Inclusive New Media Design

Inclusive New Media Design aims to contribute to the social inclusion of people with disabilities in new media like the WWW. It will do this by exploring the place occupied by guidelines for designing accessible websites in the wok practice of new media designers. These guidelines are produced by the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C WAI), the ogranisation that governs the technical standards of the web, and, in many countries, including our own, they form the basis of legal documents to which new media designers should adhere. Whilst there is much activity focusing on how to implement and improve the guidelines, and there is growing awareness of them as a result of new policy, more accessible tools and their acceptance by web design gurus, no academic research has been carried out with new media designers themselves to explore how and why accessibility does or does not get taken up.

Little is known about the factors within new media design practices which affect designers’ perceptions of accessibility guidelines, or whether other approaches, such as the inclusion of disabled users in the design process, or highlighting exemplary and inspiring accessible design practice, are to be more effective in persuading designers to subscribe to the accessibility ethos.

Furthermore, the guidelines are to be integrated into a process which is thought to be both intuitive and unknowable – creative design. Inclusive New Media Design will bring together these apparently contradictory forces – on the one hand, detailed technical guidelines, and on the other, intuitive design.

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