2. State of the art concerning standards and specifications

Standardisation and specification bodies.

W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
- WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative)
- WCAG (Web Content Authoring Guidelines) 2.0
- ATAG (Accessibility ??? Authoring Guidelines)
ISO IEC/JTC1/SC36 (Information Technology for Learning, Education and Training) ISO 24751
- WG7 (ITLET - Culture, Language and Human Functioning Activities)
Dublin Core A4A application profile
- Adaptability

Legislation:
- Section 508
- European legislation

Relevant specifications

Standards for the internet is mainly developed by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium - http://w3.org/) and that is the case for accessibility standards as well. Since 1997 W3C have worked on accessibility standards WCAG1.0 is one of the more important specifications ensuring accessibility to content - providing a set of guidelines for what to do when providing accessible information. The WCAG1.0 is under revision and WCAG2.0 is under progress.

find updated information about WCAG2.0 - to be included before final version of this document.

W3C are also developing several other specifications for accessibility, such as ATAG (Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines) and UAAG (User Agent Accessibility Guidelines). Where ATAG (http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/atag.php) address software for creating web pages and web sites so that these are accessible for people with disabilities. ATAG is also under revision and a draft of ATAG2.0 is available at (http://www.w3.org/TR/ATAG20/), UAAG (http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/uaag.php) addresses how assistive technologies increase accessibility to content such as web browsers and media players.

check status of ATAG2.0 with Jutta

One of the key features with the WAI standards is that they encode the information delivered in a given way, and then the users preferences are more or less ignored, it is the capability of the web publishing system that decides which level of accessibility you as a user will get.

There is a new standard being finalised in ISO IEC/JTC1/SC36 that addresses this issue, the new standard ISO 24751 (Individualised adaptability and accessibility in Learning, Education and Training) consist of three parts:

Part1: Framework
Part 2: Access For All Personal Needs and Preferences Statement (PNP)
Part 3: Access For All Digital Resource Description (DRD)
This standard focuses on the need of the user, and how this users would like to have the information presented (PNP), and then the system delivers the information to satisfy those needs (DRD).
This approach is different than saying that a user is blind, deaf or dyslectic among many disabilities, instead it states that my preferences is that the information should be delivered with captioning of all video and audio. Or that information should be spoken, or that no images should be delivered but their explanations etc.
This standard bases on two different concepts, one of transforming content to satisfy the needs of the user, such as contrast, font size etc, and second of providing alternatives; if you would like to have explanations instead of images, you need an alternative representation, or if you would like to have the video with captioning, you need the system to deliver the video stream that have captioning embedded.
This approach of satisfying the preferences of the user, is to some extent already satisfied by many web-sites, since many web-sites today can deliver the content in different languages to satisfy the preferred language of the user.

In the USA the Section 508 is mandatory for all procurement, and every system should be compliant to Section 508 who provides a set of guidelines for ensuring accessibility to on-line content. In Europe there are ongoing activities for developing a harmonised set of requirements for ICT systems based on the model of Section 508.

International effort in harmonising accessibility standardisation

ISO IEC/JTC1/SWG-A
- Identification of existing standards and specification and legislation
- User requirements, and user needs
- Performing a GAP analysis based on needs what exists, then start work that will fill the GAP.

Since several organisations are working with accessibility and issues related to accessibility in a vide range of applications and situations, the technology standardisation body (ISO IEC/JTC1) established a Special Working Group on Accessibility in 2004 to address the harmonisation of accessibility standards.
The plan of this group is to identify existing standards and specifications and legislation, perform a thorough user requirement analysis - and then do a gap analysis of this. Based on the gap analysis new standardisation activities will be initiated within the proper organisation.

Testing accessibility

Web-page testers
- W3C - testers (Bobby etc.)
- Section 508 - testers

To be able to comply to WAI requirements several tests have been developed to check that the HTML pages produced follows the correct syntax, and includes the required elements from the WAI specification. This tests checks for the Priority 1 and Priority 2 guidelines from WAI.

Certification of web-sites

- European project: Support-EAM - e-Accessibility Quality Mark
- WAB-Cluster (European Web Accessibility Benchmark)

Testing of governmental web information accessibility
- EIAO (European Internet Accessibility Observatory)

Conformance testing to ISO24751 (Individualised adaptability and accessibility in Learning, Education and Tranining)

Certification of accessibility:
There is an attempt to set up a certification programme in Europe under CEN-ISSS but driven by a European Commission funded project "Support-EAM" http://www.support-eam.org/supporteam/default.asp this project is a part of the WAB-cluster (European Web Accessibility Benchmark) (http://www.wabcluster.org/). Within this project there is also the EIAO project (European Internet Accessibility Observatory) (http://www.eiao.net/) that tests governmental web-sites in Europe with regard to accessibility by harvesting all sites and then processes this information for accessibility issues. The plan is to check for accessibility at a regular basis to check for improvement. So far this tests only tests some of the WAI conformance guidelines.

What is important is that the content is accessible when it is delivered to the user, not when the site was tested, this is important when information is frequently updated, and/or we have learning resources that are of dynamic nature.

When assessing accessibility it is important who performs the assessing, because one site could be useful for one group of persons with some accessibility issues and not useful at all for other groups with other accessibility issues and therefore this sites would be assessed differently.

Accessibility Interoperability issues

One of the many thought of advantages' with Learning Objects (LO's) is that they could be reused, reapplied, reassembled and used by the teacher or the learner to use the LO in a new context.
But when using a LO in a new context, the metadata provided for a specific resource might not be sufficient/adequate if the LO is used in a an another context than the LO was intended for e.g. if you want to reuse a image, and that image has a ALT text describing it, that ALT text might not be correct if the image is used in a different learning scenario, and could provide false interpretation or in some extreme situations be source of wrong learning.
The same is equally important when a given resource also have an alternative representation, and the resource is used in a different context than intended when the metadata was created. i.e. There is a picture of the heart showing the four chambers. If this picture is used in grammar school there could be sufficient information to know that: "This is i a picture of a human heart, showing the four chambers that the heart consist of" but if the same picture is used at a medical school the information should read something like: "This is a picture of the human heart, where we in the lover left part of the heart see the XX chamber, responsible for receiving venous blood from the body low on oxygen
..." hopefully this illustrates that the ALT text of a given image should change dependent of the context of use, and that this "feature" is quite important when reusing LO's.

The point is; when reusing Learning Objects and Learning Resources, the accessibility metadata need to be checked to ensure that they still provide relevant information when the resource is reused, modified and reassembled in a new context.