Today we invite guest blogger Gerardo Capiel, VP of
Engineering of Benetech, who joined the Consortium to participate
in the Digital Publishing Interest Group (DPUB IG). This is
cross-posted on the
Digital Publishing Blog.
In October of this year, Benetech joined the World Wide Web
Consortium to more deeply participate in the evolution of standards
that enable educational content to be born accessible. Our first
opportunity for deep engagement came earlier this month with the
W3C Technical Plenary and Advisory Committee (TPAC) meeting in
Shenzhen, China. During the weeklong TPAC meeting, many of the W3C
Working Groups that develop W3C
Recommendations met to advance their projects and provide an
opportunity for others to observe and inform. TPAC was also a great
opportunity for face-to-face collaboration with others in the
field.
One of the people I had an opportunity to collaborate with in
person was Charles McCathie Nevile, aka Chaals, who has long been
involved in W3C activities and accessibility. Chaals works for
Yandex one of the mainstream search engines, which leverages
Schema.org. Schema.org is collaboration between Bing, Google, Yahoo
and Yandex to create and support a standard set of schemas for
structured data markup on web pages. These standardized schemas
enable webmasters to improve the discoverability of their content.
You can experience the benefits of this standardized markup by
searching Google for ‘Potato Salad’, clicking ‘Search Tools’ and
now having the ability to filter search results by the properties
defined at http://schema.org/Recipe, such as
ingredients, cook time or caloric content.
Google
search filtered on Schema.org/Recipe properties, such as
ingredients.
For the past year thanks to funding from the Gates Foundation
Benetech has led a working group to propose a set of Schema.org
accessibility properties that can be used with existing schemas to
enable the discovery of accessible educational resources. The need
for a standard set of properties surfaced during our participation
as a launch partner for the Learning Registry in 2011. While
the Learning Registry can leverage Schema.org properties defined by
the Learning Resources Metadata
Initiative (LRMI), such as educational alignment, there was no
standard set of properties that would enable an educator to find
closed-captioned videos for hearing impaired students or algebra
textbooks that used MathML – an accessible format for mathematical
expressions. Schema.org was the ideal place to define these
properties, because they would not only benefit tools, such as the
Learning Registry, but would benefit broader Open Web Platform
technologies and mainstream search engines, such as Google and
Yandex.
During TPAC Chaals, Markus Gylling (CTO of IDPF and co-chair of the W3C Digital
Publishing Interest Group) and I were able to resolve the remaining
concerns that Schema.org representatives had with the proposed
properties. The following week, Dan Brickley, the editor of
Schema.org,
publicly announced that Schema.org would be adopting the
accessibility properties proposed by the Accessibility Metadata project and
IMS Global Access
for All.
Soon after Dan’s announcement the IDPF updated their EPUB 3
Accessibility Guidelines to
recommend to the publishing industry the use of those
properties with digital textbooks and ebooks. These Guidelines have
received broad support from the American Association of
Publishers (AAP) and the National Federation of the Blind (NFB). I
hope the Guidelines will be instrumental to the newly introduced
‘Technology, Education and Accessibility In College and Higher
Education Act’ (TEACH) by U.S. Congressman Tom Petri.
At TPAC I also participated in three W3C group face-to-face
meetings. The first was with the Digital Publishing Interest Group
(DPUB IG), which Benetech is a member of along with Adobe, Google,
Hachette Livre, IBM, Pearson and many others. The mission of the
group is to provide a forum for experts in the digital publishing
ecosystem for technical discussions, gathering use cases and
requirements to align the existing formats and technologies needed
for digital publishing with those used by the Open Web Platform.
The goal is to ensure that the requirements of digital publishing
can be answered, when in scope, by the Recommendations published by
W3C.
Per the charter of the group Suzanne Taylor from Pearson and I
put together a
set of use cases related to accessibility for Digital
Publishing. I had the opportunity to
discuss the use cases related to image and diagram
accessibility with the SVG Working Group, which is
preparing the SVG 2.0 specification for final call at the end of
this year. The Scalable Vector Graphic format (SVG) is a format
that has been deemed the third most important feature of EPUB 3
that publishers need to adopt by the AAP EPUB 3
Implementation Project. SVG currently contains a number of
mechanisms that enhance the accessibility of digital publications
particularly those in the STEM field. As a
result, SVG is an excellent standard to build upon to further
address the needs of students with disabilities.
The first use case I discussed was SVG as a fallback and
bridging solution for the accessibility of mathematical
expressions. Currently, MathML is recommended as the format that
publishers should use for accessibility. However, MathML adoption
among traditional reading systems has been abysmal and there is no
sign that it will soon improve. Google’s Chrome browser recently
dropped support for MathML and MathPlayer, a popular Microsoft
Internet Explorer (IE) plug-in, which is used by students with
disabilities is no longer supported in IE 11. Furthermore, MathML
does not work with many mainstream reading systems, such as the
Kindle, and even when there is visual rendering support, there is
little to no accessibility support. As a result many publishers,
such as O’Reilly and Inkling, have
resorted to converting mathematical expressions from MathML to
SVG or PNG graphics, which either results in a loss of the
information needed by blind or vision impaired (BVI) students or
increases the cost to publishers of complying with accessibility
requirements.
My proposal to the SVG Working Group was for the SVG 2.0
specification to support embedding MathML within SVG along with
granular verbal descriptions of the expression as a lowest common
denominator for assistive technology. This approach would broaden
compatibility and not take away information that could be leveraged
by future assistive technologies. I also recommended that SVG
express explicit support for the recently drafted
ARIA 1.1 describedAt property that enables MathML and
corresponding verbal descriptions to also be referenced by an
external URI (URL). This URL would provide access to the source
MathML and alternative formats, such as Nemeth Braille, and would
enable educators and disability services professionals to correct
and improve MathML markup, which may render correctly visually, but
poorly aurally.
