This document provides information about the WAI-TIDE project as of August 1998.
Daniel Dardailler (danield@w3.org)
Self-assessment
Part A: - Synopsis of work undertaken
Annexes
References
During the first half of 1998, the WAI-TIDE project and the W3C-WAI have achieved a lot.
After a ramping-up period and initial European partners meeting, we've made good progress is all 4 work-packages (WP01 is Management) : Education&Outreach (WP02), Rating&Certification (WP03), Standardization (WP04) and User Forum (WP05).
Our User Discussion Forum (WP05) is very active, even in W3C terms (350+ persons registered, 100+ messages/month traffic) and the topics discussed are all relevant.
In June 1998, we've asked for a change in the starting and end-date of the Education work package (WP02), moving them 3 months ahead (no change in duration) so that we can better accomodate the necessary planning phase that occured in the first 6 months, and some potential events we want to hold beginning of 1999.
Since this change still keeps this work package within the limit (18 months) of the overall project, this was not an issue and was ratified immediately by the Commission.
This WAI Education and Outreach Working Group has spent a lot of resource on planning and coordinating a variety of deliverables to promote awareness of accessibility and to provide education on accessible design. Planned deliverables include: technical FAQ's; slide-set curriculum modules with presentation notes; demonstrations of accessible/inaccessible design; sample implementations of accessibility improvements in HTML and CSS; hard-copy promotional materials; a business case for accessibility and universal design; training events; a portable interactive Web site on accessibility; etc. Many of these deliverables are already under development and will become available in the next several months.
The Rating&Certification work package (WP03) was a little slow to start due to the integration of this activity in the larger W3C WAI group working on Evaluation&Repair tools, but with no impact on the original schedule and we except the quality of the deliverable to be much better as a result.
Standardization is proceeding as planned.
|
As August 98 |
Number |
Comments, problems with deadlines |
|
Work packages on/before target |
1,3,4,5 | |
|
Work packages delayed |
2 | shifted 3 months ahead |
|
Deliverables submitted in reporting period |
1 | Interim Project Review |
|
Deliverables acknowledged by DG XIII |
1 | |
|
Late deliverables - for reporting period |
1 | This Report (due month 6, delivered month 8) |
|
Are project objectives being met? |
Grade from 0 (not at all) to 4 (totally) |
4 |
Considering the new dates for WP02 |
||
|
Is work done within the project budget? |
Yes | ||||
|
Major achievements within reporting period |
Started User Forum, Planning & Data Collection | ||||
|
Details of expected end-products (ref .......) Name |
Type |
Comments |
|||
|
Educational Materials |
multiple | See deliverable list in Annex | |||
|
Standardization |
multiple | See Report in Annex | |||
|
Accessibility Evaluation Tools |
Rating System | Part of WAI ER tool group | |||
None.
See details for each workpackage in Part A and Annexes.
Commission Project Officer ....................... Signed ........................... Date...........................
WAI-TIDE is a European Commission Telematics project whose goal is to improve the Accessibility the Web for People with Disabilities, and which is closely related to the W3C WAI project for Europe.
This project is hosted by W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium [1], an international, non-for-profit, industry-funded, and vendor-neutral organization whose mission is Leading the Web to its Full Potential.
WAI stands for Web Accessibility Initiative [2], and it is a Domain activity of the W3C started in 1997, whose mission is, in coordination with other organizations, to pursue accessibility of the Web through five primary areas of work: technology, guidelines, tools, education & outreach, and research & development.
WAI-TIDE (DE 4105) can therefore be seen as a funding arm for the overall W3C WAI project, with a specific European mission.
ICS/FORTH is an associated contractor, and there are 4 sub-contractors: INSERM/BrailleNet, EBU and RNIB (for W3C/INRIA) and CNR (for FORTH). All the partners are non-for-profit organizations.
The project started in January 1998, runs for 18 months and has 5 Work Packages:
The rest of this document is organized along the this Work Package structure, followed by annexes providing more detailed information about the Partners (Annex A) and the work produced.
Daniel Dardailler (W3C/INRIA, danield@w3.org) is the Project Coordinator and W3C/INRIA is the Prime Contractor. A W3C full staff, he is also the Project Manager of the overall WAI project at W3C.
He is the primary contact for the Commission (email is preferred), his non-electronic address and telephone are .
W3C/INRIA
There are no Intellectual Property Right associated with this project.
All the deliverables (Education material, Guidelines, Tools, etc) are for general Public access, delivered via the W3C WAI site.
The TIDE head office has empowered the W3C as the single entity who distributes the results from the project, provided that no commercial use is made.
The text of the agreement, signed by W3C, FORTH and TIDE in February 1998, is:
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) through INRIA, as prime contractor for project DE4205-WAI, requests the permission of the Disabled & Elderly Sector of the TELEMATICS Applications Programme DGXIII to become the sole entity authorised to publicly distribute the results of the project. We certify that no commercial exploitation is intended and the results will be available free of charge on the W3C's WWW page. This request is made also on behalf of FORTH, partner in the DE4205-WAI project.
