Welcome and work plan

Hi folks,

 

On behalf of all the chairs, I'm writing to introduce the work for this
Community Group.

 

As you may or may not be aware, this group represents a continuation of the
project[1] that was initiated by Benetech in 2013 to bring metadata for
discovering the accessible properties of resources to the Web through
schema.org. The original properties we developed were based on the Access
for All metadata from IMS Global, but we subsequently added some unique
properties of our own.

 

When that project wrapped up, we were using the Web Schemas wiki[2] to
maintain the vocabulary of terms. Although that wiki page remains the
current authority for the vocabulary, it is no longer actively maintained.
It's taken us a little while to find a formal way to reform the work we
began, but this W3C Community Group will now be the official maintenance
group for those vocabularies. This is in keeping with how other groups are
maintaining their properties for schema.org.

 

The first order of business we need to deal with is republishing the
vocabulary in the wiki as a Community Group document. Our intention is to
publish the vocabulary out of the Community Group's GitHub repository,[3] as
this will allow us to quickly address issues as they arise. The current
editor's draft[4] represents a straight-forward port of the old wiki. Some
missing definitions were added to flesh out the document, but otherwise the
terms and definitions are unchanged. By publishing, we want to get a stake
in the ground before beginning to tackle the tracker issues. This will also
allow us to formally retire the old wiki without delay, for example. The
published document will be at a W3C URL[5] that will redirect back to a
static version of the document in the GitHub repository.

 

Please feel free to respond to this email if you have any concerns with
publishing. Expressions of support are also welcome. If no objections are
received by end of day Thursday, November 4, we will publish the vocabulary
(most likely on Friday if the URL setup goes smoothly, but definitely by
early next week).

 

Once we have a published document, we can begin to work at the issues in the
tracker. We will be using GitHub to resolve issues as much as possible as it
provides an open and easily discovered record of our discussions and
decisions. We are not planning to hold regular teleconferences at this time
but may schedule some if problems arise that we cannot solve by tracker
alone.

 

We will try to republish the vocabulary with each issue we resolve.

 

I hope this introduction has been helpful, and please also review the readme
on the GitHub repository[6] and the charter document[7] for more detailed
information.

 

[1] http://www.a11ymetadata.org/

[2] https://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/Accessibility

[3] https://github.com/w3c/a11y-discov-vocab

[4] https://w3c.github.io/a11y-discov-vocab/

[5] https://www.w3.org/community/a11y-discov-vocab/latest/

[6] https://github.com/w3c/a11y-discov-vocab/blob/main/README.md

[7] https://github.com/w3c/a11y-discov-vocab/wiki/Community-Group-Charter

 

Regards,

 

Matt Garrish

Madeleine Rothberg

Charles Lapierre