Accessibility Timeline
PAGE CONTENTS
Timeline
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1964 | Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Act prohibited discrimination in public accommodations and federally funded programs because of race, color, religion, or national origin. It defines places of public accommodation as hotels, motels, restaurants, movie theaters, stadiums, and concert halls. |
| 1968 | Jim Thatcher creates the IBM Screen Reader, one of the first screen readers for DOS, an operating system using a text-based command line interface (CLI.) Douglas Engelbart and his colleagues at the Stanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center (ARC) presented a 90-minute computer demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco on December 9, 1968. It predicted many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing including the computer mouse, multiple windows with flexible view control, hypertext, video conferencing, word processing, and shared screen collaboration. It would become known as the "Mother of All Demos." (See the video for The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968) (1:40:52) |
| 1969 | On September 2, 1969, two computers at UCLA exchange data, marking the first test of ARPANET, a precursor to the Internet. The network remains limited to institutions, universities, and government agencies for decades. At this time it is strictly text based. |
| 1971 | Ray Tomlinson sent the first mail message between two computers on the ARPANET, introducing the now-familiar address syntax with the '@' symbol designating the user's system address. |
| 1973 | Section 508 becomes law, requiring federal departments and agencies to make their Electronic Information Technology (EIT) accessible to people with disabilities, but without detailed guidelines on how to implement this practically. |
| 1982 | Apple releases the "Apple Lisa," their first computer with a graphical user interface (GUI.), It's OS was based on technology developed by Xerox. While it marks a significant step forward in user-friendly interfaces, it introduces accessibility issues as it is difficult for people with disabilities to navigate effectively compared to CLIs. In Guidance from the Graphical User Interface (GUI) Experience: What GUI Teaches About Tech Access, the National Council on Disability (NCD.gov) states The crisis that graphical user interfacing poses to blind computer users has been building for a long time. Ever since the introduction of GUI (pronounced "gooey") into the software market in the mid-1980s, software accessibility experts had warned of the potential for lost jobs and careers as people who were blind or visually impaired were confronted by a new technology that was impossible for them to use. |
| 1982 | The term "Internet" becomes widely used when the TCP/IP protocols are adopted as the standard for communication between different networks. |
| 1983 | The ARPANET and the Defense Data Network officially adopt the TCP/IP standard. |
| 1989 | Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web and HTML at CERN, making it easier for researchers to share information. The first commercial internet service providers (ISPs) are established in Australia and the United States. The first commercial ISP in the United States (The World in Brookline, Massachusetts) begins serving customers in November 1989. |
| 1990 | President George H. W. Bush signs the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) on July 26, 1990. The law doesn't directly address the Internet or digital media. The ARPANET is decommissioned in 1990. It is survived by the network it created, the Internet. Just 3 million people have access to the Internet worldwide. 73% are living in the United States and 15% are in Western Europe. Tim Berners-Lee develops WorldWideWeb, the first web browser prototype. |
| 1992 | Marc Andreessen and his team at the University of Illinois create Mosaic, the first web browser to integrate graphics and text on a single page. |
| 1994 | HTML 2 is released Andreessen and others launch a company to develop Netscape, the first commercial Web browser. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) forms to guide web development. |
| 1995 |  Netscape launches its initial public offering on Aug. 9, 1995. That sets off the first browser war (1995–2001) in which Netscape and Microsoft compete by introducing incompatible HTML elements and features into their browsers.Microsoft releases the Internet Explorer (IE) browser, based on licensed code for the old Mosaic browser. Microsoft offers it free of charge to windows users. As part of its strategy to compete with IE by adding additional exclusive features, Netscape submits a proposal for frames to the W3C and then implements them before the WC3 includes them in the HTML standard. Other browsers adopt frames. Eventually the W3C accepts the proposal. Unfortunately, frames cause problems for users of AT. Other innovations introduced by the rivals include: JavaScript (Netscape), the blink tag (Microsoft), and the marquee tag (Internet Explorer.) The "one-upmanship" between Netscape and Microsoft threatens to fragment the web, making website development prohibitively expensive and potentially denying users access to vital content and services. W3C advocates Cascading Style Sheets (CSS.) |
1996 | The company Productivity Works releases pwWebSpeak, a non-visual Web browser. It is based on WebTalk, a prototype developed by Markku Hakkinen in 1995. pwWebSpeak bypasses visual rendering of the content. Instead it directly converts HTML to audio using synthetic speech using an approach called first order design and a rule base named Tag Language Definition (TLD.) pwWebSpeak would be discontinued in 2000. |
| 1998 | Internet giant, America Online (AOL) purchases Netscape for $4.2 billion. Glenn Davis, George Olsen, and Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded The Web Standards Project (WaSP) to advocate for browser adherence to the W3C standards in order to ensure a consistent and accessible web experience for all. |
| 1999 | The W3C releases the first Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) on May 5, nine years after the ADA becomes law. |
| 2000 | The W3C releases XHTML as an official standard intended to replace HTML 4.01. XHTML is based on HTML, but rewritten as an XML language. It is more more extensible and it is flexible to work with than other data formats (such as XML.) Browsers ignore errors in HTML pages and display them. But XHTML has stricter rules than HTML. So developers must apply strict and valid XHTML in their pages and web application to work properly. The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) sues AOL for violating the ADA because its website is inaccessible to blind users. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) supports the lawsuit, emphasizing the ADA's applicability to digital platforms. Under pressure, AOL agreed to make its website accessible to blind users. |
| 2001 | The U.S. Access Board issues the first official set of detailed standards for Section 508 compliance, providing clear technical specifications for making EIT accessible. |
| 2002 | The global Internet population surpasses 500 million. |
| 2004 | Leading web browser vendors Apple, Mozilla, and Opera found Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG.) The WHATWG agrees to work with W3C to advance the open web platform. |
| 2006 | The global Internet population surpasses 1 billion. |
| 2008 | The global Internet population surpasses 1.5 billion. The W3C releases WCAG 2.0. |
| 2012 | The W3C and the WHATWG released HTML5, the newest continuation and replacement of HTML 4.01. |
| 2018 | The W3C releases WCAG 2.1. The U.S. Access Board, a Federal Agency, adopts WCAG 2.0 AA for Section 508 compliance. President Trump signs the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act (IDEA), requiring federal agencies to improve digital accessibility. |
| 2022 | The Department of Justice (DOJ) issues web accessibility guidance under Titles II and III of the ADA, prioritizing accessible websites for governments and businesses. The guidance references WCAG and Section 508 standards (which also refences WCAG), but it doesn't specify a conformance level. |
| 2024 | On April 24, the DOJ finalizes rules under Title II of the ADA, requiring state and local government to make web content and mobile applications meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. On May 10, 2024, the Office for Civil Rights, part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), publishes a historic final rule advancing broad protections for people with disabilities under section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (Section 504). The Rule requires that websites and mobile applications conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), Version 2.1, Level A and Level AA success criteria. |
See also A History of HTML by Dave Raggett and A Brief History of HTML