Re: Annotea Features and EARL

At 11:44 AM 4/9/2001 -0400, Leonard R. Kasday wrote:
>As some of you know, we in the Web Accessibility Initiatiatve Evaluation 
>and Repair (ER) Group have been working on a language, EARL [1] that 
>describes accessibility of web sites to people with disabilities.  The 
>best way to implement EARL may well be as an application of 
>Annotea.  Would you tell us your thoughts on the following 
>features?  (rather than cross posting, I figure it's best to keep them on 
>the Annotea list.  I'll put a pointer to this discussion on the ER list),
>
>
>1. How does or will Annotea deal with documents that change?  For example, 
>if a part of a document changes, comments regarding other parts of the 
>document may still be valid, and we'd want those comments to stay useful.

The Xpointer uses the nearest id's whenever it can find them. So if the 
document contains them e.g. for titles, it is quite possible that many 
comments stay valid even after the document has changed.

For documents that don't have id's and the beginning changes it is possible 
that annotations become orphaned. Orphaned annotations can still be seen at 
the beginning of the document and they can be reattached.

Also some annotations can be in a wrong place. We have been thinking about 
ways to know that the document has changed after the annotation was made to 
warn people about that, but have not implemented anything yet. One simple 
thing could be to store also some textual context that can be compared with 
the annotated context.

If we have a document that we cannot write to or control it's change we 
will have this problem regardless of annotations.

If we can write to the document, it is good to add enough id's. Of course 
the info can be also added to the document but then it is more difficult to 
look that without the annotations.

If we have a group we can control this with a social process e.g. we don't 
touch the old version, that is annotated but create a new corrected version 
based on that. Then there could be some easy ways of moving annotations 
between documents too.



>2. Can there be annotation of annotations?

We are just implementing that. We are adding also discussion list type 
replies. We will be very interested in getting feedback about these 
features and if you need both or only one of them.


>3. Will there be structured annotations?  In other words, in addition to 
>free form comments, comments that involve new machine readable statements.

The annotation can be structured already. It is now an XHTML document. 
Adding some specific RDF is more a user interface question than anything 
else. I mean how to make it easy for users who don't know RDF to add some 
evaluations.


>4. Accessibility of Amaya to people with disabilities is improving but 
>there still seem to be some remaining problems, like need to use a 
>mouse.  Will annotea be accessible to people with disabilities, per the 
>wai user agent guidelines [2]

Please send amaya team suggestions of how to improve the accessibility of 
Amaya. I cannot talk behalf of them but I'm sure they are interested.

We do aim that annotations are accessible and the first thing is to learn 
about the problems. Charles has promised to help also.

Marja

>Len
>
>[1] http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/#earl
>
>[2] http://www.w3.org/WAI/UA/
>--
>Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
>Institute on Disabilities/UAP and Dept. of Electrical Engineering at 
>Temple University
>(215) 204-2247 (voice)                 (800) 750-7428 (TTY)
>http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday         mailto:kasday@acm.org
>
>Chair, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Evaluation and Repair Tools Group
>http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/
>
>The WAVE web page accessibility evaluation assistant: 
>http://www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/piat/wave/

Received on Tuesday, 10 April 2001 09:46:30 UTC