First version published 2004-01-03. This is a Completed report, published 2004-01-20.
This document may be updated during the life of the SWAD-Europe project to reflect or link to further developments in this area.
Comments on this document are welcome and should be sent to the public-esw@w3.org list, archived at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-esw/. General discussion of semantic web tools and technologies should be sent to www-rdf-interest@w3.org which is archived at http://www.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest. Discussion of accessibility should be directed to an appropriate group within the Web Accessibility Initiative [WAI]
This report is part of SWAD-Europe Work package 9: Visualisation and Accessibility. and addresses the scope, features and purpose of tools for annotating or commenting on web data using existing systems that are licensed as Free Software or Open Source.
For those in a hurry: go straight to the outcomes section.
EARL is a W3C working draft that has been in development for several years. It is an RDF vocabulary for recording the results of evaluations.
It's application ot acccessibility is mostly in the area of tool development, since it potentially allows for the use of several specialised tools with EARL as an information transfer format. This application has been discussed since the early development of EARL.
Work within this project focused on promotion of and help with EARL development. Interest in EARL, particularly from non-english-speaking developers, was unmatched by supporting materials. Explanations of how to use EARL in multiple languages [EARL-code], discussions in non-english-language fora, example code available with documentation in Spanish and English, development in French, have all been part of the work in this project to spread understanding of EARL.
The second axis of work on EARL has been to promote discussion of the remaining issues with the specification. This has been held up somewhat by W3C's lack of resources for management of the specification development, which may be resolved by a proposed project in which W3C would participate.
Demonstrating the possibilities offered for more complex conformance schemes has been the third major axis of work, in wider areas than just W3C. The Dublin Core Accessibility Interest Group, the INCITS V2 group standardising protocols for communication between devices for user-control of their environment, the CC/PP working group who are developing a relevant RDF vocabulary, the IMS project's work on Learner profiling as a way to ensure that it is possible to deliver information in a relevant format are groups with whom collaboration has been sought by both sides.
One important aspect of accessibility is the ability to transform content for users whose disability makes it difficult to use a particular content type. For example, some users have difficulty reading large amounts of text. Identifying different parts of the text, and being able to summarise them, can be helpful to someone who wants to navigate through a document with limited reading skills. Similarly, someone may have difficulty hearing, but be able to discern enough sound to benefit from an audio file if they are helped by having a description or transcript.
Work undertaken in the SWAD-Europe project has led directly to the implementation of EARL management in a number of tools: Axforms, MUTAT, WAINu.
Collaborative work has been important in the development of EARL implementations in several other tools: AccessValet, AccVerify, the W3C markup validator, The Wave
Collaborative work on transformation techniques has led to them being used by UBAccess' SWAP tools, with techniques being written for the WCAG group to ensure these can be implemented in other tools.
Work on using RDF to manage relationships between information has been done in collaboration with the WWAAC project and UBAccess, and again techniques describing this for WCAG are under development.
Assistance has also been provided to a number of planned EARL implementations: W3C's CSS validator, Hera, el TAW, Torquemada, WAIZilla
Extensive collaboration with groups from Europe and around the world have been an important part of the Work done. Important collaboration has taken place with the following groups:
The Dublin Core Accessibility Interest Group.
ESSI, FICYT, Fondazione Ugo Bordini, IBM Spain, Sidar, Humana, Handitech, W3C validators, Ensure, WWAAC
Wave, UBAccess, HiSoftware, JIS, Community Connect (Yorke Peninsula, South Australia), Quinkan Matchbox (Cape York, Queensland / LaTrobe University)
WCAG, ATAG, and ERT working groups, and the Glossary project
These tools have been demonstrated through mailing lists and meetings in the Semantic Web developer community, and at meetings and workshops in Europe, particularly in France.
A tutorial on EARL implementation [EARL-code], has been written and various presentations on the accessibility benefits of the Semantic Web [semwai] have been made in French, Spanish, Italian and English. These materials have been publicised through various accessibility mailing lists, including the handitech list which was created in collaboration with ESSI to provide a francophone forum where one was not available.
Further development will take place on techniques for Accessibility within the context of the WAI's working groups. This is expected to proceed slowly overall, due to the need for a community of mixed technical ability and diverse perspectives to learn what RDF is and does, and how it might be useful.
This is expected to be assisted by various pieces of work which have emerged as a result of this project, and continue in development as examples such as new work in devloping testing models, proposed by the Ensure project, with some preliminary prototyping being done in collaboration between W3C and ESSI in France, or the ongoing development of projects such as WWAAC and SWAP.
Development of the EARL specification within W3C is currently held up for a lack of resources to manage the work, but implementation is ongoing, and feedback and suggestions for important improvements to the specification continue to be produced.
Probably not. It can provide some solutions that are difficult to develop in other ways, but without tools and deployment they will not provide much for actual users.
EARL has begun to be widely implemented. It is now available in a number of evaluation tools, and is in the immediate future plans for several more. Some information is maintained by the WAI Evaluations and Repair Tools group [earl-impl]
UBAccess' SWAP tools [SWAP] and the WWAAC project [WWAAC] use RDF to transform content for users with disabilities.
A number of image annotation projects are available, and ongoing work on image annotation is tracked on the SWAD-Europe Wiki [img-anno].