WWAAC trip report and link to outline of techniques to make content easier to understand

On 27 June, I met with several people from the WWAAC.
http://212.187.34.208/wwaac/
Doeko Hekstra - Handicom
Mike Clarke, Andrew Lysley, Mark Saville, David Colven - ACE Centre 
Advisory Trust
Colette Nicolle - Loughborough University
Bengt Farre - Femtio Procent Data

I took an action to outline issues and follow-up with several W3C folks.
My outline is at:
http://www.w3.org/2002/07/03-symbolAnnotation.html

Here is a brief trip report:
They gave me an update of the WWAAC progress (http://www.wwaac.org/), a
demonstration of the browser they are developing, and discussed a mock-up
of future directions for development.

We talked quite a lot about using images to annotate content.  I took an
action to write-up my ideas and discuss with the Annotea folk.  As well as
put the WWAAC and Annotea folk in touch w/each other.

As part of their project, they are supposed to write guidelines for
developing an AAC-enabled WWW.  They will be sending at least one person to 
the WCAG
F2F in Linz 15/16 July.  It seems that we are moving towards a general
guideline about writing simply and plainly, but have techniques for folks
who want to create content specific for people with cognitive
disabilities.  We will have a group of people at the Linz meeting to
discuss this.  We're planning to approach it from the techniques
perspective at the meeting.  Others who are registered to attend to
participate in this topic discussion:
Avi Arditti (Voice of America and Plain English Network)
Jonathan Chetwynd
+ Bengt from WWAAC.

They want to standardize concept codes as a way to easily translate between
symbol languages.  e.g. bliss has one symbol for cat, but  another symbol
language uses a different symbol.  We discussed using WordNet as a catalog
of concept codes, but we need to look into how English-specific it is.

We discussed the possibility of creating a symbol-based style sheet for an
XML file as well as content negotiation for symbols.

They gave me an install of "Symbol for Windows" to demonstrate the issues
and solutions.

They were well prepared and circulated a couple of documents in
preparation for the meeting.
1. Guidelines for Developing an AAC-Enable WWW (a discussion document)
2. WWAAC Code of Practice (in 2 parts)
- Exchanging information over the Internet through Concept Coding
- Improving accessibility of web-based information and services for persons
with limited cognitive, language, and/or motor skills

The first, went through WCAG 2.0 and raised good research questions as
possible future directions for their group.  They were trying to make sense
of how they could contribute. I think we found many connection points -
primarily in review and documentation of techniques.

The second, described an XML syntax to markup concept codes.

-- 
wendy a chisholm
world wide web consortium
web accessibility initiative
seattle, wa usa
/--

Received on Wednesday, 10 July 2002 12:09:49 UTC