CWA 15778:2008

Document Processing for Accessibility

Scope

Given the widespread adoption of ICT within the publishing industries, there is a general interest in the creation and provision of well-formatted digital documents. For those people who are dependent on accessible information, this interest is of central importance, and it is this convergence of interests that stimulated the creation of this Workshop. The WS/DPA has examined some of the ways in which this convergence is helping to build consensus and create new strategies and technologies for the provision of information in formats that are more accessible for everyone.
In the real world, publishers rely on accessibility experts and consider accessible information only at the end of the content production chain. This requires considerable amount of efforts to make information accessible for everyone and it is a very hard problem to tackle. This workshop introduces accessibility as a design element in the content production and provides guidelines and best practices how more accessible documents can be produced. Another important issue is that the user requirements for accessible information are not well defined. In this work, we therefore base the elaboration on publishing use cases and scenarios that have been derived together with publishers in order to analyse at least partly the user requirements. Additionally those scenarios provide specific examples of accessible information provision as an entry point to publishing stakeholders.
Sustaining the provision of useful services and meaningful accessible content can be considered vital to the growth of the Information Society as a whole. When designing, specifying and building applications and infrastructures to store accessible content, several apparently unrelated issues arise. How do we describe the knowledge and capabilities we possess and capture the repository of resources we can use to implement these capabilities? How do we describe the questions and problems of end users and content providers?