Audience Accommodations on the Web
The most notable movement towards accessibility accommodations is the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Conceived in the fall of 1996 and led by Daniel Dardailler, the WAI began as an effort to standardize web accessibility practices to meet the needs of people with disabilities. More specifically, the WAI wanted to help people who had access to assistive devices use the Web.
"It's bad business to exclude anyone from access to your information and services, and there is no way to place a value on those users who you have excluded."
-Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton
The W3C was the perfect platform on which to start this initiative. As the leading international organization developing web standards, accessibility standards carry more weight coming from them. There are many groups from all over the world contributing to the W3C by adding information on Web standards, thus giving a more global perspective on online issues.
The WAI marked the beginning of Web developers realizing there needed to be a standard for accessibility on the Web. The initiative started an international effort to pool knowledge on this topic and make the Web more accessible. Indeed, it even showed a realization that not all knowledge on this topic could be found in the W3C community, thus bringing a more universal approach to the table. Visit the WAI History site for the full story.