The Impending Collision Of Accessibility and RIA

The web design world will have an enormous impact on the future of natural search: accessibility and rich Internet applications (RIA). On one side of the discussion, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) is pressing corporations in the state courts on the issue of designing accessible, text-based Web sites for the visually impaired who use screen readers such as JAWS. On the other side, cutting-edge Web developers and user-experience gurus are designing rich Internet applications for better user experience in a Web 2.0 world -- applications that also expand the boundaries of being search- and accessibility- unfriendly. The tipping point in the debate on dichotomous design approaches will not occur in the context of designing search-friendly Web sites; it will occur in the impending corporate discussion of Web accessibility, and whether or not corporations will build accessible Web sites in place of, or in addition to, existing rich applications utilizing Flash, DHTML or Ajax.