Request for feedbacks on SVG Accessibility, linearization, RDF, etc...

Dear all,

I spent my last week or so picking up the work some people at W3C did on 
accessibility of SVG. Unfortunately, simply due to resource problems, there 
was no follow up on these for a while, in spite of the fact that SVG is 
becoming both closer to rec and more widespread in practice.

As a short summary: an RDF vocabulary is to be developed to describe the 
content of an SVG image. This RDF description could be part of the SVG file 
itself and specialized readers can use those and some of the human 
annotation of the SVG content itself to generate a textual representation 
of the image. The methodology itself has been experimented with a while ago 
through the SVG linearization work (http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/ASVG/) but, as 
I said, there was no continuation of it since. This is where I picked up 
the issue again.

What I have done until now is at: http://www.w3.org/2001/svgRdf/ I would 
really appreciate to receive comments on these, which would help us in 
moving towards a more mature version!

One more remark: this may not be the only way to help the accessibility 
issue in SVG. One exciting, but very research-hungry line might be to 
consider a specialized graphics renderer for SVG to produce Braile output, 
for example. I know that some work have been done on Braile rendering 
before but it is still a relatively isolated line of work, but it might be 
an exciting line of work!

Ivan


Ivan Herman

Head of Offices, World Wide Web Consortium
C/o W3C Dutch Office hosted at CWI,  Kruislaan 413, 1098 SJ Amsterdam
tel:           +31-20-5924163
fax:          +31-20-5924312
mobile:     +31-62-8881369 (does not work when I am in the US)
email:       ivan@w3.org

Received on Monday, 2 July 2001 03:37:37 UTC