accessibility profiles

Hello.

Please excuse any duplication of this notice. Please feel free to send 
it on to people who may be interested.

I have posted info about the accessibility profiles work many times 
before. At last we have got to the stage where we have profiles for 
users, so they can specify their needs and preferences, and profiles 
for resources/services, so providers of those, or others who care, can 
describe their features in a way that will work for the users with 
needs.

We are now talking about accessibility as a lack of match between a 
user and what they want to access. Systems that deal with these matches 
will, in the future, look for a user profile and then discover 
resources etc that match the profile. When parts of the resource, say 
an image, are not going to be accessible to the user, the system will 
go off and look for an equivalent alternative, say a text description.

It should be noted that this metadata is not about compliance to the 
W3C guidelines, per se, but about making it possible to make resources 
accessible on all occasions, even where parts of them are not 
accessible.

Please visit the IMS website where all this is explained, and send us 
your comments on our draft profile for resources. The work is managed 
by IMS but applies in IMS cases, in DC cases, etc...i.e., we have done 
it so that all the main  metadata users can share the same profiles to 
increase the chance of interoperability. Currently we are working on 
Application profiles for LOM, DC etc. that will do this specific 
metadata binding but we have a general XSD (namespace) that all can 
refer to.

Liddy

Received on Thursday, 10 June 2004 06:00:32 UTC