Available Internet: From the WAI Initiative to Russian Practice

For many years, the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has been promoting the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) project, the main slogan of which is formulated as "Making the Web accessible". As part of the WAI initiative, WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) are being developed to help website developers take into account the needs of people with disabilities. GOST R 52872-2019 has been developed in the Russian Federation, based on WCAG recommendations. Some provisions of GOST R 52872-2019 are presented in this paper. Law № 181-FZ on the social protection of persons with disabilities, which has been in force since 1995, establishes a norm according to which developers of information resources must create conditions for people with disabilities to freely use communications and information. The general provisions of Law № 181-FZ are implemented in the directive documents of relevant departments. The paper considers the provisions of the order of the Ministry of Finance of 2023, which determine the procedure for presenting information on the websites of organizations in a form convenient for people with vision and hearing problems. The provisions of the above-mentioned order of the Ministry of Finance encourage developers of websites of organizations subordinate to government bodies in the Russian Federation at various levels to ensure sufficient text contrast, adhere to adaptive design, equip non-text objects with a text layer or comments, simplifying the work of people with disabilities on the Internet and contributing to the development of artificial intelligence tools.