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Contents of Thesis ack'ments - Introduction - Context - Accessibility - W3C/WAI - LitReview - Metadata - Accessibility Metadata - PNP - DRD - Matching - UI profiles - Interoperability - Framework - Implementation - Conclusion - References - Appendix 1 - Appendix 2 - Appendix 3 - Appendix 4 - Appendix 5 - Appendix 6 - Appendix 7
By July 2006, it was clear that the AccessForAll approach was being adopted in the educational domain (Appendix 4). By October 2007, there were 86 resources listed as relevant to AccessForAll and a glance through the list shows the dissemination of this idea throughout the academic world (Appendix 5). The Accessibility Guidelines that preceded the AfA work were read 176,505 times between Sept 2002 and June 2006 and in the same period the IMS AfA Specifications were downloaded 28,082 times. The United Kingdom Government had included the need for metadata in its standard for accessible documents in the UK (Appendix 6) and on October 16, 2007 the Australian Government Locator Standard Committee voted to include an AccessForAll metadata element for all accessible documents in Australia (AGLS minutes???). At the AGLS meeting, the National Library of Australia representative reported that the NLA is starting to write metadata for individual components such as images and songs. This is an important, although independent, action that will contribute towards implementation of AccessForAll. Finally, the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC35 is now developing a user profile for use with the universal resource console (ch ???).
In this chapter, ....
In Tokyo in October 2001, at the DC 2001 Conference, the author convinced a group of participants to set up a working group with the following charter:
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 (Nevile, 2002).
The original aim as stated was:
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 (Nevile, 2002).
In fact, this would be written slightly differently now - as the location of the alternatives need not be the same as that of the original and not everything would be 'transformed', but the sentiment was OK.
There was also reference to:
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 (Nevile, 2002).
This, and several other ideas were challenging for a community which at that time was used to thinking of a web page as a single entity, even if they recognised that is was a composition of parts, and anyway they were mainly concerned with discovery of the composite object, not the parts, and did not have thoughts about alternative composititons of pages.
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 (Nevile, 2001).
At WWW2002 in Hawaii (April 2002), the author convened a workshop on accessibility and in the notes for that, taken by Kelly Cahill, it was reported from the afternoon session devoted to accessibility metadata, that:
Metadata should not only to inform user if the website is accessible but also should be informative enough that user can find information they desire. Websites shouldn't shut out a disabled person just because it is not completely accessible (example: wheelchair and restaurant). Judy pointed to the misuse of PICS (the Platform for Internet selection) and how it had become a censorship tool. She commented that people with disabilities do not want to be told to what they can or cannot have access. They like to be able to decide whether or not to make the effort, depending upon personal choice. Liddy pointed out that PICS itself was not a censorship tool but an interesting application that made it possible for users to activate preferences from their own devices. Stu Weibel added that PICS was useful for people who wanted to make personal choices at the client end. Charles said it was important to realise that it was the use of PICS on proxies that amounted to externally imposed censorship, and that was what users did not like (Cahill, 2002).
At that workshop, Charles McCathieNevile introduced the use of EARL in this context, claiming it had some advantages that should be considered:
Why would you use EARL?
Integrating tools (using Bobby and other approved evaluation tools together)" (Cahill, 2002)
IMS started an accessibility working group to develop a set of guidelines for educators. This project, known as SALT, was undertaken in collaboration with CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media in Boston. The author participated in this work and the guidelines were published as the "IMS Guidelines for Developing Accessible Learning Applications" with editors Cathleen Barstow and Madeleine Rothberg of NCA (Barstow C & Rothberg, 2002)
The next project for IMS was to define a set of metadata elements for describing learner accessiblity needs and preferences to be known as the "IMS Learner Information Package Accessibility for LIP - Version 1 Final Specification" (Nevile et al, 2003). This work was done with as much exposure as possible to ensure that what was being developed would be suitable for use by a range of communities. Significantly, it included the DC Accessibility Working Group, the CEN-ISSS Learning Technologies Workshop, and others. A set of documents was published but they are now under review (see below). These documents were published in June 2003. The idea was that for the IMS community, the new profile could be used as an extension to the established IMS Learner Information Profile.