This timeline provides some dates for the historical background events that have lead to this project start, but doesn't include all the events relevant to the project. These will be detailed in the following Work Package sections.
WAI-TIDE has a Project Steering Committee that consists of the two main contractor managers, together with least one representative of each associated contractor and a Quality Panel representative. It is responsible for the overall strategy. It also has specific responsibility for ensuring that recommendations of the Quality Panel are adhered to by the Workpackage managers doing the technical and awareness developments and dissemination.
Besides face-to-face meeting, WAI-TIDE Project Steering Committee meets electronically under the alias: wai-tide@w3.org
The following people are on it:
This electronic mailing lists and a Web site, hosted at W3C, are used as the day-to-day management vehicle.
W3C acts as the overall project management contact and is responsible to communicating the reports and deliverables to the Commission.
Reports and deliverables will preferably be made available to the Commission using Electronic Mail and Web downloading site.
The Steering Committee or a subset of it (just the W3C sub-contractors for instance) also meets using Phone conference falicities provided by INRIA W3C office.
We try our best in this project to provide all the information online, from a project home page [3], in HTML, and other formats, so that it is naturally accessible to everybody, regardless of their preferred output media (graphical screen, braille, speech, etc).
The Technical annex of the contract (DE4105) signed in December 97 are available in different formats:
Also useful is the Part B (Proposal description) of the original technical proposal (Jul 97), which details each workpackage (the figures are sometimes obsolete)
Since we want the integration between W3C WAI and WAI TIDE to be very tight, we try to minimize the number of documents specific to just WAI TIDE but instead we try to extend and improve the W3C WAI deliverable and charter documents, and point at them from the WAI TIDE pages.
It is important for the reader to understand that point, so that the rest of this report, based on presentation of W3C materials such as a formal Charter document, make sense.
W3C has a very formal framework for organizing its activities (along Working and Interest Groups, that first must define their Charter), called the W3C Process [6], and most WAI TIDE work-packages are managed to fit under these rules.
One challenge is that over the duration of the DE 4105 programme, the Web may evolve significantly, this may influence W3C WAI priorities and therefore WAI-TIDE priorities. The project management will have to take this context evolution into account to ensure the overall success of the programme.
When change request involves modification of workpackage definition and/or schedule, the change will be notified to the European Commission for approval.
To ensure that this integration is done well, the W3C WAI programme itself has a Steering Committee of its own, where according to the WAI Cooperative Agreement, there are to be 3 members chosen by the US Gov't and specified by NSF; 3 chosen by the European Commission and specified by the TIDE program director; 3 chosen by e-mail ballot of the private sponsors, and 3 chosen by e-mail ballot of the other 9 from a slate of at least 6 suggested by the WAI IPO director.
The goal of this dissemination/awareness workpackage is to promote the realization of accessible content throughout Europe.
Most the resources were spent setting up the W3C WAI Working Group on Education&Outreach (EO), with a W3C charter that's inclusive of European needs, and defining the exact list of deliverables for this work package.
We now have a very detailed WAI EO Deliverable list which is provided in Annex B and is used in day-to-day management of this workpackage.
A particular deliverable, funded by this program, is attached in Annex C and deals with presenting to a technical audience the Accessibility Improvements that have been introduced by the WAI Technical group in the HTML4.0 specification.
This is the kind of article that we now want to submit to technical press for awareness of the content provider market. It has already been featured in different Web magazines on the Internet.
On the management side, because of the ramping up process to create formal W3C groups on Education, this Work Package hasn't really started its activity before the end of March 1998, so as a result, the beginning and end dates (same duration) have been changed (with approval from the TIDE office).
Even though we've shifted this workpackage 3 months ahead, we've accomplished a number of awareness events in the past 8 months.
Worldwide, the WAI has been present in more than 30 events (mostly US, but also Australia, Singapore, Japan, etc).
Regarding Europe, the following are noticeable for 1998.
Most of these are simple presentation (45 minutes) of the WAI activities, including the TIDE part, and the slide set curriculum that we've been using at most of these events is provided as Annex D.
More recently, in July 98, we've started doing complete seminar (several hours) teaching Web site designer how to make accessible Web pages, and our goal is to do more of these in the future (as scheduled in the Project Proposal).
As originally stated, the goal of this work package is to use the PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection [7]) technology to create a classification system assessing the level of accessibility of Web pages.
Several things have happened in that area.
We started creating a prototype PICS rating system for evaluating Accessibility, which is attached in Annex E (together with a screen-dump of the implementation), but at the same time, we decided to create a formal W3C Working Group and Interest Group to discuss all the issues related to building Tools for Evaluating and Repearing (WAI ER) Web Pages.
The two groups (ER-WG and ER-IG) should work together toward producing a WAI "toolkit" that will be offered to people who create and maintain web sites and people experiencing difficulties while using the Web. The toolkit will contain stand-alone tools as well as modules that can be incorporated into other web authoring tools. The PICS Rating system is just one deliverable of this toolkit.
