Re: [EXTERNAL] Natural language interfaces and conversational agents

Hi Jason and all,

White, Jason J wrote on 05/03/2021 13:45:
> # Focus our work on the accessibility of the natural language 
> interaction itself. As far as I know, no one has documented the 
> accessibility requirements for it elsewhere.
> # Refer to other guidance (WCAG, XAUR, RAUR, etc.) for the accessibility 
> of other aspects of the user interface.
> # Note that natural language interaction can occur as part of a larger 
> interface and that the whole interface needs to be accessible.

+1 from me, with qualifying comments to signal to you all my (ever) 
shifting perspective on this. As I commented in a private mail to Jason, 
the situation we are in regarding scope, and various challenges can be 
broadly broken into:

1) The I/O aspect
2) The service (or agent) behind it

There are also options on these approaches/perspectives, on these 
aspects which are 'narrow' - focusing initially on Speech/Voice User 
Interfaces only or much broader. My two cents are that starting from the 
narrow perspective would give us a basis to add other modalities later 
on, but there is push back on that, which I also appreciate and 
understand. If we were to then take the broader approach and try to 
widen the scope we can get into very muddy and indistinct water super 
quickly. For the broader scope approach my current thinking is that we 
may avoid confusion, mixing streams etc if we took up the idea of 
'Natural Language Interface Accessibility User Requirements'. Thinking 
of Michael's sensible suggestion to have clearly defined terms etc this 
one if my fave, as it is already well defined, isn't just a marketing 
term etc. I prefer this to Smart Agents, which potentially pushes us 
into a sea of IoT and related services. One one level this may not be a 
bad thing, but we don't have infinite time either.

To me, if we want to realise a user requirements document with a broader 
scope - this really nicely covers the need for a multi-modal, device 
independent descriptor for the I/O side and we can add a strapline or 
<h2> etc saying ' Accessibility infrastructure and supporting services' 
or similar. I'm thinking this would allow us to cover VUIs, and other 
I/O modalities for other groups, the kind of things that Jason refers to 
as 'Conversational' etc as well as look at the services behind them.

This is really helpful Jason, and please lets continue to discuss these 
options, and indeed any more we may be missing. If we were to go down 
the broader road, then I find this terminology is the most suitable 
nomenclature that I've seen yet.

HTH

Josh
-- 
Emerging Web Technology Specialist/Accessibility (WAI/W3C)