Shape the Future Symposium 2021

Shape the Future: Research and Development Questions in Digital Accessibility

https://www.w3.org/WAI/about/projects/wai-coop/symposium1/

The Web Accessibility Initiative - Communities of Practice (WAI-CooP) Project and the W3C Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working Group invite researchers, practitioners, and people with disabilities to participate in an international online symposium exploring research challenges and opportunities in digital accessibility.

Symposium date: 10 November 2021
Paper submission date: 6 October 2021

Introduction

This online symposium brings together researchers, academics, industry, government, and people with disabilities, to explore the current state-of-the-art in accessibility research, development, and practice to uncover pressing topics for future research and development.

Another goal of this symposium is to explore potential gaps between the topics discussed by researchers and practitioners. By increasing awareness to the challenges faced by all communities, collaborations could emerge and improve the current state of accessibility research and practice.

The purpose of this page is to point people at additional considerations APA wants people to bear in mind if proposing topics around Personalization, Pronunciation or other topics.

Topics, supporting information and additional considerations from APA

Personalization (supporting information: Personalization Accessibility Task Force and Making Content Usable for People with Cognitive and Learning Disabilities)

The W3C/WAI Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working group would also welcome either implementing engineering or original research proposals in two key areas of APA's current work.

APA's Personalization Task Force welcomes work aimed at providing technological solutions to a variety of challenges encountered by persons with disabilities with web technology, especially (though not exclusively) challenges for persons with cognitive and learning disabilities, many of which are described in this W3C Note publication Making Content Usable for People with Cognitive and Learning Disabilities.

Pronunciation (supporting information: Pronunciation Task Force and Issues on Pronunciation)

APA's Spoken Presentation Task Force is attempting to develop standards based approaches, including user agent components, that could bring consistency and predictability to TTS pronunciation of web based content across user agents and operating environments, for languages both ancient and modern (See Pronunciation Current Work).

Two important points are highlighted for potential proposals in this area:

Any solution requiring changes to HTML parsers may not be accepted by the browser vendors.

A significant engineering gap has emerged between the perceived needs of assistive technology vendors vis a vis the browser vendors in github issues as shown here: