3. Demands, Requirements and Use Cases

• Drivers, who drives the process
• Who are the players
  Accessibility has for many years been driven forward by strong advocates for the specific user groups, and specially the group of people with sight impairments. One of the reasons for that is the obvious; the Internet have finally given the blind equal possibility to access information, since printed books had to be in Braille, or the blind needed an reading assistants. When the WWW wave started in mid 1990 the blind finally got equal opportunity to access information, but as the Web developed and new features and software got introduced the accessibility for blind people got reduced. In late 1990 several web-sites consisted of background images with all the text, and image-links on top of that image for navigation. For the normal seeing person the site was fancy but impossible to read for the blind. Today the usage of e.g. flash have some of the same limitations for the blind.
  To ensure that the Web did not build strong barriers against the blind, the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) started the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) project to ensure a minimum level of accessibility to the Web, and a set of guidelines and requirements for how to develop accessible web-sites.

• From position papers, and the work of JTC1-SWGA

  Se på tabell fra SWG-A (swga_168.xls) og trekke ut fellestrekk... og sammenligne dette med positions papers

Syntactical, Semantical and Procedural accessibility

One of the most important issues when dealing with accessibility is predictability, to be able to navigate effectively and to use on-line information effectively, you need to know and understand the userinterface how you communicate with the system and where to find different information elements. The more consistent location of information elements are, and the more consistent the method of communicating with a system is, the more efficient you can use the system. The system will have better usability and a more efficient use, and be more accessible to a vide range of users.

Most of the attention when dealing with accessibility has been given to the WAI and Section 508 guidelines, which are addressing the encoding of the information, the syntax of the information. That use should use CSS in a certain way, that you should use elements attributes in HTML to help the assistive technologies, and to provide a basic set of accessibility and functionality to web-sites. These accessibility efforts are easy to check with a computer, hence bobby and other tools for checking WAI conformance.

But the other issues of accessibility that addresses the consistency of location of information elements, the predictability on how to navigate a web-site is not that easy to define. Some of this could be managed with proper use of HTML and CSS, but still there is a need of consistency in addressing where different information elements are located on a web-page i.e. location of search, menues, content-body etc. If the guidelines are followed and the HTML and CSS are used correctly, the information is accessible to the disabled user, that relates to screen reader technologies or the user that uses special web-reader software. But the elderly or the not so familiar to the web-user will have problems or find the web alienating if the have to learn a new logic of how systems communicate each time the uses the web, or enters a new web-site. The same goes for the "slow learner" - therefore we should in the domain of learning make sure that all on-line learning resource follows the same principles for user design and user interaction schemes.

The third issue with regard to accessibility is the procedure to follow when communicating with a system, i.e. when you do an assessment, submit a paper etc. The more consistent, the more familiar, the more you follow the same procedures when you do something, the more familiar you get, the more confident you get in using the system, the lower the barriers for using the system. Therefore is it important that we have a common way of performing tasks when we are online.

MER om eldre og økt tilgjengelighet for noen gir økt tilgjengelighet for alle. Trend mot å se at alle er forskjellige og har forskjellige behov - og det er brukerens behov (user-needs) som må settes i sentrum ISO 24751