Why care about accessibility

Universal accessibility and Wikipedia, same goal?

"The social value of the Web is that it enables human communication, commerce, and opportunities to share knowledge. One of W3C's primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability."

— Tim Berners-Lee, W3C

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."

— Jimmy Wales

(temporary diagram)

Content  ----------X----------> Visitors

Content  -----> Machines -----> Visitors
                   ^
                Web browser
                Screen reader
                Robots
                Translators
                Etc.

There is more to Accessibility than being usable by people with disabilities. Accessibility is an occasion (lever?) to improve a website's global quality. Through better semantics and standards, the website's content becomes understandable by machines. It eases the reuse of the content, indexation by googlebot and the likes, usage of the website through various devices (mobiles...)...

Reduces the bandwidth (saves money!),
Useful for elders too,
People using low bandwidth
...

http://openweb.eu.org/articles/accessibilite_numerique_pourquoi/ http://openweb.eu.org/articles/fructifions_donnees http://blog.temesis.com/post/2006/10/31/193-vulgariser-l-accessibilite