The corresponding work, for describing resources that would be used to match users' needs and preferences, was then the focus of IMS work. This work was more closely allied with work due to be done in the CEN/ISSS LTSC group and traditional work done by DCMI, in this case by the Accessibility Working Group. After some time, docuemnts were developed and published by IMS as the "IMS AccessForAll Meta-data Specification - Version 1 Final Specification" documents (Nevile et al, 2004).
The original work for the two matching profiles was undertaken by the ATRC at the University of Toronto. They developed an application called TILE (see below).
The process of development for AccLIP and AccMD was as open as was possible. A widely distributed invitation to participate in an international summit, posted prior to the January 2004 meeting in Switzerland, named as participants:
> IMS Accessibility Working Group (http://www.imsglobal.org/accessibility)
> CEN-ISSS Learning Technologies Workshop (WS-LT): Accessibility Properties for Learning Resources (APLR) (http://www.cen-aplr.org/)
> Dublin Core:Accessibility (http://dublincore.org/groups/access)
> W3C/WAI (http://www.w3.org/wai)
> EuroAccessibility (http://www.euroaccessibility.org/)
> SIDAR (http://www.sidar.org/)
> CanCore (http://www.cancore.ca/)
> EduSpecs (http://eduspecs.ic.gc.ca/)
> AGLS (http://www.naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/gov_online/agls/summary.html)
> British Standards Institute (http://edd2.bsi.org.uk/link.php/ist/43)
> National Center for Accessible Media (http://ncam.wgbh.org/) (Brookes, T, 2004)
although not all those parties were in fact active on the work. In fact, the following people participated on behalf of those organisations:
The ATRC developed a system known as 'The Inclusive Learning Exchange' initially as a prototype and then as the server for students at the University of Toronto. TILE is open source????
The author experimented with the idea of distributed metadata 'just for fun'. The result was surprising, and pleasing.
A page of the Australian Broadcasting Commission site offering video on command (ABC Video On Demand online at <http://www.abc.net.au/vod/news/>) was visited. This page had been casually recommended as a well-written resource. It was hoped that there might be sufficient information available from the resource for an alternative resource in a different mode to be found relatively easily using Google. On the day of testing (26/4/2006), the author took some words from the 'alt tag' for a video and submitting them to Google (and Flickr). This led to a blog (<http://biukili.blogspot.com/>) that provided text information about the topic – amazing and satisfying given that the first resource was only several hours old on the Web, as was the topic. Admittedly news might be a special case, but the exercise was gratifying. Google was used but not the special ‘similar resource' features. That too may have produced a text description of what was in the video.
In associated work attempting to explain why this approach will work, the author and colleagues have mapped Dublin Core and AccessForAll metadata to the FRBR model. They noted the distinction between metadata to identify the intellectual content of resources and that used to determine their presentation, control and content characteristics relevant to accessibility (as defined in the user's PNP). They were able to relate all the relevant attributes of potentially suitable resources using the hierarchy in the FRBR model but that when it comes to discovery of such a resource, we may need more than subject descriptions to find it. This means that descriptions of authors, publishers, etc may also be necessary.
Implementation of AfA is not yet simple. While there is a set of machine-readable resources to help those implementing it in the educational context where they use IEEE LOM metadata, this is not yet the case for DC metadata, expected to be a much larger implementation context. Nevertheless, the signs are very positive as shown by the emerging evidence of acceptance of the AccessForAll approach.
The set of POWDER use cases include the following:
2.1.6 Web Accessibility B (self labeling, content features, profile matching)
A report from Italy included the following:
This work presents components, which are embedded in an existing authoring/producing tool and automatically creates the IMS AccessForAll Metadata description of a LO, starting from the natural structure of multimedia contents.
and
Such a tool is now integrated in a complex process used inside the University of Bologna to create accessible LOs. Accessibility of e-learning materials produced has been widely tested by involving a group of people with disability in verifying on-line contents and services (Boni et al, 2006).
That tool and its use are described in more detail in "Automatically Producing Accessible Learning Objects" (Di Iorio et al, 2006). The author also reported the benefit of using good accessibility evaluation tools that can produce the necessary metadata (Nevile, 2004).
