Re: DC2002 in Florence in October

The Learning Federation metadata application profile uses learner profiles
to describe how a learning object meets accessibility checkpoints.

Jen

-----Original Message-----
From: Liddy Nevile [mailto:Liddy.Nevile@MOTILE.NET]
Sent: Saturday, 14 September 2002 8:25 AM
To: DC-ACCESSIBILITY@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: DC2002 in Florence in October


Hello.

At the forthcoming DC2002 meeting in Florence, we are hoping to shape
some proposals for a DC-accessibility element. This online Interest
Group has not engaged in a lot of discussion but I believe there is
nevertheless significant interest in an element that will convey
important accessibility information. Am I right?

There is work on-going to find a suitable way to represent the
accessibility of a resource or service and also to represent
conformance to accessibility standards. As the standards are
developing, particularly because their use has now revealed
interesting data about how they can affect the implementation of
accessibility, the ideas have been changing. But the technologies
have been developing as well, as many of the tools required for
increasing accessibility are emerging.

The issues that need to be dealt with include:
* what should be available about the accessibility of a resource or service
* how should this information be represented, encoded
* where should this information be made available
* who should be responsible for providing this information

Work has been on-going on how to categorise the needs of users,
whether these needs are the result of disabilities or circumstances.
The IMS Global Project is close to releasing its LIP for people with
disabilities - Learner Information Profile This profile is based on
extensive work done in Canada and at the UK Open University. It helps
organise the information that is necessary to cater for all sorts of
access devices that might be in use. It follows a model that has been
adopted in the UK where the Open University can have a profile of its
enrolled students but not all users want others to control or have
access to their profiles.

There are still outstanding issues such as:
* where and how should such a profile be used. There are different
answers depending upon the context, it seems.
* how should such a profile be encoded so that it can be used for all
relevant purposes, including discovery and content transformation.
* how does such a profile relate to the profile of a resource or
service being sought by a user.

W3C Accessibility Working Group members are participating in the
DC2002 Accessibility sessions in order to support the dialogue
between DCMI and W3C Accessibility with respect to the proposed DC
element.

Please indicate if you are able to attend these sessions or
contribute to the discussion by sending your thoughts to this list in
the next few weeks.

Liddy

Received on Thursday, 19 September 2002 15:00:53 UTC