Please read this message and respond to me asap.

As you all know, we have struggled away with our accessibility work  
and we proposed a new term but still have not managed to get that  
finalised.  We have done a lot of work to simplify and DC-ify our  
proposal and think that it is getting somewhere fast (indeed we hope  
so).

But we have another problem:

We would like to hear from members of this list about a proposal to  
close down the Accessibility WG and start an Adaptability WG.

When the Usage Board advised us of the problem they were having with  
the name 'accessibility' and that their research showed that it is  
not clear to people what we mean, we put that together with other  
research and decided to work with the name 'adaptability' instead.  
The Usage Board members found that our 'accessibility' got confused  
with the access issues of librarians and others so it might be about  
digital rights, or it might be about facilities etc - it was not  
distinct. We decided that If we are working on adaptability in  
general, then accessibility for people with disabilities is a sub-set  
of that work. (This is a tiny bit tricky as in some places, people  
are described as having disabilities and in others, esp. Europe and  
wherever the WHO works, the relationship between people and their  
circumstances, often man-made, results in disabilities.)

In essence, we would like a new element called adaptability (which  
includes accessibility as we know it) and we will make an application  
profile using it and other DC terms for describing the accessibility  
of resources.

Adaptability works for people who are not able to access resources  
and services due to the sort of problems that are of interest to the  
current DC Accessibility community as well as for people who are  
concerned about adaptability for device independence (eg putting web  
pages on phone screens) and other kinds of adaptation. The advantage  
of the wider term is that communities who have not thought about  
accessibility but are concerned about adaptability will be in a good  
position to add accessibility in to their mix, and that the efforts  
will be combined rather than fragmented.

If we are to proceed with this change, ie to set up the adaptability  
working group, we need to know that we have the support of the DC  
Accessibility community in this effort.

Please respond to this email with just yes (if you are happy with the  
change), no (if you are not), or comments if you would like to  
contribute to the debate. Please take care to address your email to  
me, not the list: mailto:[log in to unmask]

Thank you

Liddy