DCMI Accessibility Wiki

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Quick introduction

Dublin Core metadata is designed to be easy-to-use and ubiquitous. A single DC term should convey important information that can be complemented by other metadata where suitable. For people with disabilities who use assistive technologies, very detailed metadata about their needs and the characteristics of a resource may be necessary if they are to have good access to information.

The single term 'accessibility' has been designed to perform the duties of a DC term for access: it warns users with limitations on their access facilities of potential problems with a resource. AccessForAll descriptions (see below) make a much greater difference and are, of course, recommended. A resource may be inaccessible to a user as it is first published, but subsequently augmented by an accessible alternative, such as a description of an image. In this case, the use of the DC accessibility term supports the addition of another term, such as has-version or has-alternative, that points to the new resource that may be useful in the circumstances.

AccessForAll is a new strategy for matching resources to the needs and preferences of individual users, especially, but not exclusively, for those with permanent disabilities. AccessForAll is a general accessibility strategy and the task for the DC community is to develop application profiles so AccessForAll can be realised across all domains in an interoperable way. The original AccessForAll work is the work of the ATRC at the University of Toronto, who have given free access to their work, and is supported by work in other fora in collaboration with the ATRC. The first version was made by IMS GLC for education, and is currently being updated to match the ISO/IEC version.

ISO JTC1 has adopted AccessForAll and the first three parts of the standard are completed. These include an introductory Part 1; Part 2 that describes how to write descriptions of user need and preferences for digital resources and Part 3 describes how to write resource descriptions for matching them to the needs and preferences; currently Part 4 & 5 (non-digital resources), Parts 6 & 7 (events and places), and Part 8 (languages) are in preparation. The AccessForAll approach to accessibility has been implemented in several places, including at the University of Toronto (TILE - http://www.barrierfree.ca/tile/) and in the learning management product of Angel Learning (http://www.angellearning.com/products/lms/accessibility/default.html)

Potential use of DC AccessForAll metadata

Quick Links

Outstanding Tasks

Technical

  1. finalise full AccessForAll terminology

  2. register AccessForAll schema with vocabularies for terms

  3. develop AccessForAll descriptions for user's needs and preferences

  4. provide cross-walks?

Practical

  1. provide guidelines for AccessForAll implementation

  2. develop some 'very good' examples

Draft of terminology (in SKOS) as SkosTerminology

BetaVersion of AfA accessibility profile

Recommendation by DCMI Usage Board work (in progress)

Cancore work - developing guidelines for using Access For All (in IEEE LOM)

WCAG 2.0 amendments for metadata - LN

WCAG-metadata-proposal-LN.html

Issues for Discussion on this Wiki

If you have looked at the DC Accessibility Community homepage http://dublincore.org/groups/access, you will have seen that there is a list of work items and some issues for discussion. This Wiki is here to solicit constructive comment on the issues.

If you are interested in tracking discussion on any issues, you need to register and then subscribe to the page. This means you will get notification of changes made to that page. Your name and address will not be given to anyone or used for any other purposes.

Archived pages

Discussion pages no longer active:

DC Accessibility Wiki

A WikiWikiWeb is a collaborative hypertext environment, with an emphasis on easy access to and modification of information. This wiki can also link to InterWiki space.

You can edit any page by pressing the link at the bottom of the page. Capitalized words joined together form a WikiName, which hyperlinks to another page. The highlighted title searches for all pages that link to the current page. Pages which do not yet exist are linked with a question mark: just follow the link and you can add a definition.

Rather than 'edit' text, please just add comments starting with your name so we know from whom they came, e.g. Liddy Nevile: Accessibility should be redefined as .....

To get an overview of this site and what it contains, see the SiteNavigation page.

To learn more about what a WikiWikiWeb is, read about WhyWikiWorks and the WikiNature. Also, consult the WikiWikiWebFaq.

Interesting starting points:

CategoryHomepage CategoryHomepage