Accessibility of electronic information: perspectives and challenges

The technological and social evolution in the field of electronic information is extremely fast and deep and is going to heavily modifying the way we generate and enjoy information. Moreover Internet is changing its nature from provider of contents to repositories of interactive applications and from the social point of view, the users are no more clearly distinct from producer of information. From a theoretical point of view all these changes can be faced by WAI Guidelines, but the focus is in accomplishing a personalized and optimized experience. For a strong and concrete impact on users new perspectives must be introduced at industrial level. A support in this innovative process can come from standard organizations, such as ISO, which are improving its effort to address at least accessibility in their standards. Lastly the technical evolution can lead to cope with accessibility problem from the wider perspective of Design for All but at present these approaches seem too difficult to be integrated in the mainstream developing process. In the short term different solutions coming from social phenomena can be evaluated. The fast growth of Web 2.0 if correctly used could be an important resource in cooperating a personalized and optimized user experience.