To further details the mission of each group, the ER-WG will consist of those people who are actually creating and writing the toolkit. Members of this group will implement the tools based on input from the interest group (see below) and web authors.
ER-IG will systematically collect feedback from potential tool and web users, discuss issues around evaluation and repair, and provide input to the working group. This is where the discussion and the user feedback on which category to include in a formal rating system should occur.
To some extent, this can be seen as broadening the activity of this workpackage, which was limited to a PICS experiment, to the study of the more general problem of implementing tools that provide Rating and evaluate Web sites.
The charter for the Interest group is provided in Annex F.
A standardisation activity has been defined within the WAI-TIDE project to ensure that the Web related access technologies propagate to the official standard bodies, such as the International Standards Organisation (ISO). The detailed objectives of this activity concern:
During the first six months of the project, the following activities have been carried out:
In addition, a detailed workplan for the remaining duration of the TIDE-WAI project has been developed.
The Annex G presents a summarising account of each of these activities emphasising the detailed objectives set, achievements to date, future work and expected results.
The WAI User Forum is an online user forum to be used by the project workpackages to gather user needs and requirements.
The Forum is up and running under the alias
w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
which is also the formal name of the W3C WAI overall Interest Group.
More than 350 persons are registered in this online forum, with an average traffic of more than 100 messages per month.
A public archive of the most recent messages sent to this list is
available at:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/1998JulSep/
The best way to stay informed of overall WAI activities, and to participate in general WAI discussions, is to subscribe to this forum, which can be done automatically by sending a mail to w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org and a "Subject:subscribe" and nothing in the body.
See each WP section for more information (Education&Outreach and Standardization have details)
In particular, we've already scheduled presentations in several conferences in the next few months.
The W3C was founded in October 1994 to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability.
It's an international industry consortium, jointly hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science [MIT/LCS] in the United States; the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique [INRIA] in Europe; and the Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus in Japan.
Services provided by the Consortium include: a repository of information about the World Wide Web for developers and users; reference code implementations to embody and promote standards; and various prototype and sample applications to demonstrate use of new technology.
The Consortium is led by Tim Berners-Lee, Director and creator of the World Wide Web, and Jean-François Abramatic, Chairman. W3C is funded by Member organizations (around 280 in August 1998), and is vendor neutral, working with the global community to produce specifications and reference software that is made freely available throughout the world.
W3C produces Recommendations, documents often called "W3C standards", that define and evolve the core languages and protocols of the Web: HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), CSS (Cascading Style Sheet), etc.
W3C's main site is at http://www.w3.org
BrailleNet is a french consortium whose mission is to to promote the Internet for social, professional, and school integration of visually impaired people. Its objectives are to improve Internet access for visually impaired people, develops pilot web site, containing specific services, explore tele-working and education thru Internet and disseminate result of work to end-users.
The BrailleNet consortium regroups INSERM (French National Institute on Medical Research), EUROBRAILLE (first maker of Braille terminals), AFEI (specialized in the formation of visually impaired people), CNEFEI (specialized in the formation of teachers), ANPEA (National Association of Parents of Visually Impaired Children), FAF (Federation of Blind and Visually Impaires in France).
BrailleNet web site is http://www.ccr.jussieu.fr/braillenet
EBU is a non-governmental and non-profit making European organisation, founded in 1984. It is the principal organisation representing the interests of blind and partially sighted people in Europe with membership made up or organisations of and for visually impaired (VI) people in 43 European countries. EBU has formal consultative status as the co-ordinating NGO for the visual impairment sector on the European Disability Forum in Brussels.
EBU Web site is at: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/EBU_UEA
RNIB web site is http://www.rnib.org.uk
Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH, Greece), is a centre for research and development monitored by the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Technology (General Secretariat of Research and Technology) of the Greek Government. The Institute of Computer Science, one of the seven institutes of FORTH, conducts applied research, develops applications and products, and provides services. Current R&D activities focus on information systems, software engineering, parallel architectures and distributed systems, computer vision and robotics, digital communications, network management, machine learning, decision support systems, formal methods in concurrent systems, computer architectures and VLSI design, computer aided design, medical information systems, human-computer interaction, and rehabilitation tele-informatics. ICS-FORTH has a long research and development tradition in the design and development of user interfaces that are accessible and usable by a wide range of people, including disabled and elderly people. It has recently proposed the concept, and provided the technical framework for the development of unified user interfaces, that are adaptable to the abilities, requirements and preferences of the end user groups.
ICS/FORTH Web site is at http://www.ics.forth.gr
The National Research Council (CNR, Italy) is a government research organisation (staff of about 7000), which is involved in activities addressing most disciplinary sectors (physics, chemistry, medicine, agriculture, etc), in cooperation with universities and industry (one of its tasks being the transfer of innovations to production and services).
CNR Web site is at http://www.cnr.it
Priority: There are three priority levels: high, regular, later. As of August, 1998, "high" roughly corresponds "by September 1998"; "regular" to October through December; "later" is intended for January 1999 & on, and will be re-assessed according to impact information from implementation of earlier strategies.
