DISCUSSION

Community Solutions

Web 2.0 techniques can be used to create accessibility on sites. One approach is the use of “mashups” to enhance accessibility. Mashups are a signature aspect of Web 2.0 in which information from several sites is combined or modified to create a new site with incrementally richer features. Unlike classic aggregation that involved loading images or frames from different sites into a portal-style page, mashups involve the seamless blending of data via scripts, using APIs or other data exchange technologies. The content of the resultant page involves resources from all the involved sites with no clear demarcation between them. An early mashup hit the news in 2003 when student provided on his own site an alternate, accessible interface to the Odeon Cinema’s Web site. He was able to provide the same service of searching cinema listings, but in a lightweight, simple, and accessible interface. This was celebrated in the accessibility community and was a visionary use of the new capabilities of technology to increase access. Although this project gained a great deal of attention, and even had the potential to increase the business to the cinema, it was shut down due to legal protest. Since this time, mashups have become more common and accepted, and are frequently used to provide alternate interfaces to major e-commerce sites. Such sites even specifically provide public APIs to support value-add via mashups. Often, mashups are created to integrate data from various sites to address specific interests, but users can take the lead of the Odeon cinema example and use this technique to solve accessibility problems. Amazon.com is an example site that, although it itself provides a simplified and accessible version of its user interface in addition to the primary one, alternate versions for specific usability and accessibility needs are available.

Rich Content

Many people who have difficulty with Web sites now will be able to make use of sites in these new dynamic services. Now techniques exist to provide dynamic contextual help, provide an
Interface suited to the user’s experience, and learn a user’s preferences in order to quickly select the most appropriate choices provide great value. This will be of particular help to users with
Cognitive and learning disabilities, who will benefit greatly from the more interactive nature of these sites, and from the potential to provide multimodal interaction.

New Technology

The new technologies also bring indirect benefits. We should also consider the direct benefits to the field of accessibility brought by these technologies. The convergence of Web 2.0 and Semantic Web is likely to be brought about by improvements in automated semantic discovery heuristics. Tools and services that can analyze a Web site and discover semantics will be able to plug in value-added services, essentially bringing the capabilities of the Semantic Web to sites that were not designed with that in mind. The same techniques to discover semantics will be invaluable to assistive technologies, which remain dependent on a semantic understanding of the site to transform the presentation and provide alternate user interfaces for interaction. As much as third party semantic discovery services will be able to add value to sites for commercial reasons, third party accessibility transcoders will be able to use this technology to provide access.