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A Semantic-web based framework for developing applications to improve accessibility in the WWW

Published: 22 May 2006 Publication History

Abstract

One of the biggest issues the World Wide Web (WWW) community has to overcome is accessibility for all. The rapid expansion of the WWW using problematic web authoring practices, together with the dominance of the desktop metaphor in web page design has raised many WWW accessibility problems for people with disabilities. In this paper we present a what may be termed as a "Semantic Web application framework" which allows different applications to be designed and developed for improving accessibility of the WWW. Apart from the architecture, the tools and the technologies that compose the framework, the key idea of the framework is that it aims at promoting the idea of creating a community of people federating into groups each playing a specific role: ontology creators creating concepts using an ontological approach to describe various elements of the WWW, annotators using concepts to annotate specific pages, user-agent developers creating tools based on the framework, and finally end-users (people with disabilities) that use these tools for their benefit. Within the proposed framework, these groups cooperate and interact with each other, having as their ultimate goal the improvement of WWW accessibility.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    W4A '06: Proceedings of the 2006 international cross-disciplinary workshop on Web accessibility (W4A): Building the mobile web: rediscovering accessibility?
    May 2006
    153 pages
    ISBN:159593281X
    DOI:10.1145/1133219
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 22 May 2006

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    Author Tags

    1. RDF
    2. accessibility
    3. information seeking
    4. metadata
    5. semantic web
    6. voice browser

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