Accessibility and Metadata

Liddy NevileLa Trobe University

Summary

• Accessibility– What is it?– How does it become involved?

• Metadata– For what purposes?– How can it be used?

What is accessibility?

• Not ‘clear’ DC• Not access rights• Has political connotations• ==> generalised definition

W3C efforts in WAI

• Guidelines– Techniques– Tests– Techniques for tests– …

• Content and presentation

Other W3C developments

• Device independence• Protocols and formats• cc/pp - composite capabilities and

preferences format• HTML, XML, RDF, …• Scalable vector graphics (SVG)

W3C WAI activities..

• WCAG• ATAG• UUAG• EO• ...

ATRC

• Assistive technologies• Web4All• ==> ACCLIP (IMS Global)

– Access4All (A4A)– Best Practices Guide

• But - privacy and security?• And political correctness.

unBounded Access

• People with cognitive disabilities• The engineer use case• The non-English speaker• ….• => language characterisation,

concept languages, ...

INCITS V2

• Mission - access for everyone to everything

• The universal remote console– Use cases (scenarios)– ‘skins’– Components - manual, etc…– Language independent? flexible?

Metadata

• Purposes include:– Compliance– Quality maintenance– Discovery– Repair– Alternative equivalents

Possible solutions

• At systems level:– a metadata repository that manages

and reports on accessibility compliance (evaluation by agents and people, repair tools, corrected items library, reports, etc)

– La Trobe experiment

Possible solutions

• At metadata level:• For compliance

dc:relation:conformsTo• Needs declaration and certification and ….

– Evaluation and Repair Language (W3C)

Possible solutions

• At metadata level:• For repair dc:relation:……???

• Refers to Web services, Cascading Style Sheets, ….

• For use with assistive technologies– A4A description of user’s AT preferences

Possible solutions

• At metadata level:• For equivalent alternatives

dc:relation:isEquivalentTo• Refers to alternative modalities or different

but equivalent alternatives ….

New solutions?

• Interactive metadata• People, resources,

devices/services, events/contexts