IT Accessibility Committee June 2006 Newsletter

### Edited by Joel Obuchowski

Forum IT Access Committee June Meeting

The next meeting of the IT Access Committee will be held from 2:30 - 4:00 on Thursday, June 8 at the Forum's offices, 411 State Street, Albany. Parking is available in Washington Park.

Among the topics to be discussed are the first meeting of the NYS Validation Tool Requirements work group, our annual list of accomplishments and goals for the Forum's annual planning meeting in July, and a recap of our other recent activities.

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NEWS

NYS Local Government IT Directors Association Conference

Mike Short spoke at the New York State Local Government IT Directors Association on May 31. About 75 people heard the background and policy segment of the IT Accessibility Committee's core curriculum. The talk was very well received.

LAST CALL FOR COMMENTS ON WCAG 2.0

The WAI has extended the comment period for comments on WCAG 2.0 until June 22nd. For more information on the WAI or the WCAG 2.0, see http://www.w3.org/WAI/ (External Link)

JOE CLARK....

Many of you are familiar with web accessibility expert and advocate Joe Clark. Joe has written an extensive article titled "To H--- with WCAG2" published at A List Apart (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/tohellwithwcag2 (External Link)). In it, Joe validates some of the impressions we had back in 2004 when these fundamental changes to WCAG 1.0 were first proposed. The sweeping nature of these changes is a large part of the reason that New York moved to a hybrid accessibility standard.

While Joe's article is harsh, it's also a good synopsis outlining many of the reasons experienced web developers and accessibility advocates are skeptical that these new guidelines can be implemented.

WEB STANDARDS PROJECT ESTABLISHES ACCESSIBILITY TASK FORCE

The Web Standards Project launched its new Accessibility Task Force at this spring's South X South West conference. For more information about the Task Force, see http://www.webstandards.org/action/atf (External Link).

Their review of the WCAG 2.0 is forthcoming, per the article at http://www.webstandards.org/2006/05/26/wcag-review-period-extended/ (External Link).

Useful Articles from WebAIM:

All of these articles can be accessed from the WebAIM home page: http://www.webaim.org/ (External Link).

Usable and Accessible Form Validation and Error Recovery Form validation is the process of testing to ensure that end users enter necessary and properly formatted information into web forms. Error recovery is the process of guiding the user through fixing missing or improper information as detected by form validation. There are several methods of performing form validation and error recovery.

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The Importance of Human Evaluation

Usually the best approach in evaluating web accessibility is to use both a software tool and a human evaluator. Each approach has strengths and weaknesses which complement the others and form a more complete approach to web accessibility evaluation. People with disabilities can be especially valuable as accessibility evaluators.

Accessibility of AJAX Applications: Part 1 - Accessibility Issues

Read WebAIM's responses to the following questions:

What is AJAX?
Why AJAX?
Why Not AJAX?

Also included in this article is a list of resources related to the accessibility of AJAX.

And for our readers in the SUNY system ...

Web Accessibility Policies (and Pseudo Policies) in Postsecondary Institutions

This updated list represents a broad sampling of web accessibility policies across the United States and other regions around the world. Many of these policies can be more accurately described as suggestions, since many institutions do not have any binding formal policy. See how your web accessibility policy compares, or use these as a springboard to create your own.

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"Semantic Web ready for mainstream use"

By Jonathan Bennett

Special to CNET News.com

Published: May 24, 2006, 8:14 AM PDT

The Semantic Web, where machines are able to read the contents of documents as readily as people can, now has all the standards and technologies it needs to succeed, according to W3C director Tim Berners-Lee.

Speaking at the World Wide Web 2006 conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, on Wednesday, Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, said it is now time for Web developers and content producers to start using semantic languages in addition to HTML.

A panel discussion titled "The next wave of the Web" kicked off the second day of the conference and marked the start of the technical conference content. Nigel Shadbolt, professor of computer science at the University of Southampton, told the conference attendees that what has been achieved with the Web so far is astounding by itself.

"We've produced an information infrastructure that few would have anticipated, with the possible exception of Vannevar Bush, but I think even he would have thought the scale of all this extraordinary. Fifty years ago, it might have appeared audacious, perhaps even inconceivable, that we could have built the kind of global infrastructure that now surrounds us," said Shadbolt.

However, the Web is still a mass of unstructured data with little to link groups of documents together, and no way for computers to manipulate the information in Web pages. The Semantic Web project aims to solve this problem by adding machine-readable content to the Web.

Berners-Lee said that building the stack of technologies needed to make the Semantic Web a reality has taken some time, but that we're now at the stage where the technologies can be used.

"We set out five years ago with the famous layer cake diagram, saying we're going to need RDF (resource description framework) as a data language, we're going to need an ontology language, we're going to need query and rules languages. We've been making our way through that," said Berners-Lee.

The last layer of that cake has recently been finalized. Berners-Lee explained that "the Query language, SPARQL, is now in the candidate recommendation phase, which means it's time to implement it. Without SPARQL, we could say the stack was fairly incomplete. Then suddenly we realized, 'Just imagine that you've been trying to sell relational database systems with just a data language but no query language.'"

This last step will be the biggest, because it will allow a link between the old Web and the new, Semantic Web. "SPARQL is going to make a huge difference, because behind a SPARQL server you can put a huge amount of existing data and then serve it up to the Semantic Web," said Berners-Lee.

The Semantic Web project is already ahead of its creators' original expectations. Jim Hendler, one of the authors of the original semantic Web proposal and also on the panel, told the conference that "when we were putting the article together we were thinking of it as a 10-year vision. My greatest surprise was that technologically a lot of these pieces fell into place sooner than I expected."

Jonathan Bennett of Builder UK reported from London.

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COMING SOON ....

NYS Validation Tool Project

As you may know from previous transmissions, the Forum will be initiating an RFP to develop a validation tool customized to NYS standards. That work will begin on June 7, when volunteers will meet to plan how requirements for the RFP will be developed and will be completed by the end of the summer.

After we've developed a process for our work, we will probably be reaching out to agencies to solicit their ideas for the tool. We are hopeful that we'll be able to have something in place by the end of the year.

Forum Partners with Attorney General's Internet Bureau for NYC Accessibility Session

In mid-September, the Forum will partner with the Attorney General's Internet Bureau, MicroKnowledge, Inc., and the Association of Technology Act Programs to provide a corporate briefing on web site accessibility.

This will be an introductory-level session including a background on the issues, legal basics, and the advantages of accessible web design. We'll have more specifics on this session in future newsletters, and on the Forum web site http://www.nysforum.org.