Hello Everyone

This is a very quiet group! I suspect many subscribed are hoping that
a way of dealing with metadata for accessibility evaluations will
emerge from the woodwork - somehow?

Well, no!  We have to work to develop this.

In a couple of weeks a first F2F  meeting will take place with a
small group at the WWW11 conference in Hawaii. At that meeting, we
will revisit the issue of how to proceed with this work.

What has happened to date, so far as I know, has been at least some
work to bring together some of the major players in this area. W3C
Working Groups and the IMS Accessibility Working Group have come
together on a couple of occasions to find how they can work together
on this. Some of us from DC-Accessibility have  been involved in
encouraging this collaboration.

Currently IMS is engaged in finding ways to work on both resource
accessibility evaluations and user requirements, so they can be
matched. User metadata is an interesting area of consideration: some
are in favour of this approach and others concerned about it. It is
often favoured when closed communities are involved, eg an
educational institution's clientele.  Different approaches can be
taken - some leading to thinking of people as having disabilities or
disadvantages in terms of access and others coming at the issue the
other way, describing the abilities in terms of access for users.

At the F2F meeting, it would be good to consider input from the wider
community, so please tell the list how you feel about this and how
you think it might or might not work.

In terms of resource descriptions, we still need to know more about
requirements. The email following this will be a short quiz with 5
questions that I would be particularly grateful if you could answer.
I will compile the results before sending them to the list so please
respond to me, not the list. They will greatly assist us at the F2F
meeting.

Liddy