Accessibility Metadata Draft Proposal Submission

Hello,

I would like to submit the Accessibility Metadata draft proposal for
discussion.

The latest version (0.5) is available at
<http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/Accessibility>
http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/Accessibility (or, in case you want to
reference an archived version with change history:
 <https://wiki.benetech.org/display/a11ymetadata/Proposed+Properties>
https://wiki.benetech.org/display/a11ymetadata/Proposed+Properties). We also
have a public website at  <http://a11ymetadata.org/>
http://a11ymetadata.org/ which has the specification and examples.

For background on Accessibility Metadata, please review the resources listed
at the bottom of this email, including our group wiki, mailing list and
public website.

The use case for this proposal is to provide accessibility metadata for
educational content, but it is applicable for accessibility information on
all web content. These standards will complement the work of the Learning
Resource Metadata Initiative ( <http://www.lrmi.net/> LRMI), which is
developing metadata standards related to educational content. The Schema.org
use of LRMI does not currently include accessibility information in their
efforts. By developing the accessibility component of the educational
metadata, Benetech, IMS Global, and our partners will greatly improve the
ability for students, teachers, and parents to find accessible educational
materials that fit the specific learning needs of any student. Students will
be able to find and use the materials they need to succeed in the classroom
and beyond.

For specific user stories that the Accessibility Metadata Working Group used
to inform their process, please see
<https://wiki.benetech.org/display/a11ymetadata/User+Stories>
https://wiki.benetech.org/display/a11ymetadata/User+Stories.

A few notes on the draft:

1.	We have a large set of examples for the primary content types and
relationships, which can be seen at
<https://wiki.benetech.org/display/a11ymetadata/Properties+Examples>
https://wiki.benetech.org/display/a11ymetadata/Properties+Examples.
2.	A crosswalk table, which lists the correspondence of our proposal to
earlier and current work on accessibility metadata can be found at
<https://wiki.benetech.org/display/a11ymetadata/Properties+Metadata+Crosswal
k>
https://wiki.benetech.org/display/a11ymetadata/Properties+Metadata+Crosswalk
.. These works include  IMS AccessFor All v3, AfA ISO, existing schema.org,
ONIX, and Dublin Core.
3.	We are actively working with content providers and expect to have
several content sources and metadata creation sources in the next month.

We welcome additional participants to join our list at
<https://groups.google.com/group/a11y-metadata-project>
https://groups.google.com/group/a11y-metadata-project.

This specification is made available with the
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/> CC-BY-SA license.

Lisa Mattson, on behalf of IMS Global and the Accessibility Metadata Working
Group
Chief Operations Officer
IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc.

[1]  <https://wiki.benetech.org/display/a11ymetadata/>
https://wiki.benetech.org/display/a11ymetadata/
[2]  <https://groups.google.com/group/a11y-metadata-project>
https://groups.google.com/group/a11y-metadata-project
[3]  <http://a11ymetadata.org/> http://a11ymetadata.org/
[4]  <http://a11ymetadata.imsglobal.org/> http://a11ymetadata.imsglobal.org/