Re: plain/simple/easy language variant subtag

 
"We don’t know how to do this today" ——   referred to our ability to write code that can understand the information on a web page (or any page), and then re-present it at any different understanding level so that it can be presented at an appropriate level for every particular individual.

That is what we don’t know how to do today.      And what I hope machines can do in the near future 
	(and what I fear that machines will be able to do in the near future - because that sounds like machine understanding of all text on the internet) 

gregg

----------------------------------
Gregg Vanderheiden
gregg@raisingthefloor.org




> On Sep 17, 2015, at 4:25 PM, Phill Jenkins <pjenkins@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> 
> > We don’t know how to do this today 
> 
> I think we do know how to do a lot of it today.  When I view the challenge or problem in a two or three dimensional matrix, there is a lot I see we can delivery, or at least work on today:   
> 
> 1. We have technologies that change the modality of the content from text to audio via TTS, voice recognition to auto create text captions, even experimental text to ASL avitars 
> 2. We have device capabilities and formats with smart phones, tablets, desktop, various size displays and output devices including Refreshable Braille Displays. 
> 3. We have experimental image recognition technologies and advanced OCR 
> 4. We have visual/text presentational transformational technologies: line spacing, word and character spacing, color and contrast, font style, etc. in platforms, browsers, and plug-in and cloud delivered AT. 
> 5. We have expermental summarization technologies 
> 6. We have emerging translation (e.g. German to English) technologies 
> 7. We have stable authoring/developer guidelines such as the 38 Success Criteria in  WCAG 2.0 Level A and AA. 
> 8. We have tablet based "AT like" unique solutions (apps) being delivered today to people with cognitive disabilities for things like rehab and job training. 
> 
> so, 
> a. If you are narrowly referringto the space of taking any block of random text from the web and converting it into various levels of simplier blocks of text, we do have experimental summarization technology, so we have at least one level of transformation.   
> b. We could invent a tag or attribute for marking up at least 6 levels of language comprehension if someone wanted to provide various level of the block of text by hand for further studies of effectiveness.   
> c. I don't think we are ready to propose any new "Success Criteria" that would apply to "all" content.  But perhaps there is room for a new Level AAA Success Criteria, but I've not thought that through yet.   
> 
> There is other related work in this space, so it would be good to connect and not duplicate our precious resources: 
>         Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility Task Force 
>                 http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/cognitive-a11y-tf/work-statement <http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/cognitive-a11y-tf/work-statement> 
>         Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities 
>                 http://www.colemaninstitute.org/ <http://www.colemaninstitute.org/> 
> 
> we = IBM Research, browsers, platforms, University research programs, Coleman Institute, Google, Apple, Microsoft, AT vendors, etc. etc. 
> 
> ____________________________________________
> Regards,
> Phill Jenkins, 
> IBM Accessibility