The IMS Tools Interoperability project is part of the Engage project at the University of Wisconson - The Engage program partners with UW Madison faculty and academic staff to apply innovative uses of technology for teaching and learning. In this project, UW-Madison, WebCT, Blackboard, Sun Microsystems, SAKAI, QuestionMark, and staff from Stanford, UC Berkeley, MIT, Indiana University, and the University of Michigan are all involved. A special server edition of ConceptTutor, and a Moodle LMS were proposed for 2005 Alt-i-lab [Alt-i-lab 2005] conference in Sheffield, England in June 2005.
The aim is:
To promote accessibility and to demonstrate the use of IMS ACCLIP and ACCMD standards for accessibility, we have modified Fedora to implement an RDF binding of ACCLIP and ACCMD. A student’s accessibility preferences are matched to the accessibility characteristics of the content at the time of the request. Thus, a visually impaired student will receive content tuned to her needs when she requests a ConceptTutor without having to know how to request the specially tuned content (Engage, 2007).
In "Beyond the LOM: A New Generation of Specifications," Michael J. Halm says:
The importance of the ACCLIP specification may not be immediately understood, but this specification provides enormous opportunities to customize and adapt the learning experience based on the users preference. This powerful capability now can be used for anyone, not just those with disabilities. These preferences will be stored in the Learner Information Package and could travel with the learner from one on-line environment to another. Since these preferences are created and maintained by the learner, this gives the individual the control to change the environment as needed. This also allows one to consider the learning style of the learner as part of the environment. Visual learner will be better able to set preferences that are unique to the type of way they learn. This preference can translate into the type of learning objects that are selected and deliver in the learning environment (Halm, 2003).
SAKAI is a university consortium effort ot develop a set of open source tools for tertiary education.
FLUID is a huge project in which the AccessForAll idea is being taken to the next logical step: while it is useful to be able to switch components, it is really necessary to also be able to switch user interface components, and that is what FLUID is about.
In late 2007, the WCAG Working Group is finalising Version 2.0 of WCAG. The last remaining problem is what to do about metadata. It has produced some interesting challenges. The AccessForAll position, put by the author to the WCAG WG, is that there should be metadata to describe the content of every resource, inclusing its accessibility characteristics, on every Web page that is considered accessible. The Chair of the WCAG WG, Gregg Vanderheyden, is interested because he sees that in the case where a page is accessible in the sense that it is conformant, someone who wants a version of the page that happens to suit them but is not fully conformant, might want to find that version. As Jutta Treviranus wrote, (24/10/2007 - email):
I think we are missing the point. An important consideration is that Metadata does not require and is not about conformance. It is about labelling and finding accessible resources. You need to think beyond a single site or a single page. If there are a number of resources and some are accessible to you and some are not, Metadata helps you to find the ones that are accessible to you or alternatively to gather the same information as the Web resource you want from a number of pieces that are accessible to you. So is WCAG only about access to a single site or about access to the Web? If it is about access to the Web then you need to think about systems and varied resources, some that are more accessible to a given user and some that are not.
Sadly, some think, the response to this was:
This is beyond the scope of WCAG 2.0. It sounds like a good candidate for the next version.
WCAG 2.0 is addressing the accessibility of Web pages, the unit of conformance. There are a number of other issues related to the larger view of the web that have also been deferred to future work. (Loretta, 24/10/2007 - email)
One major constraint for W3C's work is that it needs to result in technical specifications; nothing can be recommended that cannot be tested. Another constraint is that it must be possible in every case. Vanderheyden posed the problem of the resource that is to be published but, by law, cannot be altered any way in the process. An example is an historic digital image, that has value in being that image. The problem with that image would be that metadata could not be added to it and nor could even a link to metadata. Fortunately, on the day this problem was to be solved, another W3C WG released their first version of a solution. The Internet Content Ratings Association community want to be able to add metadata about resources that is very similar to the AfA metadata in type - they want to describe the relevant characteristics of resource content that leads to ratings for nudity, violence, etc. The W3C Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) Working Group [POWDER WG] developed POWDER to enable information to be conveyed via the http head of a resource and this is just what is needed for the Vanderheyden problem. The issue is what is to be conveyed, and the POWDER WG has now modified their examples to include two use cases that draw upon AfA metadata.
