At its most basic, the web allows for two modes of access: visual and non-visual. For the most part, our design attention is focused on making decisions that affect the visual, or surface, layer - colors and type, screen dimensions, fixed or flexible layouts. However, much of the power of the technology lies beneath the surface, in the underlying code of the page. There, in the unseen depths of the page code, we make decisions that influence how well, or poorly, our pages are read and interpreted by software. For this presentation, we will shift our attention beneath the surface of the web and focus on design decisions that affect non-visual access to web pages.

Accessibility for the Dynamic Web is now possible due to new standards being developed at the W3C and being implemented in Firefox. The technology allows today's web pages to contain additional markup describing semantics. An often-cited benefit of this technology is the ability to describe scripted widgets with dynamic behaviour. However, another major benefit is to differentiate the sections of a web page, via human-readable labels or predefined semantics such as "main", "contentinfo", "navigation" and "search". Marking the sections of a web page offers dramatic improvement for users who need access to today's web with a small device or an assistive technology.

We will discuss how this additional mark-up provides benefits for the following technologies:

1. Web browsers on small devices -- we will demonstrate the use of Minimo, using the markup to provide convenient access to a complex web page
2. Screen readers, which allow users to choose from a list which section on a page they want to read
3. Screen magnifiers, which can zoom in on the most important content of a web page as it loads
4. Onscreen keyboards, which can provide users keystrokes for navigating the content by sections
5. Web page simplification software, which can provide a simple view of the web page for users with varying ability to navigate or comprehend complex web pages

This wide variety of use cases shows that the simple power of semantics for web page sections generates many benefits, whether used with today's legacy content or tomorrow's more powerful markup languages.

For more information:

1. Dynamic Accessible Web Content Roadmap
2. Accessible DHTML in Firefox

Interest in accessing the Web from small, mobile devices, such as cell phones, is increasing rapidly. The challenge of delivering content to such devices is similar in many ways to the challenge of delivering it to users with disabilities. There is a real synergy between these use cases which offers the hope that solutions applicable to one will also be applicable to the other. This presentation will examine the ways in which recent work in standards, being driven by the need to support mobile Web users, may also help to improve accessibility.