Info: The following information is included for each deliverable: priority, due date, status, localization issues, and URL of any current drafts.
The list is organized in 4 sections: Compilation materials, Presentation Curricula, Reference Materials on Accessibility Improvements, and Others, including Brochure, Reference Cards, Business Case, etc.
As part of their ongoing efforts to pursue and promote accessibility, the Web Accessibility Initiative, joined forces with the W3C HTML Working Group in the design of [HTML4.0], which became a W3C Recommendation in December, 1997. For this latest release of the World Wide Web's publishing language, the WAI group sought remedies for a number of authoring habits that cause problems for users with:
In particular, the WAI group addressed:
In the following sections, we look at how WAI contributions to HTML 4.0 (in conjunction with style sheets) allow authors to avoid accessibility pitfalls even as they create more attractive, economical, and manageable pages.
Highly structured documents are more accessible than those that aren't, so HTML 4.0 has added a number of elements and attributes that enrich document structure. The new constructs will also allow software tools (e.g., search robots, document transformation tools, etc.) to extract more information from these documents. The following structural elements are new in HTML 4.0:
HTML was not designed with professional publishing in mind; its designers intended it to organize content, not present it. Consequently, many of the language's presentation elements and attributes do not always meet the needs of power page designers. To overcome layout limitations, the W3C HTML Working Group decided not to add new presentation features to HTML 4.0, but instead to assign the task of presentation to style sheet languages such as Cascading Style Sheets ([CSS]). While style sheets are not part of HTML 4.0 proper, HTML 4.0 is the first version of the language to integrate them fully.
Why did the HTML Working Group adopt this strategy? For one, experience shows that distinguishing a document's structure and its presentation leads to more maintainable and reusable documents. Also, by extracting formatting directives from HTML documents, authors may design documents for a variety of users and target media in mind with minimal changes to their original HTML documents. The same HTML document, with different style sheets, may be tailored to color-blind users, those requiring large print, those with braille readers, speech speech synthesizers, hand-held devices, tty devices, etc. But style sheets have another significant impact on accessibility. They eliminate the need to to rely on "tricks" for achieving visual layout and formatting effects. These tricks have the unfortunate side-effect of making pages inaccessible.
For instance, HTML does not have an element or attribute to indent a paragraph, so many authors have resorted to using the BLOCKQUOTE element to indent text even when there is no quotation involved (many visual browsers indent the content of the element). This is misleading to non-visual users: when an audio browser encounters a BLOCKQUOTE element, it should be able to assume that the enclosed text is a quotation. More often than not, that assumption proves incorrect since the element has been misused for a presentation effect.
The BLOCKQUOTE example demonstrates the misuse, for presentation purposes, of an element intended to provide logical information. Many similar traps can seduce HTML authors: they use tables and invisible GIF images for layout; they use H2 or H3 to change the font size of some text that is not a header; they use the EM element to italicize text when in fact, EM is meant to emphasize text (often presented with an italic font style, but rendered differently by a speech synthesizer); they use lists for alignment, etc.
Now, style sheets will give authors a richer palette for layout and formatting at the same time they eliminate the accessibility problems that arise from markup abuse.
A picture may be worth a thousand words to some people, but others need at least a few words to get the picture. Authors should always complement non-textual contexts -- images, video, audio, scripts, and applets -- with alternate text content and textual descriptions. These are vital for visually impaired users, but extremely useful to may others: those who browse with text-only tools, those who configure their browsers not to display images (e.g, their modem is too slow or they simply prefer non-graphical browsing), or for those users who are "temporarily disabled," such as commuters who want to browse the Web while driving to work.
In HTML 4.0, there are a host of new mechanisms for specifying alternate content and descriptions:
The "title" attribute has many accessibility-related applications. For instance, with the new ABBR (abbreviation) and ACRONYM elements, it may indicate the expansion text of an abbreviation. Or it may provide a short description of an included sound clip. Or it may provide information about why a horizontal rule (the HR element) has been used to convey a structural division (although authors should be sure use structural markup as well, such as the DIV or SPAN elements).
But of all the new elements, the OBJECT element (for including images, applets, or any type of object) is the most important for specifying alternate content. With it, authors may specify rich alternate content (i.e., that contains markup, impossible with attribute values) at the same location they specify the object to be included. When a browser cannot render the image, applet, etc. included by an OBJECT element, it renders the OBJECT's (marked up) content instead.
One important application of this OBJECT feature involves client-side image maps. In HTML 4.0, the content model of the MAP element has been expanded to allow marked up anchor (A) elements that give the geometries of the map's active regions. When placed inside of an OBJECT element, the textual version of the image map will only be rendered if the graphical version cannot be. Thus, authors may create graphical and non-graphical image maps at the same location in their documents.
Visually impaired users have tremendous difficulties browsing pages where navigation options rely largely on graphical cues. For instance, image maps with no textual alternatives are next to impossible to navigate. Or link text that offers no context (e.g., a link which simply reads "click here") is as frustrating as a road sign that reads only "Exit" -- exit to where? Or adjacent links not separated by non-link characters confuse screen readers, which generally interpret them as a single link.
