Beyond Text: WAI-Adapt AAC Symbol Specification, for Visual Markup
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Ecija: Okay,
… we are privileged to have this breakout on the way, that task force, that we want to begin by giving them more general context about what we do which is personalizing the web for better accessibility.
… This presentation that you're seeing is
… on the latest work. I'm doing that task force.
… As we mentioned Shannon Snyder from Ibm, the task force home is listed here. It's under Apa that. And this talk slides are available online.
… So what we'd like to address in this overview is who
… needs a more adaptive way. What are our long term goals and approaches? What's our current focus, which is symbols?
… And some exploratory work we've been doing around semantics and adaptations. I know there is no scribe.
… Yeah, when you find this right?
… Oh, my.
… so is a story. Long time accepted term accessibility field for adapting individual to a particular task
… might remind people. The great model for disability is the CFC from the whl, which is basically, it's not a medical model disability, charity or social model. It's a model of an individual performing a task in an environment.
… And when an individual cannot perform that fast, and that individual is disabled in some sense. So when I came to Spain I've been rather surprised. A little people speak English, and I am disabled on the street. He could do not understand the same individual.
… same task.
… different environment, and I will disable. So in the history of working in this field. People talk about adaptation. So I have an adaptation. I hope if I adapt the environment.
… so people need to access critical services. People need to join meetings on time.
… People need to make doctors appointments. Can I make a complaint to the water company? I need water essential services. Can I terminate, heating
… today more services than ever are delivered, accessed and mediated by digital devices.
… and if these devices are not usable by somebody with a disability that they will be denied except for services which is actually against the law. In many countries so standards exist to make these interfaces accessible, such as the
… okay, the webcam accessibility kind of
… user weeds differ. So here we're talking about. For example.
… when I see that as a glance, I know, we say, but people who were born. After that I have never even touched one of those things. They're accustomed to using a USB key
… and say, that might be a better ipad for say, because we've never seen a disk. So different. People have different expectations of symbols and what they need.
… Different people have different ex needs for interpreting
… to serve the different needs and to exactly. We need semantics. We need a way to semantically identify what that button is it the button? What does it do
… the way that?
… Yes, of course. Answering these questions. it was founded by people who had worked for many, many years on the work streams that ended up giving us aria
… and look back. So this is, not a new workstation for quite a distinguished
… one with a long track record the demonstration that the group came up with very early was how to make a good cup of tea. It's just simply a web page where we could show
… what we could do if we could adapt this. And here we have turned on the ability to put symbols on different worlds. So whereas here the word setting up is all lower. And you, if you need to read the word setting up, or you have no idea what it means
… when I adapt it. I show a Instagram or a pictorial symbol, somebody setting up something
… just like the word make here, make somebody make. That's an example
… of adapting
… a page to user meetings. We're talking about users with cognitive and learning disabilities, and
… the group is deeply informed by the document that you see on the screen making content usable for people learning disabilities.
… The this product of the Coga
… Task force deeply informed the work that we're doing. We're addressing the needs of these people which you could say are part of the next 1 billion
… web users. Users that have been a little, too, have found the web currently a little too confusing, little too difficult
… throughout my reach.
… How do we do this?
… Our first focus is on symbols.
… We're working with community organizations such as with symbolic, with whom we've published alternative and communication. Simple registry.
… We started with symbols because alright. on an almost ubiquitous use.
… They decorate all kinds of they appear
… in messaging. I get messages from my daughter that literally have more symbols than words. Now see you soon, with a rainbow, smiley face, the dog jumping.
… and
… there is no semantics around symbols. The original insight
… that the words on a page have semantic functionality, that if we're going to introduce them the semantics will be critical to see a word if you go to a different document. See? In other words, it's a heading, or it's a bulleted list.
… But he did not think of encoding the symbols cause in those days. Documents he was working with. the symbols might have been turned bullets who wouldn't even thought of that way
… very quickly. As we all know, the web became a very direct place today, pictures.
… video or everywhere. And they have their alternative text, but simple to remain semantically on the door
… and basically neglect it.
… So the first publication that our passport is moving towards technical recommendation status.
… it's a semantic method for marking up symbols.
… I'd like to show you this
… link, the Aac Symbol registry. So we wish to enable a method
… for stating the semantics of the symbol. Now, how do we do that?
… There's just so many single sets
… what we did. And I keep saying, we that this works to start before I join the task force
… was to find one of the oldest and most intensively documented symbols symbolic setup.
… You then use this as a lookup. So we create a normal spec around the symbol said, that is curated by a decade or international organizations
… split symbols.
… And then, if I look up, for example, the word happy in this registry. Or smiling face, or even better.
… I can get a symbol for questioner.
… They have symbols for almost everything.
… This is a Wpc. Publication. Here we are said and happy. This is unhappy.
