Web accessibility regulations are overdue

[Commentary] In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a standard view of how we would interact with a personal computer: we were sitting at a desk, with a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse. Today, computing is very different. We still use desktops, but we also have laptops, tablet computers, smart phones, and some of us even have wearable computers such as the Apple Watch. And that "we" includes people with disabilities, who are a part of this rich, flexible world of computing but access it differently.

People who are deaf or hard of hearing need captioning for video, or transcripts of audio. People who are blind need a Web page to have appropriate markup, such as text describing the images (such as the shopping cart icon on a retail website), and appropriate labels on forms (e.g. “first name”, “last name”, “city”), so that they can listen to the Web page using a screen reader such as VoiceOver, JAWS, Window-Eyes, or NVDA. Having the same level of interaction, the same ease of use, the same access to content, is a form of innovation. It's also a civil right.

[Jonathan Lazar is a Professor of Computer and Information Sciences at Towson University.]