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The ”Barrierefreie Informationstechnik-Verordnung – BITV” stands for a Barrier-free Information Technology Regulation in Germany.

This regulation stipulates that the websites of public facilities should be freely accessible to everyone, including people with handicaps. The regulation further recommends that other websites should likewise be freely accessible.

• By request, cekom designs accessible websites and advises its clients about the best ways to adapt an existing website in order to make it accessible.

What means accessibility in web design?

Accessible web design is the art of programming web pages so that anyone can read them. The issue is more than just ”handicapped-suitable programming.” Essentially, it involves a technique which makes it possible to build web pages that are readily accessible to all users.

For example, one must ensure that a screenreader can read aloud the contents of the website to a blind person.

Why go to so much the trouble?

Approximately 37 million people with one kind of handicap or another live in Europe alone.

But a ”handicap” can also mean:

• there’s no keyboard available (e.g. a computer in a car) or
• there’s no mouse available (e.g. at publicly-accessible terminal) or
• the user can hear little or nothing (e.g. due to street noise) or
• there isn’t much space on the screen and the graphic viewer is switched off (e.g. a PDA or Organizer) or
• the depiction of the typeface has been enlarged in the browser because the user has momentarily misplaced his or her eyeglasses.

Catchword: There’s no such thing as a handicapped person; instead, something or someone handicaps the person.

Furthermore, there are also certain ”users” who aren’t human beings, which are essentially blind, but which are nonetheless asked to answer people’s questions millions of times each day. In principle, the world’s most popular search engine, Google, is a ”blind” Internet user that can only absorb and store in its archive information found in texts, not in images. Some 150 million questions are posed of Google daily (status: September 2002).

When a web page is programmed so that it can handle all of these situations, then that page is also built in a way which makes it accessible to handicapped people.