A key aspect of many philosophers' interest in using the World Wide Web to post philosophical materials is the incredible access it affords our audience, whether students, colleagues, or ordinary persons interested in leading an examined life. Ideally, anyone, anywhere, anytime can read, listen to, or interact with our online creations. And in many respects, reality is not too far from the ideal. On the download side, more and more public libraries allow web access to people who don't own a computer, and lots of patience can compensate for the ever-present network congestion. On the upload side, web authoring tools (often built into popular word processing programs) make it ever more easy to post documents online. Paradoxically, while at the same time these tools allow more people access to philosophy on the web (due to the sheer amount of new materials posted daily), current web authoring programs are restricting the access of disabled users, primarily the visually impaired, who more and more often are beginning to feel like roadkill on the information superhighway.
While clearly this is an unfortunate situation, it may be less clear that it is also an ethical problem for philosophers and other people who post materials on the web. It's a matter of ethics because although the disabled who are unable to access many materials posted on the web are a minority of users, the cost to make materials accessible is small in absolute terms, and insignificant in relation to the benefit disabled users could derive from complete access to the web. Since in this instance we can do something to benefit others at small cost to ourselves, consequentialists and non-consequentialists alike should agree that we ought to do so.
Whether there's really a moral obligation here depends in large part upon it actually being the case that the cost to develop accessible materials is small. So in my presentation, I'll discuss the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative and the particular recommendations they make to people posting materials on the web. Their guidelines provide us with a small number of measures that web authors can take to assure accessibility. Then I'll show how these guidelines can be fulfilled through examples, thereby demonstrating that the cost to individual web authors is in fact a small one. Finally, I'll discuss a few peripheral issues, such as why we can't rely on market forces alone to develop web authoring tools guaranteed to produce accessible web materials, and why I think it's really in a web author's self-interest to develop accessible materials (even though it may not look that way at first glance).
Brian J. Rosmaita <contact me>