Origin and History
The concept of "Raising the Floor" first arose in connection with work on accessibility standards around the Web. Gregg Vanderheiden was involved extensively in both the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (as Co-chair and Editor) and in the US Governments 508 guidelines renewal. In the process of working on these guidelines it became clear that creating Web content that would work with 'average' or 'affordable' AT was just too limiting. The base or floor level AT just could not handle modern Web technologies. And in other countries the floor level technologies affordable by most people was often even lower.
The committees were faced with either a) creating guidelines that would result in Web pages that could be accessed using only the latest versions of the best (and most expensive) assistive technologies, or b) creating guidelines that would work with most AT but would severely limit Web content to just basic web technologies. Both of these were untenable.
It became clear that something needed to be done to raise the level of the technologies that were available to people with average, little or no resources to expend on expensive AT. Gregg coined the term "raising the floor" to describe what needed to be done: to raise the base or floor level of access technology that was available to the masses. To raise it up sufficiently that users would be able to reach and use the modern Web content and technologies they are encountering on the Web today (and those coming).
Gregg called Jim Fruchterman, a longtime colleague and successful social entrepreneur in accessibility, to discuss the feasibility of the concept and to see if Jim was interested in helping to launch such an effort. Jim was immediately taken with the idea but thought that the concept was needed beyond just Web content. EBooks and mobile technologies were just two places that Jim thought it should be expanded to. The three domains were quickly converging and should be addressed together.
The two of them began exploring the idea with other colleagues and also took the idea on the road for general input. Quickly a group of interested and like-minded people gathered. The Trace Center's core grant was up for renewal and a project to initiate Raising the Floor was written into the center grant as a core activity. It was a natural extension of the Trace Center's previous work on virtual assistive technologies. In addition, Jim's organization would soon win a contract from the US Dept of Education to provide accessible books to all print-disabled students in the US, and Raising the Floor dovetailed nicely with the contract's mandates for widely and freely available eBook related access features and services (as well as Benetech's Route 66 project).
The Trace Center core grant was awarded in September and with its start in October 2008, the Raising the Floor Initiative was launched. By the start of 2009 there were already over 50 leaders and key programs who had joined the project from both mainstream IT and the accessibility fields, with more coming on board daily as they became aware of the effort. A listing of those who were early sign ons to the initiative can be found at Early Participants. They come from widely varying backgrounds but all are interested in helping to address the problem of raising the floor to close the gap between them and the requirements of modern and evolving Web technologies.
