Re: This is obvious to me. Is anybody doing work on it?

Actually the work is being done at W3C on a thing called CC/PP - Composite
Capabilities / Preferences Profile. For more information look at the website
of the group making it: http://www.w3.org/Mobile/CCPP/ (although I don't know
how up to date that is - sigh)

It is a mechanism for sending along complex information about what things the
user can and can't deal with - for example how big a window the user can or
wnats to open, what colour profiles are available for them, what formats can
be handled (e.g. text, no image formats, java, ...)

It has some neat features for putting the information in at different points
on the transmission line - so an assistive technology could add some info,
and a proxy can work out how to deal with some info...

cheers

Chaals

On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Nick Kew wrote:


  On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Steve Carter wrote:

  > When I started getting into web accessibility it immediately occurred to me how useful it would be for there to be some standard strings that could be inserted in the user-agent-string so for example instead of
  >
  > Mozilla/4.04 (Win95; I)
  >
  > you would have
  >
  > Mozilla/4.04 (Win95; I; ; IMP-CONT IMP-AUD)

  That would be completely counterproductive.  User-Agent strings have been
  widely abused since at least Netscape 0.9, and commonly faked even before
  Microsoft arrived on the scene masquerading as Netscape.

  > and the person building the web application could easily code in quick work arounds for any tricky accessibilty cases.  A quick brainstorm suggests
  >
  > IMP-CONT - the user requests high contrast output
  > IMP-COLx - the user is colourblind (x denotes the type of impairment)
  > IMP-AUD - the user cannot reliably use auditory senses so please use visual
  > IMP-VIS - the user is not able to perceive visual output

  What you are describing is an application of HTTP Content Negotiation to
  address accessibility.  This would be an appropriatesubject for an Accept:
  header.  The HTTP working group would presumably be the forum to discuss it.



-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI    fax: +1 617 258 5999
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(or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)

Received on Monday, 28 January 2002 15:58:41 UTC