HTML 4.0 includes several features to facilitate navigation:
Investing in physical-world accessibility modifications, (wheelchair ramps, curb cuts, etc.) has benefitted a much larger community than those with disabilities: how often have parents with baby carriages or cyclists appreciated these same improvements? The benefits from accessibility innovations can similarly be generalized to other situations:
The WAI group has produced a set of guidelines for page authors. The guidelines, and related documents, describe good authoring practice in detail as it relates to accessibility.
A PICS rating system is a file (standard extension is .rat) that represents a set of categories and vocabulary used to assess a particular domain.
In our case, the domain is the level of accessibility of web pages.
This can be used in multiple ways, for instance by search engine (as in: give me all the pages about that *and* that are "Non Graphical Access Level" < 2) or just as a storage format in a static database of page rating.
The most difficult part if to come up with a semantic mapping as to what the various scale level means (Fully accessible, Mostly accessible, etc) and this is clearly a task for the newly formed WAI Evaluation&Repair Interest Group.
In this prototype, we have defined 2 categories:
Each category has a 5 scale-value:Fully,Mostly,Poorly accessible and Mostly, Fully inaccessible
Here is the full access.rat file.
((PICS-version 1.1)
(rating-system "http://www.w3.org/LabelBureau/WAI")
(rating-service "http://www.w3.org/Ratings/WAI")
(name "WAI")
(description "The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) rating service for the Internet")
(category
(transmit-as "ng")
(name "Non Graphical Access Level")
(description "Level of access to the information on a page for a
user agent with no graphical screen capability")
(label
(name "Full")
(description "Fully Accessible without a graphical screen")
(value 0) )
(label
(name "Most")
(description "Mostly Accessible without a graphical screen")
(value 1) )
(label
(name "Poor")
(description "Poorly Accessible without a graphical screen")
(value 2) )
(label
(name "Bad")
(description "Mostly Inaccessible without a graphical screen")
(value 3) )
(label
(name "None")
(description "Completely Inaccessible without a graphical screen")
(value 4) )
)
(category
(transmit-as "na")
(name "No Audio Access Level")
(description "Level of access to the information on a page for a
user agent with no sound capability")
(label
(name "Full")
(description "Fully Accessible with no sound")
(value 0) )
(label
(name "Most")
(description "Mostly Accessible with no sound")
(value 1) )
(label
(name "Poor")
(description "Poorly Accessible with no sound")
(value 2) )
(label
(name "Bad")
(description "Mostly Inaccessible with no sound")
(value 3) )
(label
(name "None")
(description "Completely Inaccessible with no sound")
(value 4) )
)
)
Labels are encoded in PICS in the form of:
(PICS-1.1 "http://www.w3.org/Ratings/WAI" labels exp "1997.12.31" for "http://www.foo.com/foo.html" by "DD" ratings (ng 1 na 0))
meaning the page http://www.foo.com/foo.html has a
Since modern browsers already implement the PICS standard, we can try out this access.rat file in Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer for instance, and look at the generated User Interface.
The Evaluation and Repair Interest Group (ER IG ) will work with the ER Working Group (ER WG) on tools for
ER IG will collect and analyze input from all people who use or benefit from these tools, including users with disabilities, web authors and administrators, content owners, and tool vendors.
For all the types of users listed above, and for initial and future versions of the tools:
Success of the evaluation and repair tools will be gaged by informal surveys of users and testimonial opinions from organizations regarding:
Success will result from the joint efforts of ER WG and ER IG, and indeed all of the Web Accessibility Initiative. The individual contribution of the ER IG will be measured by examining survey results and testimonials regarding features to which the ER IG particularly contributed.
In view of the constant stream of new technology whose accessibility must be evaluated, the expected duration of the ER-IG is two years, at which time the group should be re-chartered for the duration of WAI work.
The Page Author Guidelines are already complete enough for initial work of this group to begin. Input regarding plans and completed tools of the ER-WG will of course depend on when those plans and tools are delivered, but no requirements are set here.
Group home page, proceedings, deliverables, and charter will all be public.
This group is related to other W3C groups via the dependencies on deliverables described in sections 5 and 6 above.
In addition,
In general, we will seek input from groups of the users identified above, including
Recommendations will be packaged as the following series of deliverables. However, informal communications will also be delivered to ER WG on other issues as they arise, especially if their quick resolution is needed by ER WG
The times at which the other deliverables will be produced will depend on the issues that arise and the number of people available to address them.
w3c-wai-er-ig list
w3c-wai-er-ig list
/WAI/ER/IG group home page
There will be one vote per member (even if there are multiple members from a particular organization). Votes shall be submitted via email. (This differs from the W3C voting process for formal W3C process because these are not formal W3C recommendations)
Escalation of issues within ER IG or between ER WG and IG goes to the WAI Coordination Group.
w3c-wai-er-ig list and respond in timely manner
to postings
It is crucial to have representation from all people who will be using the tools and the people who will benefit from their use.
