Outreach update and suggestion for new document

First the outreach update, and then I explain why I think we need a
document about the Semantic Web.

On 4 August I gave a talk on the "Semantic Web and Accessibility" during a
course in the summer school of the University of Cádiz, Spain. Other
taking part in the three day course were Enrique Varela (ONCE Foundation),
Alejandro Rodríguez Ascaso (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), Lourdes
González (ONCE Foundation), Javier Romañach, Carlos Egea, Lucas Bride.

A similar summer school course in El Escorial (near Madrid) for foreign
exchange students was featured (if only for a minute or so) with an
interview on regional TV.

Although my talk only lasted two hours, the preparation has been arduous
to say the least. Although I read three books on the Semantic Web, none of
them mention accessibility. There is an RDF Techniques for WCAG document,
but I had to do an XSL transformation in order to read the latest draft
and its very patchy. Other people (in particular Charles MCathieNevile and
Lisa Seeman) have talks online at W3C but I found them of very little use
as a source of information. RDF Primer is too long for accessibility
people new to the subject. In short there's a big gap in the information
available.

The main areas I covered were:

* What the SW is.
* Quick intro to RDF.
* Two vocabularies not directly related to 
  accessibility: 
  - DC
  - FOAF (and mixing DC in FOAF).
* EARL.
* Resource and learner profiles (IMS Global).
* Transformations based on RDF data (UBAccess).

My presentation is online (in Spanish) at:
http://www.infoescena.es/achuter/acceso/charlas/200408_sanroque/

The reason for my explaining all this is that it seems to me there is a
need for an easy to read education and outreach document giving an
overview of all this activity:

* The different ways SW technologies can 
  improve accessibility

* That some don't really fit in with the 
  design-for-all model of WCAG.

* How the different avenues of development 
  related to each other.

* What accessibility people should do now and 
  what they can expect to happen in the near 
  future.

There's nothing available that does this in one document or in any.

best regards,

Alan Chuter
achuter@teleservicios.com

Received on Friday, 6 August 2004 06:02:21 UTC