Supporting device independent and accessible authoring by a next generation Web Publishing Framework

Yehya Mohamad and Carlos A. Velasco
Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology
BIKA Competence Center
Schloss Birlinghoven, D53757 Sankt Augustin (Germany)
mohamad@fit.fraunhofer.de, velasco@fit.fraunhofer.de

W3C Workshop on Device Independent Authoring Techniques
September 2002, SAP University, St. Leon-Rot, Germany

What is BIKA?

Competence Center from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT)
Part of the Life Science Informatik Research Group

What is BIKA?

Competence Center from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT)
Part of the Life Science Informatik Research Group
Interdisciplinary team:
- computer science
- pedagogics
- linguistics
- engineering

Work-areas

Accessibility/usability research for Internet services & applications, new devices
- technical implementation
- user studies
Participation in international recommendation bodies (W3C.WAI)
Development and commercialization of software tools
Consultancy and training to industry and interested actors
Biofeedback and therapeutical intervention systems

Problem statement

Access to information:

Variety of devices,
Different interaction modes (disabilities),
Different contexts of usage.

Problem statement

What implies actual Web Authoring?

Separation of Concerns (SoC)

Management,
Logic,
Content,
Style.

Separation of Concerns for Web content publishing

Do actual CMS help? Not really!

Rely on HTML, proprietary XML vocabularies (do not support particular customer needs, ATAG 1.0, XAG)
Do not support content adaptation
Do not support SoC for authoring

Is device independent authoring possible?

Almost!

Requirements for device independent authoring

Flexible XML vocabulary design for content
Vocabulary must support multimodality (ATAG/XAG compliance)
Support SoC through Web Publishing Framework (allows reuse of components)

What about Style and Logic? Device dependent

Cocoon

Open Source Web Publishing Framework

Apache Software Foundation project
Java Servlet Framework - Server-side transformation of XML documents
Any data source: RDBMS, NXD, LDAP, WebDAV, Filesystems
Most W3C recommendation: XSLT, XSL-FO, SVG, CC/PP, XForms, Web Services

Implementation

XForms-based content authoring
Style and Logic handled separately
User/Device profiles

Benefits of the proposed integration

Clean integration authoring/publishing
Device independent content authoring
Reuse of logic/style components
Addressing of accessibility issues: XSLT+XSL+CSS+user profiles
Accessible web-based authoring interfaces can be designed