We therefore seek participants who can give expert opinion of their own, plus participants who can collect information from people who would not normally be represented (e.g. non-technical web content owners, people with little or no experience surfing the web).
This requires participation from people who are themselves
A four-phase approach has been followed in the TIDE-WAI project: data collection, data analysis, consolidation & recommendations, and dissemination (see Figure 1). Currently, the first two phases have been completed and the remaining period will be devoted to the remaining activities, namely consolidation & recommendations and dissemination.
Figure 1 - Phases of the project
Objective
The objective of this task was to review the current and on-going standardisation activities related to web accessibility, at European and International levels, considering current work on guidelines and recommendations, standardisation initiatives and national and international policies. As a result of this activity, a list of standardisation committees and existing and on-going standards has been drafted, where accessibility work could be propagated.
Achievements to date
Following the defined plan, the data collection phase started with a thorough investigation of the state of the art on web accessibility related standardisation activities focusing on:
This investigation has been conducted through the active involvement of FORTH in: (a) organisations and committees relevant to the WWW (e.g. W3C, UseWeb, Internet Society) and the disability community (e.g. RESNA, AAATE, COST 219, HELIOS-HANDYNET); (b) the involvement in standardisation organisations and committees at European (e.g. ETSI, CEN, CENELEC) and International levels (e.g. ISO); (c) the review of relevant bibliography and information available on the WWW; the participation in related conferences and workshops; and (d) direct contacts with key actors in the disability, ergonomics and standardisation fields. A list of the organisations that were reviewed, as well as the forums where initial work of this activity was presented is provided in Annex I.
From the analysis of the collected data, several conclusions can be derived regarding the present coverage of the work on guidelines and recommendations, the current standardisation activities in the area of Web accessibility, and the existing policies and laws at national and European levels.
Guidelines
Although there are significant efforts in developing guidelines and recommendations for accessible Web documents, the areas covered are limited considering the scope and rapid developments in Web technologies. A considerable effort has been made by W3C/WAI to collect and consolidate the existing guidelines and recommendations and provide a complete and unified set of accessibility guidelines as official W3C documents. The main conclusions of the conducted investigation are:
Standards
Due to the short history of the Web and the rapid evolution of the associated technologies, official international or national standards in this field are not yet available. However, in many cases, de facto industry standards have been adopted by the Web community. Recently, standardisation organisations (e.g. IEEE - Internet Best Practices Study Group, Internet Society - Internet Engineering Task Force) have expressed an intention to start standardisation activities related to the Web, including accessibility. From the conducted investigation, the following conclusions can be derived:
A list of Standardisation Committees, where standardisation work on web accessibility could and should be propagated is provided in Annex II.
Policies
To make the guidelines and standards applicable to mainstream technology products, accessibility policies and rules need to be adopted. Currently, accessibility related laws are available in:
Despite the influence of these policies on software vendors, their impact on standards is still minimal.
The above data collection results provide an account of the current state of the art in relation to standardisation activities on accessibility in general and Web accessibility in particular. Moreover, they provide a valuable insight towards what is currently missing from on-going standardisation work as well as how existing and future results can be propagated towards the relevant communities.
Future work and expected results
The data collection and analysis phase has been officially completed in the first six months of the project, providing a comprehensive view of the standardisation activities (with regards to Web accessibility) at national, European and International levels. A list of possible paths for promoting standardisation work in this field has been compiled and a monitoring activity will be continued in order to review developments and related work during the remaining time period.
Objective
As discussed in the previous task, the vast majority of existing guidelines for WWW accessibility mainly focus either on page authoring, user agents, or the structure and presentation of Web documents. By implication, such guidelines do not fully address structural languages (e.g. XML), presentation languages (e.g. CSS), scripting languages and other properties which are typically related to the overall interaction platform. On the other hand, the proliferation of interaction platforms and their continuous growth (e.g. HTML, VRML, XML, DHTML), necessitate an account of key requirements that should be preserved if these developments and future ones are to comply with the broad accessibility objectives. The objective of this task is to study and identify such key requirements (at the level of the interaction platform) which would extend the current collection of guidelines on accessible Web design.
Achievements to date
In the present context, the term interaction platform refers to any software tool providing implemented (or the means to implement) interaction elements which in turn can be used to construct a user interface. Such software tools include the traditional user interface development toolkits, such as Windows95TM, Motif, Athena Widget Set, as well as some current and emerging Web technologies such as structural languages (e.g. HTML, XML), presentation languages (e.g. CSS), scripting languages (e.g. JavaScript) as well as emerging Web technologies such as WebTV, Java, etc.
