Abstract
Awareness of Web accessibility is spreading all over the world among Web designers and developers, due to regulations such as the US law called Section 508 and guidelines like the W3C WCAG. We now see various Web accessibility adaptations on the Web. For example, we see increasing use of alternative texts for images and skip-navigation links for speed. However, we sometimes find inappropriate ALT texts and broken skip-navigation links, even though they are present. These pages may be compliant, but they are not accessible or really usable. We analyzed such problems and found that some sites only try to comply with regulations and guidelines, but without understanding the needs underlying Web accessibility. We concluded that Web designers and developers should experience the real problems faced by people with disabilities so they can create truly accessible and usable pages. There was no practical way for them to experience disabilities. In this paper, after giving an overview of the historical progress of voice browsers, we discuss how much and how well the Web accessibility has progressed by analyzing real world improvements to existing sites. We then describe why the "disability experience" helps give a better understanding of the Web accessibility guidelines and regulations. Some tools like Home Page Reader and aDesigner are available to let designers experience blind users' perspective of usability. Finally, we discuss the future direction of our accessibility efforts. Copyright 2005 ACM.