Students and others who can identify their needs may benefit from having stylesheets constructed to support their needs. Offering a service to individuals, and also generating or pointing to good generic stylesheets to which people can help themselves, can be a great asset to those with special needs.
Some typical special requirements are described briefly.
In some cases, special pages can be constructed to help with problems - see eg the search entry pages constructed by Gregory J. Rosmaita that give access to some of the standard search engines that are otherwise inaccessible: http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/search.html
In other cases, XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) may be used to repair or transform web content on the fly, to increase its accessibility.
The identification of special needs is not necessarily a medical matter. In some cases, people simjply don't have the technology or access to the technology they need. It is recommended that the technological needs are assessed in this context rather than the disabilities a person may or may not have. In some cases, profiles of special access needs may be established. see, eg, the draft LIP.
Last updated: 8 March 2002