ABSTRACT
Inclusive New Media Design (INMD) aimed to explore the relationship between a particular group of designers (web designers) and a particular set of guidelines (web accessibility guidelines), with a view to developing knowledge about design work and contributing to understanding about the place of technical guidelines in design practice. These guidelines are produced by the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C WAI), the organisation that governs the technical standards of the web. In many countries, the guidelines form the basis of legal documents to which web designers should adhere. Whilst there is much activity focusing on the how to of the guidelines, no academic research had previously been carried out with web designers themselves to explore why accessibility is or is not adopted. Little was known about the factors within web design practices which affect designers’ perceptions of accessibility guidelines, or whether other approaches would be more effective in persuading designers to subscribe to the accessibility ethos. By developing such knowledge and addressing these gaps, INMD aimed to contribute to the social inclusion of people with disabilities in the World Wide Web (WWW); as such, it had an explicit social inclusion agenda. It focused specifically on people with intellectual disabilities (ID), one of the most misunderstood and marginalised communities in society, whose accessibility needs are often poorly understood, even by web accessibility experts whose expertise more often lies in the fields of sensory or physical disability.