The SVG group was very open and responsive to my proposal and
Richard Schwerdtfeger from IBM took the first action by adding to
the SVG 2.0 specification draft support
for aria-describedat. With these standards in place our plans
to take to market a
prototyped tool for publishers and other content creators to
convert MathML to described SVG become even more compelling.
Next I discussed with the SVG Working Group research and
development that Benetech had undertaken to use Open Web Platform
technologies to implement the sonification
features of MathTrax. MathTrax is a
graphing tool for blind and low vision middle and high school
students to access visual math data and graph or experiment with
equations and datasets.
Doug Schepers, a staff member of the W3C, demonstrated
a project we had collaborated on to sonify graphs of
mathematical expressions, such as a parabola, using the Web Audio
API and the nascent Web Speech API supported in Safari 6.1 and the
upcoming
Chrome 33. We discussed that in order to generalize this
approach work with SVG graphs generated by other tools, such as
D3.js, we needed standard
semantics to identify which SVG elements represented data and
the x and y axis. Richard Schwerdtfeger suggested that new ARIA
roles be enumerated for this purpose. I look forward to moving this
forward with Rich.
One of the advantages of the SVG format for accessible images
and graphs is that textual descriptions of the whole image or
individual elements can be included within SVG. This is superior to
the use of the alt property with HTML image elements, because
descriptions can be lengthier than those
typically used with the alt property and they are portable with
the image content. Unfortunately SVG descriptions are limited to
text and can’t use rich HTML markup to incorporate tables, lists or
links. I recommend reading some of the
recommendations by the DIAGRAM Center on the use of
structured elements for image descriptions, particularly in the
STEM field.
I was in luck with this use case as the
SVG Working Group was already considering supporting
HTML within SVG 2.0. My use case was further confirmation that
SVG could benefit from this support and an action
was created specific to this use case.
Because we need a way to deal with back titles that don’t
leverage these standards for rich image descriptions or have
insufficient descriptions, I discussed the need for mechanisms to
support the
crowdsourcing or post-production addition of image descriptions
to titles that have already been published. Previously I discussed
that ARIA 1.1′s describedAt property is one enabling standard that
tools, such as DIAGRAM Center’s
Poet can leverage. Markus Gylling and I also believe that the
emergent Open
Annotations specification provides another approach. The good
news is that Doug Schepers from the SVG Working Group believes this
will be possible based on his talks with the developers at Hypothes.is who are building one of the
first tools to leverage the Open Annotations specification.
Besides aural and textual modalities, the content of SVG graphs
can also be conveyed via tactile modalities. Educators to blind and
visually impaired students have commonly used tactile graphics to
make graphical content accessible. SVG is the recommended digital
format for creating tactile graphics that can be printed with
specialized printers called embossers.
These specialized printers are expensive, thus the DIAGRAM Center
and others have been funding and conducting research on the
use of 3D
printers for making 2D SVG graphics
accessible. Given MakerBot’s recently announced
mission to put a 3D printer in every classroom, this is very
exciting.
Haptics are
another promising technology for making SVG graphics accessible via
a tactile modality. The DIAGRAM Center recently partnered with
ETS to research tablet-based haptic display of graphical
information and explore the inclusion of this technology in EPUB 3
textbooks.
Ideally the same SVG
graphic could be printed with ink, an embosser or a 3D printer.
Based on discussions with SVG Working Group we determined that a
solution could be to
leverage CSS media queries, which today are used to format web
pages for print. An action
item was taken for Doug Schepers and Tab Atkins who also sits on
the CSS Working Group to work on tactile, 3D and haptic media
queries for SVG.
Finally I presented to the SVG Working Group the need for SVG
images to be easily reusable
within a document and across documents without the need for the
HTML image element, which limits much of the advanced capabilities
of SVG. The SVG Working Group recommended that iframes be used to
inline the same SVG graphic across multiple locations in a
document. This seems like a reasonable approach and I will be
further discussing it with our DIAGRAM Center partners, the DPUB IG
and developers of assistive technologies.
I was quite pleased with how open and curious the SVG Working
Group was to issues around accessibility. This was exactly the type
of collaboration that the Digital Publishing Interest Group was
meant to create.
My last day at TPAC was spent with the W3C Independent User Interface
(Indie UI) Working Group. Their mission is to facilitate
interaction in Web applications that are input method independent,
and hence accessible to people with disabilities. For example
currently Web application authors, wishing to intercept a user’s
intent to ‘zoom in’ on a map view, need to ‘listen’ for a wide
range of events that vary by operating system or device, such as
CTRL-Plus, Command-Plus, pinch/zoom touch gestures, etc. Assistive
technologies further expand and complicate the possible
interactions that web developers must account for.
Ideally, content and applications automatically adapt to the
users preferences. To make this possible the Indie UI team is also
drafting a
user context specification. The Indie UI team was very
interested in learning about our work with Schema.org to specify
accessibility properties. One use case enabled by leveraging both
of these specifications is applications that automatically narrow
search results for users based on their preferences. For example if
the user context indicated that the user had a
preference for videos with captions, then a search query could
automatically
narrow results to videos with captions.
I’m very excited to see all these standards coming together to
enable a born accessible future and reaping its benefits. I’d like
to thank the W3C for putting on a great event, which crystallized
for me the importance of the W3C’s mission.
since 2005.