… Just about anything you can think of is here as we look up
… now that we have a primary key
… for all these symbols like here I happen to 6709.
… It's here. everything's here.
… It's a kind of primary key. And then you could associate this with the symbol of any other zoom set under the sun.
… So. going back to
… the slot, I showed you the symbol registry which we've already published.
… We then explain, the projected use in the symbols, module symbols. Module is in
… candidate recommendation and it outlines. It's a very short document.
… It outlines simply our goal to serve the this population. It tells a little bit more background how you're using A/C symbols and we primarily are focusing on A/C
… users. But, as I've explained, we see that this would actually help any users.
… and we define how to use the markup, which is very simple.
… Just give the number of symbol involved.
… It's adapt, dash, simple. It's the attribute. Right now we're gonna get a
… So we we're requesting from what? Wg, correct.
… And so here's an example. You can expand the word cup and decorating with the symbol. It's that simple. I'm showing the chrome sample on the screen.
… And we are currently looking for implementations.
… So
… that is the first focus of our task force.
… You want to enable access to web content for single users.
… During I've mentioned the work the A/Ca few times. I'm showing now the global Symbols repository for A/C. Simple sets of screen. We have worked with the people at Google Symbol.
… They are on board, supported for what we are doing because it gives them for the first time the ability to translate between simple boards.
… if you've got the bit, are in a hospital or shown a symbol board, which means you can't communicate both where you can't speak, you can only gesture to each of these.
… I'll show you the
… home to your symbols. You would end up seeing the same order. Simple. You can't do today.
… So to summarize, the need is that users they need symbols, help them understand the concept content on the page, using symbols that they know, and the solution is to allow others to attribute
… signal set, agnostic concepts
… parts of the content of the page. Here is an example. Markup.
… See list, it is adapt and the simple quote number there you could look up the phone number and then register that I showed you.
… We are only mapping individual concepts in video, simple, we're not translating.
… I'm also showing on the screen with symbolic site. This inbox is an unusual highly dedicated community. where they actually mark up entire text principles.
… language. We're not interested in marketing every single word. But we wouldn't prevent someone from doing that
… we just think symbols are very helpful for things like chat to headings. But things like that.
… I showed you the registry. And now
… to keep things simple. We're going to show you a tool that shows how easily and readily we can mark things up with.
… We've been socializing this
… oh, no
… something else to mark up on my web page. The people named it.
… What about City Central?
… Alright
… people feel we have aria, have
… we have to see it says we have to do refill. We've got so much work to do. Are you giving us more work to do? And we just get it kind of push back on that level.
… So that is why we first want to show how simple it would be implemented a tool for about the atmosphere.
… We also just want to express.
… just because there's lots of markets doesn't mean
… we couldn't use one more market that would help people with time disabilities. It wouldn't be mandatory. It doesn't have to go in every page
… but we shouldn't feel just because we have so much success behind us. We have to lock the doors
… and not innovate any more. Imagine if we did give you to mark up fatigue syndrome
… and didn't do anything new for 5 years, I expect we will not be of the coming world
… any comments or question before you show you the demonstration of the adaptable content offering tool.
… It's a prototype of what an authoring tool might look like.
… It was made by me. So it's a bit rough and ready. And what I learned was
… So it's actually simpler to make these things on my sync because I make this. So anybody else can make these things. I'm just gonna minimize the
… documentation products.
… What I've done is I put in the HTML mark up for the chat to list of the video that's in our fly list. So if you're here and you can see before
… it's the same markup. And I'm just gonna show you how we would get to the markup that's in the we II don't think we yet to have posted an electronic version of the flyer because it was literally hot off the press. But we will be doing that. The URL link there, to which is the explainer. URL. So there will be a digital version of this shortly, and we apologize.
… But what I've got for both of you who can see the screen is, this is just a normal, unordered list. Which contains the following chapters, ingredients, prepping, cooking, play and taste. And so what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna press the button.
… and the program is just giving me a suggestion of what the symbols should be, and most of them well, some of them will look familiar, and some of them won't, and some of them are expert, and one is missing.
… And so what it's done is it's just very naively
… suggested symbols based on strain matching. I mean, this is really super simple, and you probably wouldn't do it like this in the real world.
… But this is its first event, and it's almost there. But I'm gonna open up bits where I can refine what the symbols are going to be. So ingredients. I'm going to keep trying. It didn't know what to. It. Didn't know what that meant. So I'm just gonna go into a dialogue here. But lets me search for it. And then it's got the concept
… of preparing food. So I'm just gonna say, yes, I want the concept of preparing food.
… Then clicking is okay. As we said, we don't actually want to put a symbol on every word. It's okay for plate and taste just to be plate just to have a symbol. So I'm gonna take the symbol of the other 2.
