Chapter 12: Conclusion

Introduction

The Preamble (Chapter 1) defines accessibility as a successful matching of information and communications to a user's needs and preferences to enable the user to interact with and perceive the intellectual content of the information or communications. The Introduction (Chapter 2) says:

The first decade of international effort to make the Web accessible has not achieved its goal and a different approach is needed. In order to be more inclusive, the Web needs published resources to be described to enable their tailoring to the needs and preferences of individual users. Resources need to be continuously improvable according to a wide range of needs and preferences. Thus there is a need for management of resources that can be achieved with metadata. The specification of metadata to achieve such a goal is complex given the requirements, themselves not previously determined.

Metadata is a tool for supporting the management and descriptions of resources to achieve these ambitious goals. Designing the metadata specifications is a complex task as that task necessarily precedes its use and thus verification of its requirements.

The subsequent chapters report on:

• the last ten years' efforts to define disability and thus accessibility (Chapter 3);
• the development of universal accessibility techniques for making the content of the emerging Web accessible (Chapter 4);
• what success or otherwise has resulted from the universal accessibility approach and responses to this state (Chapter 5);
• an understanding and definiton of metadata and its potential role in a networked, digital world (Chapter 6);
• early investigations and efforts in the use and likely availability of metadata to support accessibility or resources (Chapter 7);
• a new use of metadata to describe individual user's needs and preferences with respect to resources in ways that are useful to people with special needs for effective perception of their content (Chapter 8);
• a more traditional use of metadata to describe resources in ways that are useful to people with special needs for effective perception of the intellectual content of the resource (Chapter 9);
• an extended use of metadata to provide a means of managing digital resource components for matching of compositions of those resources in ways that were effective for individual users (Chapter 10);
• the definition of effective interoperability and the need for technical interoperability of AccessForAll metadata if its implementation is to become a reality (Chapter 11), and then
• this conclusion.

Final discussion

In "Accessibility, usability and adaptability: responding to Dublin Core Profiles of Needs and Preferences", the authors assert:

.. the newly emerging IMS and Dublin Core adaptability and accessibility standards and the proposed profiles of needs and preferences (PNP) is set to have a profound impact on the way we view the creation of digital content as well as the way it is presented to us. (Green S, ???, p. 18)

This thesis has worked its way through a maze of issues to justify a simple contention stated at the beginning:

Considering the problems of accessibility, the context in which the problem occurs, and the available solutions, it has been necessary to define a more comprehensive framework in which the available parts can function, taking better advantage of the emerging technologies, without compromising either the interests of stakeholders or existing efforts, to achieve a better outcome for users and publishers.

The thesis has followed the structure proposed in the Figure ???:

Figure ???: Thesis structure

It has been shown that given the newer technologies and techniques, including what is known as Web 2.0 technologies and metadata, it is possible to be more comprehensive in the approach to accessibility without compromising hard-won efforts and that there is a receptive community that are willing to work with the new framework. The thesis is the first and only document to comprehensively explain this work and show its potential to justify the claims of Green et all and to support future work.

Future work

events and places, FLUID, distributed discovery, ..... further work includes work on how to discover the extra pieces - using FRBR??

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