Trip Report WWW2002 Web Content Accessibility Workshop May 7 2002, Honolulu, Hawaii

1. Introduction
2. A-prompt presentation
3. LIFT presentation
4. blackboard presentation
5. presentation of e-government activities in denmark
6. discussion
7. dublin core metadata presentation
8. EARL presentation
9. link collection

1. Introduction:

attendees introduce themselves, there are people from USA, canada, australia, korea, denmark etc.

people from different areas work on the same issues sometimes even without noticing it. e.g. device independency has many common issues with accessibility.

different guidelines all over the world need to be harmonized to avoid fragmentation.
why are there different guidelines ? are the WAI guidelines not clear enough ?

judy brewer introduces the WAI

• active since 4.5 years
• the five major activities are:
  1. look at other specifications with focus on accessibility issues
  2. guidelines in four areas:
     1. web content guidelines
     2. authoring tools guidelines
     3. user agent guidelines
     4. XML guidelines (just starting)
  3. validation and evaluation tools (validation: "is there an alternate attribute ?", can be done automatically easily versus evaluation: "is the alternate attribute meaningful ?", difficult, output in RDF)
  4. education and outreach
  5. coordinating with other activities
• reference: www.w3.org/WAI/

the US government modified the WAI guidelines and turned them into their own set of rules. in addition, large companies such as IBM or Microsoft have developed their own guidelines, so now there are now many different recommendations around. the software industry responded to that by slowing down their development related to accessibility. that's why the W3C talks now a lot about harmonization.

WAI V1.0 is the current version. V2.0 is under consideration, but V1.0 will still be the current version for quite a while.

the current W3C evaluation procedures are based on similar ideas as our poster presentation "measuring accessibility" at WWW8 in toronto: analyze web pages with a selection of browsers and check for some particular properties, such as screen size, usefulness with images turned off etc.

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2. A-prompt presentation:

• Web accessibility verifier
• meant to be integrated into an authoring tool, but can also be used stand-alone
• different level of conformation (section 508, W3C WAI)
• provides some automated repairs
• guides the user through the unautomated part of the repair process
• detects e.g. images without ALT attribute, sounds without caption, ASCII art without caption, images with insufficient color contrast and provides tools to immediately repair these problems without the need of additional tools
• provides summary with repair progress indication
• currently available for Windows only, other operating systems under consideration
• reference: www.aprompt.ca

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3. LIFT presentation:

• " a dreamweaver add on
• selection of various guidelines to check against
• guidelines modifiable
• provides a repair wizard
• available for Windows and Mac
• reference: www.usablenet.com

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4. blackboard presentation:

• learning and resource management system
• references:
  1. access.blackboard.com
  2. www.webaim.org

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5. presentation of e-government activities in denmark:

• there is an initiative by the danish government to increase accessibility of governmental web sites at all levels
• they perform manual evaluations by students, score rank from 1 to 5 "web krons"
• evaluation is done on a yearly basis and there is a significant increase in accessibility compared to last year

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6. discussion:

Content Management Systems (CMS) need to be accessibility approved - and they itself need to be accessible.

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7. dublin core metadata presentation:

• a set of rules to describe information on the Internet
• metadata is a representational tool to assist in the structural aggregation of data into information and information into knowledge
• dublin core: 15 elements plus additional qualifiers, an architecture for expressions of reusable semantics, participations from over 35 countries
• cross domain, including museums, libraries, government, commerce, publishing etc.
• modular and extensible
• reference: dublincore.org

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8. EARL presentation:

• evaluation report language
• written in RDF (Resource Description Framework), which is written in XML
• keeps track of changes
• reference: www.w3.org/WAI/ER/#eral

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9. link collection:

1. WAI homepage: www.w3.org/WAI/
2. poster presentation at WWW8: "measuring accessibility"
3. A-prompt: www.aprompt.ca
4. LIFT: www.usablenet.com
5. blackboard: access.blackboard.com
6. webaim: www.webaim.org
7. dublin core: dublincore.org
8. EARL: www.w3.org/WAI/ER/#eral
9. EARL presentation: www.w3.org/2002/Talks/0507-wf7/
10. Section 508: www.access-board.gov/news/508-final.htm

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