Re: History of EARL/EDL/ADL

useful survey :)

my interest in this area came out of work we did in the desire project,
97/98ish. Not written up too well, but there's a bit on WAI stuff in one
of the reports we wrote:

http://www.desire.org/html/research/deliverables/D3.1/

relevantest bit excerpted below...

Dan

http://www.desire.org/html/research/deliverables/D3.1/qualratings/doc0007.htm

4.5
[[
4.5 Vocabulary for Rating the Accessibility of Internet Resources
One application of a vocabulary may be to describe the 'form' properties
of a resource - these are the properties concerned with the presentation
and organisation of a resource and the interface through which it is
presented. The aspect of quality described by this vocabulary would be one
of accessibility and usability of the resource. The vocabulary would be
useful for describing and choosing the accessibility of resources for a
whole range of users including people with disabilities, users using new
page viewing technologies (mobile and voice), and electronic agents such
as indexing robots.
The DESIRE quality guidelines suggest a number of criteria concerned with
the form (presentation and organisation) of a resource. However these
guidelines have been superseded to some extent by the work of the W3C Web
Accessibility Initiative (WAI), who have been co-ordinating with many
organisations to develop a comprehensive and unified set of accessibility
guidelines. These could be employed to create a standard vocabulary for
the format of Internet resources. The working draft of the WAI
Accessibility Guidelines on Page Authoring provides a list of guidelines
that page authors should follow in order to make their pages more
accessible. Conformance to the WAI guidelines would imply that the
resource is accessible to the widest possible audience and also provide
opportunities for users to filter resources based on these properties e.g.
not to offer any resources that are not viewable by the user's access
mechanism.
To create machine-readable ratings for accessibility, each of the WAI
guidelines might be encoded as a formal classification scheme, or we might
have a more general yes/no category such as "meets most of the WAI
guidelines". In a usage context a personalised search environment which
knew something about the users information needs could prioritise search
results on the basis of (a) their preferences ("no shockwave", "only
highly usable sites", "sites that meet WAI-A.7 only" and (b)
classification of those resources by some agency, mechanical or human. The
text below is taken directly from the WAI Authoring Guidelines, some or
all of these guidelines could be used to generate accessibility ratings
for resources.
[...]
]]

Received on Friday, 15 February 2002 21:10:48 UTC