The workshop is a collection of people who want to make the (current) web accessible rather than a bunch of researchers trying to carve out a new research area. It feels more like a proto-working group discussion. (This is not necessarily bad, but should change the perspective with which the papers in the workshop proceedings should be viewed.) There are two things I want. The first is web pages that are accessible (which is what the workshop participants want). The second is to be able to incorporate the knowledge in the WCAG guidelines into (our) web page generation processes.
Morning keynote. Summary of Chieko Asakawa's work in the last 10 years. aDesigner - a disability simulator that helps Web designers ensure that their pages are accessible and usable by the visually impaired. The tool looks at such elements as the degree of color contrast on the page, the ability of users to change the font size, the appropriateness of alternate text for images, and the availability of links in the page to promote navigability. The tool also checks the pages's compliance with accessibility guidelines. The result of this analysis is a report listing the problems that would prevent accessibility and usability by visually impaired users. In addition, each page is given an overall score. With this information, Web developers get immediate feedback and can address these obstacles before the pages are published. My question is, can we use the knowledge embedded in this to generate pages that conform to what is wanted? Or at least, extract the knowledge in there and place into our various "boxes" containing the different knowledge types we work with.
paper, slides
User really want web pages to be tailored to them, whoever they are.
Genre detection. 20-25 templates in library at the moment.
Don't educate the content providers, but the tool builders. http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag.html
WCAG 1.0 is official, but WCAG 2.0 is a working draft. Macromedia
are working on putting this into Flash. SVG and SMIL need to be
updated. Trying for recommendation this year - so trying to stay
focussed. Mentioned Flickr as a
site using flash but not being accessible (yet).
Chatted to Wendy Chisholm about what I/we can do by directing resources rather
than dedicating them. Source of funding for this? (CHIP) Semantic
web. NL Net?
Composition: put html inside another piece of html.
Detect non-content "clutter" on web page and then remove it. (But what about the wishes of the content provider?) Using slashdot as example site.
Korea is really working hard at making their web pages accessible.
Brian Kelly is from UKOLN, a centre of expertise in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information, education and cultural heritage communities. slides
Afternoon keynote Eric Meyer. Can you have accessible design? Humans are very visually oriented and many designs use images. CSS Zen Garden shows different way out designs on the same content. Screen-scraping a web page and rendering the (visual) presentation audibly is deeply flawed. Documents are becoming semantic and structural = accessible. If it is audio browsing then forget about how it looks - it is audio. (Amazon and E-bay is still all visual based of course.) Screen readers should become audio browsers. Try putting a DOCTYPE in - if there is a DOCTYPE then use standards mode and otherwise use backward compatability ("crutch") mode. Need some form of audio styling for an audio browser. In summary, there is tension between accessibility and visual design. But this is a not a huge amount of tension. We need to build audio browsers so that we need audio styling (voice ML didn't go anywhere), but there is a newer Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) Version 1.0. More at "Voice Browser" Activity.
LOM (Learning Object Model) and accessibility.
Note the authors also have a paper in the main proceedings:
P. Karampiperis, D. Sampson: "Designing Learning Services: From
Content-based to Activity-based Learning Systems", Proc. of the
fourteenth International World Wide Web Conference, WWW2005, Chiba,
Japan, May 2005. There is also accessibility work within DC - ask Brian Kelly.
Paul Ryan Bohman from WebAIM. Message presented first: we shouldn't concentrate on the content but on user agents and assistive technologies. Demystify cognitive disabilities. Their units of analysis for web pages are interesting: They have identified six potential units of analysis: 1 The Web "page", 2 The entire Web site, 3 The template, 4 Content within the template, 5 Content "chunks" or subsections, 6 Scenarios and paths. For example, a border around a list of text items means that they have been grouped together (so they are trying to figure out from the visual devices what we are trying to convey through using appropriate visual devices).
EARL - Evaluation and Report Language. It would be interesting to
talk to Shadi
Abou-Zahra, but unfortunately he couldn't make it. Wendy Chisholm is
working fairly closely with him - I chatted to her during lunch.
Shadi is chair of the Evaluation
and Repair Tools WG.
Designers, content authors, programmers, managers, evaluators. Boils
down to needing machine-readable syntax for test results to allow tools to check
pages automatically. Builds on RDF. Purpose is generic quality
assurance. EARL is to use SemWeb technology for testing existing
pages - we want it the other way round, to use the same info to
generate pages. OWL gives them more options. Their problems are
competely different from our own: describing location for test
results; improving persistence of test reports;