- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2002 21:10:47 -0500 (EST)
- To: "Sean B. Palmer" <sean@mysterylights.com>
- cc: <www-archive@w3.org>, <charles@w3.org>
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 However these guidelines have been superseded to some extent by the work of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), who have been co-ordinating with many organisations to develop a comprehensive and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