DCMI Accessibility Special Interest Group

Row title	Details
Title:	DCMI Accessibility Special Interest Group
Chair:	Liddy Nevile, Liddy.Nevile@motile.net
Status:	This special interest group is currently active.
Established:	2001-10-25
Charter: (Draft)	To provide a forum to: * to consider the role of advice to DCMI about the accessibility of its products - website, tools and recommendations - and report on a strategy for ensuring that DC recommendatiojs and information are accessible in the future * to determine the relationship between accessibility (evaluation and repair) descriptions and DC descriptions? - and report on an appropriate way to represent accessibility information in DC * To promote the use of Dublin Core in identifying accessible resources as part of resource discovery - and conduct a half day workshop at WWW2002 in conjunction with other accessibility promotion groups.

Row title

Details

Title:

Chair:

Liddy Nevile, Liddy.Nevile@motile.net

Status:

This special interest group is currently active.

Established:

2001-10-25

Charter:
(Draft)

To provide a forum to:

* to consider the role of advice to DCMI about the accessibility of its products - website, tools and recommendations - and report on a strategy for ensuring that DC recommendatiojs and information are accessible in the future
* to determine the relationship between accessibility (evaluation and repair) descriptions and DC descriptions? - and report on an appropriate way to represent accessibility information in DC
* To promote the use of Dublin Core in identifying accessible resources as part of resource discovery - and conduct a half day workshop at WWW2002 in conjunction with other accessibility promotion groups.

Open Issues [top]

A preliminary set of issues have been developed. more are invited.

Is accessibility a resource discovery issue?

What is the relationship between accessibility (W3C's ERL?) descriptions and DC descriptions?

Is it sensible to embed one in the other?

Could one provide, as part of DC RELATION, information about the relationship between equivalent resources?

Should ERL schemata be recommended?

Information that may be of use in the discovery process

Resource Description

We want to convey a statement that there are appropriate multiple versions of content, within the same resource, so that everyone who has the resource will have access to a suitable transformation of it.

Equivalence - a special notion

Accessibility communities consider that some content can be available in alternative formats but some is more than this, it is equivalent, i.e. for some users the alternative will be not merely interpretation of the original but suitable to be used instead and simultaneously - see definitions at http://www.w3c.org/WAI

What DC elements are relevant

Preliminary discussion points to:

RIGHTS - access rightsbut is it the right sort of access?

TYPE - not useful here

RELATION - is format of (expects changes in format but not in content) and is version of (expects changes in content)

FORMAT - used to convey mime type, size, and could be relevant t accessibility.

Does accessibility need a new element ?

only if essential

is it proposed here only for political reasons? should this be tolerated?

or is there a serious case because the information doesn't dumb-down to readable form (Note: an associated text string could be very long), and

accessibility metadata is already able to be used to drive user access applications and needs to be in a special place?

In general,

gateways need to be accessible and

they can expose accessibility or otherwise of the resources they point to, and

the utility of gateways will improve if they carry accessibility information.

Forums [top]

Decisions are made by obtaining a consensus from a broad range of individuals and organizations. Listed here are some of the open fora where discussions take place:

Special Interest Group mailing list: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/dc-accessibility.html

There have been several activities of relevance to this Interest Group. (If others know of relevant activities, please let us know!)

Original meeting of interested members at DC 2001, Tokyo, October 2001.
Meeting of W3C WAI Interest Group and IMS Accessibility Working Group, Melbourne, November 2001.
Meeting of W3C Authoring Tools WG and IMS Accessibility WG associated with W3C Technical Plenary, Nice, February 2002.
Meeting at WWW 2002 Accessibility Workshop, Waikiki, May 2002.
EARL meeting in Bristol, June 24-26, 2002. Meeting Report.

and coming up:

Workshop (?) at DC 2002 Conference, Florence, October 2002.

Background [top]

Meeting of interested members at DC 2001, Tokyo, October 2001

Information on discussions and decisions that were used to support the creation of this special interest group.

Members of the Dublin Core Community who met in Tokyo at DC2001 Workshop considered the need for DCMI to demonstrate its concern for accessibility of web content by exemplifying good accessibility practices and providing a context for others who also take time to make their content accessible. The following image shows the process whereby a web resource can be tested for accessibility, and how ERL (the W3C Evaluation and Repair Language) might be used to capture the semantics of such a report.

slide showing process of evaluating a web page

History [top]

Date constituted: 2001-10-25, At the 9th Dublin Core Workshop in Tokyo a small group met to consider interest in forming a special interest group relating to issues concerning web content accessibility.

Related Work [top]

Links to groups, reports, software, projects, etc. that would be of interest to the participants of this special interest group.

W3C/WAI: http://www.w3c.org/WAI/, developing accessibility standards, tests, and ERL, etc.

IEEE/LOM (IMS: http://www.imsproject.org/), working on metadata about resources and learners and accessibility

NCAM: http://ncam.wgbh.org/, accessibility of all media.

Resources [top]

Information, standards and reports that were used to support the decisions and discussions in this special interest group.