AfA FAQ
What can I read now to get a sense of how AfA works?
In the short term, anyone who wants to understand how the standard works could refer to the overview document published by IMS. As the AfA standard was based on earlier IMS work, this document can provide the background and help with understanding of the standard. See http://www.imsglobal.org/accessibility/accmdv1p0/imsaccmd_oviewv1p0.html In particular, it may be useful to read starting at Section 2 of that document.
What should I do now?
If you are a resource publisher, you should label your resources! The most basic labeling is to say what access mode is required to access the intellectual content of the resources. This is necessary so that users can not just find out the format of the resource, and if they can access it. For example, when there is text in an image, it would be described as an image although the type might be text. To clarify what is available to a person with accessibility needs, information about the access mode is necessary. The choices are visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory and textual, auditory, braille, haptic, and hazard content. While the first four are easy, textual is used to mean not only that the resource uses text but that the text is transformable ie it can be used by a screen reader or converted to Braille. You know if the text is 'textual' by checking against the WCAG Guidelines.
How do I add AfA metadata to a Web resource?
If you want to add the metadata to the resource, complete and put the metadata in the head of the document. The metadata can be expressed in several forms. the simplest being as a meta tag in HTML and the most sophisticated being in RDF, also suitable for inclusion in the head of an HTML document.There is a vocabulary that catches what is of significance to most people with accessibility problems: they want to know if there is content they will not be able to access. For this reason, the vocabulary offers warnings about access limitations. The vocabulary set contains the following: auditoryOnly, visualOnly, tactileOnly, hapticOnly, brailleOnly, olfactoryOnly and hazard and allTextual
<link rel="schema.AfA" href="http://purl.org/afa/AfA.xml" /> <meta AfA:accessibility content="visualOnly"> <meta AfA:accessibility content="auditoryOnly">
which means that there is some content that needs to be heard and some that needs to be seen.
AfA User Guide
Contents
Overview of AfA What should I do now? Glossary References