Re: DC2002 and Accessibility Metadata

> important that the metadata proposed for accessibility contains the 
> identity of the person (or agent) asserting the level of 
> accessibility or accessibility standards compliance of the resource. 

This sounds like PICS, but you haven't mentioned PICS.  PICS is actually
a good example of how general purpose solutions are only used for one
thing, and how self certification becomes the norm.

PICS allows one to rate the site in arbitrary dimensions, but in practice
it is only used to rate on the factors generally used in deciding film
classifications, albeit with more than one dimension.

Even as implemented, PICS nominally has third party rating services
(one can become ones own rating service, at least in theory), but in
practice only the ones that involve self certification are ever used,
and my impression (but not on a very scientific sample) is that people
with sites not intended to offend will tend to give themselves a perfect
bill of health without thinking whether that is really true - how many
films do you see with a rating implying no cautions at all for children
(U in the UK rating system), but there are a lot of sites claiming this.

Note also that PICS became supported in browsers because of reject
conditions, not accept conditions.

Received on Sunday, 15 September 2002 05:40:59 UTC