While the TILE model can be extended within a given context, it is probably not until it is working across vast numbers of resources and context that it will really start to pay off for the individuals. The issue is: if a component is not accessible, how can an alternative resource, or component or service be discovered on the Web, if there is such a thing?
There are at least three approaches being considered; FRBR descriptions, OpenURIs and POWDER.
The author asserts that if it is easier to find alternatives on the Web, and items of interest in one mode are also available in other modes because more items are available and they are discoverable, providing users with alternatives to inaccessible content will become more of a community activity and thus more successful. If this hypothesis is right, the burden on individual content developers can shift a little from the frustratingly unsuccessful one of requiring all content to be provided in universally accessible form, to a requirement to provide accessibility services.
In the rare case where a resouce for some reason cannot be associated with metadata, for example when it is a sppecial archive and by law cannot have any chancges, not even the addition of metadata, it may be possible to use the POWDER protocol and put metadata in the HTTP header.
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One possibility is to launch a query once, and to develop a service that can formulate a suitable OpenURL from a user's content query in combination with their needs and preferences profile. Wikipedia provides a useful explanation of OpenURI:
An OpenURL consists of a base URL, which addresses the user's institutional link-server, and a query-string, which contains contextual data, typically in the form of key-value pairs. The contextual data is most often bibliographic data, but in version 1.0 of OpenURL can also include information about the requester, the resource containing the hyperlink, the type of service required, and so forth. For example:
http://resolver.example.edu/cgi?genre=book&isbn=0836218310&title=The+Far+Side+Gallery+3
is a version 0.1 OpenURL describing a book. ...
The most common application of OpenURL is to provide appropriate copy resolution: an OpenURL link points to the copy of the resource most appropriate to the context of the request. If a different context is expressed in the query, a different copy ends up resolved to; but the change in context is predictable, and does not require the creator of the hyperlink to handcraft different URLs for different contexts. For instance, changing either the base URL or a requester parameter in the query string can mean that the OpenURL resolves to a copy of a resource in a different library. So the same OpenURL, contained for instance in an electronic journal, can be adjusted by either library to provide access to their own copy of the resource, without completely overwriting the journal's hyperlink. The journal provider in turn is no longer required to provide a different version of the journal, with different hyperlinks, for each subscribing library (Wikipedia, 2007).
In simple terms, an openURI contains a place for customisation information to be added by a server. It is not difficult to imagine a versio of OpenURI that adds information not about the particular location of a copy of a book that is in a number of places, but about an accessible alternative version of a content component.
There is a growing community who are publishing small objects on the Web and even offering some description of them. Social activities are then taking over and others are adding ‘tags' to those objects. As, in the end, such tags may be more plentiful than other metadata, we are interested in how this activity may serve to increase the effectiveness of our process.
Increasingly, images are ‘tagged' by either their creators or others. If an image is tagged, using such systems as Flickr (FLICKR online at <http://www.flickr.com/>), the tags could be used to discover a text resource that has the same intellectual content. We are aware that while it can be asserted with some confidence that tagging of images and the number of images on the Web is increasing, it is not yet clear if the same will be true for resources in other modalities. Although there is not an obvious rush to place text versions of sound files on the Web, there is a strong move towards more atomic resources and, in many cases, those are small ‘chunks' of text. The drive behind this move is the growing interest in RSS (Really Simple Syndication or RDF Site Summary) (RSS Specification online at <http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/spec>) feeds, and many people are responding to this use of personal ‘pull' technologies by publishing in ways that support RSS. There is, then, some hope that there will be small chunks of text that are tagged and may be useful as alternatives to images.
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How does one determine if the metadata framework proposed will in fact enable increased accessibility of the Web?
Perhaps the first thing is to determine a test: if 100 pages of content can be shown to be inaccessible to a significant number of people and then, given suitable metadata they can be rendered suitable, it would be a proof of concept. For this experiment, 100 pages of content containing geospatial information will be selected.
Pages for testing
The following pages were selected from the first 100 to appear when Google was asked to find Melbourne Victoria. Any pages that contained geospatial information were included in the list and all that contained no such information were rejected. The complete list is archived as it was on 7 January 2006.
from ...http://www.nla.gov.au/pathways/jnls/newsite/browse/geoghist.html#Geography%20and%20Mapping accessed 28/03/2006
Indexes and Databases - Geography and Mapping