In order to identify accessibility guidelines relevant to an interaction platform, several activities have been undertaken, the results of which influenced what is reported further on as achievements to day:
One important observation related to the accessibility of interactive applications and services by different user groups, including people with disabilities, is that no single interface implementation is likely to suffice for all different users. This simple conclusion leads to the formulation of our first design-oriented principle for universal accessibility in Human Computer Interaction, which reads as follows:
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P1: Designing for the broadest possible end user population entails the provision of alternative interface manifestations depending on the requirements, abilities and preferences of the target user groups. |
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This principle translates to several guidelines, which are summarised as follows: |
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G1: Provide support for designing for a particular modality or combinations of modalities suitable for different users. G2: Provide facilities for encapsulating modality-specific designs into unified interface specifications |
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On the grounds of the above, we can now formulate the second development oriented principle for universal accessibility in HCI, which reads as follows:
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P2: An interface that is designed for the broadest possible end user population, including people with disabilities, should link with a target platform rather than making direct calls to the platform. |
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Such a principle translates to several guidelines or tool development requirements, which need to be preserved in order to facilitate accessibility at the level of an interaction platform. These are: |
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R1: An interface should be allowed to make use of suitable interaction resources offered by different interaction platforms (platform integration) R2: An interaction platform should provide facilities to allow enhancements of the originally supported interaction techniques with new ones suitable for specific users and contexts of use (platform augmentation) R3: Provide mechanisms for specifying interactive behaviours through abstract interaction elements relieved from platform-specific properties (platform abstraction) R4: Provide facilities which allow an interaction platform to expose and make use of information produced by external software tools (orthogonality) |
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Each one of these requirements is briefly described in the table of Annex III.
Future work and expected results
It is important to note that the above principles, guidelines and requirements are not yet formulated in a manner that would be acceptable to standardisation bodies, which necessitates further work on interpreting and presenting meaningful recommendations for standardisation activities. This task is expected to be achieved through collaboration and exchanges with members of the W3C-WAI community and through expert consultation. Once the required refinements have been achieved, the results will then be documented in the form of technical reports to be submitted to the relevant standards communities for consideration and inclusion in existing drafts or new work items (see section on dissemination strategy).
Objective
The objective of this task is to analyse the collected and consolidated data in order to formulate a strategy for their dissemination towards relevant standardisation and regulation committees.
Achievements to date
Following the review of the current situation regarding standardisation work on Web accessibility and the consolidation of the collected data, potential exploitation paths were examined and evaluated with the aim to define a specific dissemination strategy to be followed in the project.
Several criteria were taken into account in selecting and defining a specific dissemination strategy for standardisation work. These criteria include:
Special attention has been given to the recent efforts towards preserving universal access to services and applications in the context of the emerging Information Society (IS) in Europe, and the development of the National Information Infrastructure (NII) in the USA, and the related standardisation initiatives.
Of particular interest is the introduction, by the European Commission, of a Mandate to the European Standards Bodies for Standardisation in the field of information and communication technologies for disabled and elderly people (SOGITS N 1032 - EN 06/05/98), as well as a collective standardisation action initiated by CEN (the Information Society Standardisation System - ISSS) to include all the relevant European Information Society standardisation activities under a single umbrella.
Additionally, another relevant target is the new work item on accessibility by TC 159 SC4 WG5, which has been contacted in the past and has expressed the willingness to study recommendations and project results which relate to the new work item.
Future work and expected results
From the above, it follows that the work on developing a suitable dissemination strategy in the context of the TIDE-WAI project WP4, will be continued in the light of the preliminary project's results. It is expected that through collaboration and agreements within the W3C-WAI community the workpackage-specific results, as well as other W3C-WAI results, can be propagated to the most appropriate bodies for consideration and inclusion in standardisation activities.
Standardisation Organisations and Web related Committees / Societies
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International Organisation for Standardisation - ISO http://www.iso.ch/welcome.html
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American National Standards Institute - ANSI http://web.ansi.org/default_js.htm
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European Committee for Standardisation - CEN http://www.cenorm.be/
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IEEE Standards http://standards.ieee.org/
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International Electrotechnical Commission - IEC http://www.iec.ch/home-e.htm
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International Telecommunication Union - ITU http://www.itu.int/
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European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization - CENELEC http://www.cenelec.be/ |
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European Telecommunications Standardisation Institute - ETSI http://www.etsi.org/
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National Information Standards Organisation - NISO http://www.niso.org/
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Internet Society http://www.isoc.org
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World Wide Web Consortium - W3C http://www.w3.org/
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Australian World Wide Web Accessibility Standards for People with Disabilities http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/lawlink.nsf/pages/wwwaccess |
Committees related to the Information Infrastructure
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Global Information Infrastructure Commission http://www.gii.org/index.html |
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The National Information Infrastructure (NII) http://sunsite.unc.edu/nii/NII-Table-of-Contents.html
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Information Society Project Office http://www.ispo.cec.be/
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Web Developers and Service Providers related Organisations
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The HTML Writers Guild http://www.hwg.org/lists/intro.html
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The Web Standards Project http://www.webstandards.org/ |
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Web Design Group http://www.htmlhelp.com/
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Best Viewed With Any Browser Campaign http://www.anybrowser.hostnow.net/campaign/ |
Standards of Immediate Interest
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Committee |
ISO TC159 Ergonomics |
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Related Standard |