… And now, when I look at my preview, it looks very much like what's in the one. There's a symbol for ingredients, pressing, cooking, and plate and taste, just as one simple. So that's
… That's just an example of how easy it is, and then at the bottom. you get the markup out that is on the slide.
… I like the I showed.
… That's this girl and marking the tax area.
… So this is the, this is a markup that's on this slide that gave them an example of how to do this mark up basically
… the text that is going to the simple is just being wrapped in a span, and the span has an attributes on it. This attribute is has been requested. But we're still in the process of
… that that process. So it's not official yet. We were using data, attach attributes. So we were encouraged to to go with that symbol because there weren't any conflicts. But again, this is not ratified. This is not finalized. This is just a prototype
… couple of things to maybe head off a a few questions Lionel alluded to this already. One of the questions we always get is oh, not more markup Lionel already mentioned this, I'm gonna take it from
… slightly different angle. But the kind of same outcome we said.
… we don't need to mark up everything. We only need to mark up the key things in most cases.
… We also think that this is a huge benefit to the people. It's going to open up access to things they didn't have access to before.
… This prototype tool shows that you can pretty easily get pretty close to a good result
… with an altering tool. That's very simple. We imagine that actually clever authoring tools would be much better at suggesting what appropriate symbols would be.
… So we actually think that this would be maybe part of Cms's, or tools that help you also content.
… it would give you the always like the opportunity to review the symbols that it thinks are appropriate
… as you go, and it would be much cleverer about when to put symbols on words and when not to. So we believe, unless you need us. If we're preparing more of a case for why this is so important to do
… the other thing is that this, I mean, it wouldn't. Inevitably, if you wanted to make this clever, you'd be using machine learning, and we think, we don't have a we haven't gone to an official spec
… view on on that altering process. My personal opinion, which is, not necessarily reflective of consensus of the group. But we haven't had Major. Is that machine learning altering time?
… It could be a real boot to make that altering process easier. At Runtime it would be unreliable, and and we wouldn't necessarily advocate for that necessarily wouldn't.
… but as a as a content also. We think that with a little bit of machine learning help that could, that process could be pretty painless.
… So that's the demo of the tool.
… We do have some other slides.
… which is I will just go over very briefly. I'm actually not gonna go through all the content of these some bootstrapping. We we need input from horses we've made. This is as easy as we can ways to make it easier. We've seen things like the main element work very well because it it fulfills the need for a lot of people. And it's it's neat.
… So we're hoping this will be kind of the same thing. And we are working on demonstrating the the benefits and researching of the user population more.
… And again, we think that this idea of providing a small bit of machine readable semantic metadata will will help with a wide range of adaptations. And so the last part
… is further work on explorations.
… If you've seen presentations about our work before, some of these will be familiar. So I'm just gonna go over them extremely quickly. We've got simplification. We're still working on simplifying content for the user and looking a variety of different techniques. So that we're still looking at indicating the purpose of form fields in a free, user, friendly way. And we're still looking into actions and destinations.
… I'll say something specific about explanations because it's we're working on it. This feedback as well.
… Another problem that we are trying to solve in our task force is
… helping people get to the part of the site that they want. And there are some really common areas of sites that people might want to visit, so that might be the login page, the search page, the accessibility statement, the products page, those sorts of things, and the cognitive accessibility task force has given us a list of those.
… and
… by happenstance we came across a spec on a completely different subject that has a concept of a well known URL, and we realize that that could solve our problems and some other ones as well. And we usually have 3 sort of independent proposals on this idea of well known Urls have come together for different parts of accessibility, and we're discussing, both with other feedback as well that one
… realize on existing infrastructure, so it could be quite quick to get it adopted, and we're hoping to forward.
… And then the last area of further work is distractions. But I'm not gonna distract us from the main topic yet by talking.
… There we go. We have a road map or multiple stages. I'm just gonna demonstrate this. You can follow these links on the slides. We haven't explained that. We have symbols module. We have other modules forthcoming.
… There's a lot more to come, so we want you to get an on the ground floor, and how can you get involved? Well, feed giving us feedback here would be brilliant.
… we really want implementations sites. Mark up content, mark top. We can foresee web extension to do this stuff. There's a web extension part of the tool that I showed you as well with the rendering part, but it doesn't count because it came from within the group. So we need somebody else to implement it. User agent changes ideally, ultimately, in the long run, would be fantastic
… and more ways that you can take part. You can review the simple module again implementations. You can comment. And I get a brief mailing list for joining the group. If you are eligible to do so, we would love to have you. I think that's the end. So I just want to thank you for listening. And the presentation was made by us in the event that's
… and there's some links to to back to it. The URL is slightly different here. This, this is some gonna be changed. So we have to keep back to the URL that the one that I put in Irc will work until then apologies. It's not to cool the URL because it's about to change.
… And
… but that's that's the presentation, and we just want to turn it over for discussion