ABSTRACT

Introduction When Tim Berners-Lee formulated his ideas for the world wide web, he held a ‘grand vision’ for this application as an environment of and for fl exibility. He confi rmed these ideals in 2010 by writing, ‘The Web should be useable by people with disabilities. It must work with any form of information . . . and it should be accessible from any kind of hardware that can connect to the Internet’ (BernersLee, 2010, p. 82). Via this vision, a popular imagining of the web as free and democratic has become potent. However, as the web has evolved, it has become increasingly diffi cult to hold onto Berners-Lee’s vision as it becomes clearer that many people remain disabled by some forms of digitisation and unable to access the web effectively. Disabled people using assistive technologies often bear the brunt of built-in accessibility problems.