RE: Web Of Things Technical Accessibility Issues.

I fully concur with Michael’s observations. Moreover, it seems to me that, in general (and I can’t think of any obvious exceptions), ensuring that the data can be consumed by applications which need to perform computations on them should be sufficient also to enable a highly accessible user interface to be constructed in an application making use of that information.

On the other hand, this doesn’t guarantee that one is collecting and making available what is most needed by applications designed to overcoming access barriers (e.g., in the environment or otherwise). Thus the problems appear to be more closely related to what information is collected rather than to how it’s represented.


From: Michael Cooper <cooper@w3.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2019 10:24 AM
To: Joshue O Connor <joconnor@w3.org>; White, Jason J <jjwhite@ets.org>; RQTF <public-rqtf@w3.org>
Cc: public-apa@w3.org; group-apa-chairs@w3.org; Judy Brewer <jbrewer@w3.org>; Shadi Abou-Zahra <shadi@w3.org>; WAI Team <w3t-wai@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Web Of Things Technical Accessibility Issues.

On 18/06/2019 5:31 a.m., Joshue O Connor wrote:
One of the questions I've got is how can we insure that thing meta data - when needed, translates in a way that accessibility APIs can consume?  Do we need abstractions between RDF/JSON-LD and an accessibility API? Will it all be just parsed as text? Does this data need a semantics to present to a user (which I think will be the case)?

The discussion in this thread is interesting and has some good thoughts. On the one above, though, I caution about presuming accessibility APIs are necessarily part of the solution for web of things accessibility. Accessibility APIs weren't designed for that, and I think sooner or later that approach to accessibility will have a natural sunset. It's useful to think of where web of things might interface with accessibility APIs, and in some cases where specific enhancements to accessibility APIs might be important. But we should also think of other ways web of things can make themselves accessible. Rich enough "thing descriptions" so a user agent can construct an accessible experience without a priori knowledge, self-describing metadata ontologies that allow automated processing without reference to restricted vocabularies... Some of those things have been dreams of the metadata community for a long time, but the present state of technology and the novel use cases of web of things might mean those things are realistic now, and a potentially important part of the accessibility puzzle.

Michael

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