Macromedia and the National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) at WGBH today announced a partnership to test Macromedia Web authoring products so people with disabilities, in compliance with recent federal guidelines and corporate initiatives, could use them effectively.
The CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media is a research and development facility that works to make media accessible to underserved populations such as people with disabilities, minority-language users, and people with low literacy skills. Its projects and initiatives expand the reach and refine such technologies as captioning and description, while working on developments in the fields of technology, media, disability and education. NCAM is a founding member of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Macromedia provides innovative solutions to enable developers to deliver Web content that meets accessibility guidelines, and the partnership with NCAM extends its commitment to make the authoring of Web content more available to people with disabilities, according to Pat Brogan, Macromedia’s vice president of solutions. NCAM will provide Macromedia with technical evaluation and guidance to make its products compliant with W3C accessibility guidelines and the federal government’s Section 508 rules for product and content accessibility. NCAM will also work with Macromedia to build alliances with other industry leaders to enable a continuous dialogue about the importance of accessibility, Brogan said in a statement.
Macromedia already has various options available for developers to create accessible Web content. Macromedia and UsableNet previously announced the Section 508 Accessibility Extension for Dreamweaver 4 and Dreamweaver UltraDev 4, which checks Web pages for accessibility the same way a document can be checked for spelling. New Dreamweaver accessibility templates and Section 508 Web Development Guidelines for Macromedia Flash and Dreamweaver are also available to further assist government agencies in making their Web sites accessible. For more info go to the Macromedia accessibility solutions Web site.
Also, check out MacCentral’s Forward Migration column this Friday for a roundup of special needs software products available for the Mac platform.