(note that I am not a member of the EO working group, but I do read
the archive from time to time).


Some answers to Karl's questions - of course these are all just my
personal opinion:


On Friday, Oct 3, 2003, at 13:14 US/Pacific, Karl Hebenstreit, Jr.
wrote:


<excerpt><color><param>0000,0000,0000</param>1.  What is the status of
XML Accessibility Guidelines? 
</color><underline><color><param>0000,6666,0000</param><bigger><bigger>XAG1.0
-- W3C Working Draft 3 October 2002

</bigger></bigger></color></underline></excerpt>

I'm the currently active editor of it, but the working group is out of
charter so cannot publish new updates. I am assuming and hoping that
the new charter will include working on XAG but it apparently hasn't
been decided yet. 


As far as I can tell there is not much likelihood of significant work
on the guidelines until the group is rechartered - I am not working on
them until the status is clarified, but the work that I am doing
elsewhere does include stuff that will provide techniques if the work
does re-start. There are also pieces being implemented "in the wild".


<excerpt><color><param>0000,0000,0000</param>2.  Do the latest
activities in XML, especially web services, impact web accessibility? 
Is there a concise overview of how XML and Web Services help
accessibility?

</color></excerpt>

I don't know of one, but there are certainly areas in which
semantically well-described Web Services could be very useful.
(Relying on a well-known location or a plain text description of a
service can be useful too, but only when people find a particular
service and tell others about it).


Work done by groups like UBAccess and the (now abandoned) transcoding
work at IBM provide some ideas of Web Services that could be useful.
There is a specific area of work mostly within the Semantic Web
development community on image annotation that could be suitable for
further leveraging via Web Services.


XML and Web Services are more or less separate. XML provides some
possibilities in the form of enabling new, richer document formats to
be created with better accessibility support (although that isn't
guaranteed, hence the XAG work). Web Services essentially standardises
the things that used to be done through CGI-bin interfaces and other
machine-to-machine interactions via the internet. 


So they are both more powerful tools than what they replace -
respectively SGML, which was complex, didn't include standardised
support for hyperlinking, and had a very semantically poor way of
defining languages through a DTD, and an unspecified collection of
ways to interact via the Internet, including with websites.


<excerpt><color><param>0000,0000,0000</param>I'm glad to see a more
comprehensive approach to learning enviornments being taken --
learning styles, collaborative learning environments, and experiential
learning are all important aspects of truly addressing needs in this
area.   This comprehensiveness is meant to be implied by the use of
"adequately" in the third question:


3.  Regarding Knowledge Repositories, has anyone been evaluating
whether the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) standard
is <italic>adequately</italic> addressing accessibility requirements
(at least it is stated in their intentions)?  

</color></excerpt>

This was discussed in the context of the Dublin Core Accessibility
special interest group at the Dublin Core 2003 conference in Seattle
last week. I don't know if the answer to your question is yes, but
there are good signs that the issue is recognised and treated
seriously.


--

Charles McCathieNevile                          Fundación Sidar

charles@sidar.org                                http://www.sidar.org