ISO 9241 Ergonomics of Work on Visual Display Terminals |
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Status |
Final |
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Related Standard |
ISO 14915 Multimedia User Interface Design |
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Status |
on-going |
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Related Standard |
ISO CD 13407 Human-centred design process for interactive systems |
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Status |
Draft |
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Comments |
Contribution to, and enhancement of, the last 2 standards with accessibility related work is possible since they are not yet accepted in their final form. Contribution could also be provided in the new work item on Accessibility that has been recently accepted by the Working Group 5, Sub-Committee 4 of the TC 159. New work items on Web accessibility from the perspective of ergonomics, human factors and user issues, could be proposed under this technical committee. |
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Committee |
ISO/IEC JTC 1 Information Technology / SC 7 Software Engineering |
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Related Standard |
ISO/IEC CD 9126 Software quality characteristics and metrics |
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Status |
Draft |
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Related Standard |
ISO/IEC DIS 14598 Evaluation of software products |
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Status |
Draft |
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Comment |
Contribution and enhancement of both standards to include Web accessibility issues from a software engineering point of view is possible since these standards are not yet accepted in their final form. |
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Committee |
ETSI STC HF 2 Human Factors for People with Special Needs |
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Related Standard |
None |
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Status |
None |
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Comment |
New work item on accessible telecommunication infrastructure and web-based services could be proposed. |
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Committee |
CEN/ISSS Information Society Standardisation System |
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Related Standard |
None |
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Status |
None |
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Comment |
New work item on accessibility requirements of web-based services in the emerging Information Society could be proposed. |
Standards of Peripheral Interest
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Committee |
IEEE P2001 Web Page Engineering for Intranet/Extranet Environments (Well Engineered Web Page Guidelines) |
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Related Standard |
None |
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Status |
None |
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Comment |
New work item on accessible Web-based work environments could be proposed. |
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Committee |
Special Joint Working Group IEC/TC3-ISO/TC10 (SJWG/13) Future standardisation needs in the field of documentation |
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Related Standard |
None |
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Status |
None |
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Comment |
New work item covering accessibility of the Web as a documentation medium could be proposed. |
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Committee |
ISO TC46 Information and Documentation |
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Related Standard |
None |
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Status |
None |
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Comment |
New work item covering accessibility of the Web as a documentation medium could be proposed. |
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Committee |
IEEE P1063 Software User Documentation |
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Related Standard |
None |
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Status |
None |
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Comment |
New work item covering accessibility of the Web as a documentation medium could be proposed. |
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Committee |
ISO/IEC JTC 1 Information Technology / SC 34 Document Description and Processing Languages |
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Related Standard |
None |
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Status |
None |
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Comment |
New work item covering accessibility of the Web as a documentation medium could be proposed. |
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Requirement |
Definition |
Rationale |
Comment |
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Integration |
Ability to import any interaction platform that may be required for the development of interactive applications |
In cases where the interaction elements originally supported by a particular interaction platform do not suffice, it is important to be able to utilise interaction elements from alternative sources |
Usually, interaction building blocks and re-usable interface components which are provided from different software firms do not follow interoperability guidelines |
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Augmentation |
The process through which additional interaction techniques are injected within the original collection of interaction elements of a particular platform |
It is desirable to be provide extended interaction facilities, beyond the original collection, which could be useful in specific contexts of use (e.g. voice-control of windowing application, scanning, etc) |
Newly introduced interaction techniques become an integral part of original toolkit elements, while old applications re-compiled with the augmented toolkit version automatically inherit the extra interaction features. |
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Abstraction |
Ability to specify interactive behaviours by means of abstract interaction objects |
Different interaction platforms offer different programming interfaces and calling conventions, thus complicating the use development of an interface that makes use of several such platforms |
There should be a well defined protocol for mapping abstract interaction objects to concrete interaction elements as supported by a target platform |
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Orthogonality |
Ability of a platform's run-time libraries to expose and make use of information produced by external software tools |
When a user interacts with a particular application there are issues that relate to the specific contexts of use and which can only be determined during the interactive session. In such cases the interaction platform should provide the means to expose and receive information relevant to the context of use. |
Typically, what is required is extensions in the Application Programming Interface of the interaction platform |
This section identifies the correspondance between the deliverables listed in section C3 of the Project Proposal and this report, and also provides a table that illustrates the use of the resources for the results achieved.
From the original table in the Project Proposal, the following deliverables are relevant to the first six months of activity:
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Deliverable |
Title |
Delivery |
Nature |
Dis-semination |
Type |
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D1.1 |
Project Reference Guide |
3 |
RE |
PU |
PD |
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D1.2 |
Interim Report |
6 |
RE |
PU |
PD |
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D3.1 |
PICS compliant Rating System |
6 |
RE/SP |
PU |
PD |
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D5.1 |
User Forum Set-up |
6 |
RE |
PU |
PD |
Explanation of the table.
In addition, the deliverables listed in Annex C (HTML 4 Accessibility Improvements) and D (WAI Presentation Slide Set) are part of WP02 Education, even though they were not listed in the original Project Proposal (too detailed at that time).
During the first six months of 1998, the following resources have been used: