One function of the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center at the Smith-Kettlewell Institute is to work on systems that will enhance the inclusion of people with visual impairments into society, particularly the work force. To this end we have developed systems for accessing the environment (Talking Signs) and participated in efforts to make the World Wide Web accessible.
Both of these efforts are central to The Accessible Planet Project.
The ideal of everything being freely accessible to everybody/everywhere/anytime is a sort of leitmotif of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and its Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).
This theme also underlies the efforts of those individuals and groups who form a loose alliance called the Disability Rights Movement (DRM). It is all about access to the built environment and all the facilities therein. It is believed that through inclusion we can feed the starving babies, end war, and all that good stuff.
It is very difficult to discuss these matters without some understanding of how this major problem of intra-human disorder continues after so many millenia. The roots of our dilemma are almost tediously addressed in some major works by Korzybski, Fuller, Skinner, and Berners-Lee described in an appendix. Basically the problem is with the structures of our language/thought/action and one approach to overcoming/bypassing this is through the unprecedented opportunity inherent in the "Webized" network - the World Wide Web and the internet.
The Semantic Web has as its central goal universal accessibility by means of allowing our machines to get directly to the content/meaning of all materials on the World Wide Web and therefrom enable the tools needed to let us be proud to be human.
In order to understand how providing accessibility to Persons With Disabilities (PWD) might enable humankind to achieve its loftiest aspirations, we must shed our notions of pity for the "poor unfortunates" and instead focus on what we have been doing that is the underlying issue of said misfortune.
We have become so accustomed to patronizing people with differences from some illusory "norm", and segregating them into an excluded "otherness", that we have mostly lost sight of the fact that "they" are "us" and in fact there's no "they" out there. We are all in this together and members of one another in a completely seamless, unavoidable "global village".
Coupling full access to the content/meaning of the Web with access to a built environment is being implemented in The Accessible Planet Project.