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Subject: How does DITA rate for Accessibility?
While discussing an invitation to liaise with a new workshop on accessibility, I asked the general question, "How is DITA certifying to best practices in accessibility and localization?" This note introduces a thread on the topic of Accessibility in particular. Accessible information not only fulfills mandated requirements for information deliverables, it is also plain good practice that takes into consideration all users of your products. DITA strives to meet the known requirements of: W3C Accessibility IBM and other corporate accessibility initiatives Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act Unlike the case for XHTML, DITA's accessibility features rely on output processing to minimize the amount of direct authoring to introduce IDs and special links for navigation in screen readers. Here is a partial list of the intended architecture for enabling accessible output. The core language provides the <alt> content element for the <image>, and the <desc> elements for <object>, <table>, and <fig> to ensure that accessible descriptions can be written with rich text content. Image has a longdescref attribute to allow pointing to alternate description. Table has a rowheader attribute to indicate row-major headings instead of the usual column-major format for headings. Output transforms configure the header links for navigation accordingly. Output transforms generate table navigation using header-to-cell attribute-based links in support of W3C accessibility guidelines. Output transforms generate D-links for non-text objects. The transforms also generate longdescription alternate content/links from descriptive text, as authored according to guidelines by writers. ... (more can be said here) In addition, good authoring for accessible content involves following authoring guidelines for these special types of content: Images: Animations: Image Maps: Graphs and Charts: Syntax Diagrams: In addition, these are not directly DITA markup/output issues, but common components of many types of Web-based UA. Good practices with these components can augment the accessibility of DITA deliverables using these components. Frames: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): The description for these guidelines remains to be written. Anyone is welcome to follow up on individual items. Regards, -- Don Day Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee IBM Lead DITA Architect Email: dond@us.ibm.com 11501 Burnet Rd. MS9033E015, Austin TX 78758 Phone: +1 512-838-8550 T/L: 678-8550 "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" --T.S. Eliot
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