We want accessMode and mediaFeature functions Re: [a11y-metadata-project] Schema.org accessibility proposal Review...

On Wed, 11 Sep 2013 18:43:06 +0400, Gerardo Capiel <gerardoc@benetech.org>  
wrote:

> Common use cases we have not really discussed much are based on what  
> happens in integrated classrooms where teachers are trying to serve both  
> students with no disabilities and student(s) with different  
> disabilities.  Below are some use cases based on my experiences with  
> users of our Bookshare web library and it's related applications:

[snipped some really good use cases]

> Some of these use cases indicate a need for the user to know about the  
> combination of access modes the resource uses and what adaptations exist  
> within the resource to support the assistive technology used by the end  
> user.  I believe that merging accessMode and mediaFeature into one  
> property makes it harder for users to make those determinations  
> themselves.

Yeah. I totally agree.

My basic thinking is in part conditioned by how I present this to  
engineers in Yandex, and in part by what I heard, which included several  
times that "accessMode isn't really that helpful and we rely on  
mediaFeature and a set of complex algorithms for matching".

As I see things right now, mediaFeature seems really important as a way to  
rank results for things that can be useful. I see accessMode as a quick  
way of removing things that the user simply won't want from that sorting  
process.

The idea is that if we have 200 resources, and 120 are unable to meet the  
user's need, we save a LOT of processing by eliminating them quickly. Then  
we run the more complex ranking algorithms on the smaller set of things  
that, in principle, *could* meet the user's *needs* - but not all will be  
equally preferred.

One way I am thinking is that I want to use accessMode as a shortcut to  
make it cheaper to do more careful checking of mediaFeatures, so users get  
an exact match.

I'll keep the use cases Gerardo posted, because they are along the lines I  
have been trying to build up. I think we actually need to make a lot of  
these, to work through the issues of how we best satisfy them.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex
       chaals@yandex-team.ru         Find more at http://yandex.com

Received on Wednesday, 11 September 2013 20:05:56 UTC