WebCGM and accessible graphics -- two ideas

Reference WebCGM 2.1
http://www.w3.org/TR/webcgm21/

Reference Hypertext CG ACTION-24
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/CoordGroup/track/actions/24

Back in September I blurted out two thoughts about WebCGM
and accessible graphics, in a cloud of purple smoke.

Lofton asked me to spell them out in an email and HCG gave
me an action to do that.  Better late than never, here
they are.  Still just brainstorming notions.

1.  A question:  Would the XML Companion file either
accept SVG within it or contain enough information so that with
the XML Companion file included, WebCGM files could
deliver the same access functionality of the image+SVG
diagrams that John Gardner and Vlad Bulatov have worked
with?

See, for example,
http://www.svgopen.org/2004/papers/SVGOpen2004MakingGraphicsAccessible/

2.  A remark:  One of the problems with leveraging SVG
to get accessible diagrams is that the SVG that actually
gets written to most SVG files in the wild is not
'semantic' or 'ontological' but rather just a collection
of directives to lay ink on the canvas.  A heap of
scribbles.  No better than
a bitmap in terms of still requiring a lot of human effort
to build a graph catalog of articulable objects and relationships
in the scene.

Given that CGM is a native output of
CAD systems that maintain something of an ontological
view of the subject matter, perhaps the corpus of CGM
diagrams in the wild would prove more fertile ore for conversion to
accessible form than the corpus of SVG in the wild.

Those were the two thoughts.

Al

Received on Friday, 7 November 2008 15:55:56 UTC