Making the internet accessible for people with cognitive and communication impairments.

This paper presents some of the work of the EU WWAAC project (World Wide Augmentative and Al-ternative Communication), which aims to make the elec-tronic highway more accessible to people with cognitive and communication impairments, in particular those us-ing symbols instead of text to communicate. Few spe-cific guidelines are available to make sites truly accessi-ble and usable for these user groups. We propose that guidelines are required for two purposes: to design stan-dard Web pages for use by the general public, including a wide range of older people and people with disabili-ties, and also to design Web pages specifically for par-ticular impairment groups, e.g. for symbol users in their personal, educational and employment activities. Not only should the guidelines be relevant to particular user groups, they must also be • accessible—that Web developers can easily find the most relevant guidelines, and • usable—that Web developers can easily put those guidelines into practice.