Wendy Chisholm, W3C/WAI
Team contact for WCAG WG
Introduction
The premise of Web accessibility is: content adapts. For example, text (a
sequence of characters from the Unicode character set) can be read aloud by a
speech synthesizer, magnified by a screen magnifier, displayed in a variety
of color combinations by a browser, displayed as braille by a braille
display, and signed by a signing avatar. Captions can be read instead of
listening to the speech and sound effects in multimedia. A link may be
activated by clicking a mouse button or pressing a key on a keyboard.
Web accessibility is making the Web accessible to people with a spectrum
of visual, hearing, movement, reading, and processing abilities by providing
a spectrum of alternatives and transformations. Web accessibility is not
"making the Web accessible for people who are blind" by providing text-only
sites. For example, while speech synthesis of text is useful to some people
with learning disabilities, it doesn't help everyone. Some people find it
difficult to process visual information, such as text, and need symbols,
summaries, or illustrations to facilitate comprehension.
There are a variety of issues and opportunities that we have discussed in
the Web Content Accessibility
Guidelines Working Group (WCAG WG). Metadata for content adaptation
provides a solution to many of the technical questions and perhaps some of
the policy questions as well.
I would like to attend the workshop to
- Explain and learn how content adaptation will benefit Web
accessibility
- Raise awareness about issues in Web accessibility that ought to be
considered while developing metadata for content adaptation
- Demonstrate and learn about the similarities and differences between
techniques and user scenarios that the DIWG and WAI WGs face
Summary points (incomplete)
WAI Guidelines and how they relate to content adaptation
- WCAG 2.0 - Guidelines outline principles of
marking up content for adaptation
- WCAG 2.0 Techniques - How to markup
content in diff techs to facilitate adaptation
- ATAG 2.0 - Authoring tools assist author in
providing markup that facilitates adaptation
- UAAG 1.0 - User agents provide access to
alternative content and perform adaptation
Examples of existing projects
- PFWG roadmap – semantic
enhancement for web applications
- WWAAC - Concept codes, converting to
symbols
- UBAccess, SWAD-E - annotating content for
adaptation
- IMS - aggregating
accessible learning objects
Issues
Historically, the preference for making content accessible is direct
accessibility provided by the content originator or aggregator. In the
future, metadata could be provided after-the-fact by third-party annotations.
There are opportunities as well as issues with this direction.
Responsibility issues
- Potential additional cost for people with disabilities to subscribe to
annotation services?
- Who is responsible for ensuring the annotations are provided? Fear that
if it isn't the originating organization's responsibility, it will be no
one's responsibility.
Implementation issues
- Lag in implementation in assistive technologies
- How provide all of the semantic markup that is desired without
increased burden on the author? (3rd party? refer to responsibility
issues)
- What is the business motivation that will cause authors to provide
semantic markup?
- How does someone claim conformance to WAI guidelines?
- How would organizations address the mass of legacy content?
Opportunities
- Enhanced quality of life for people with disabilities (more work,
social, and daily life opportunities)
- New skills or jobs? i.e., summarizing and illustrating content
- New services (like RFB&D) (or is this a bad thing?)
$Date: 2005/09/05 08:45:47 $ Wendy Chisholm