RDFa, and its implications for accessibility
Peter Krantz has some extremely interesting thoughts on the use of RDFa in assistive technologies. It makes thought-provoking reading not just because it raises some interesting ideas about accessibility, but also because it gets us thinking about how we might define a processing model that sits on top of RDFa, that would in turn allow all sorts of functionality. Peter gives an example at the end of his article:
In practice, the sequence of events for a screen reader working on top of a web browser could look like this:
- Browser opens the web page.
- Screen reader parses the HTML and extracts references to all external vocabularies.
- External vocabularies are fetched and parsed for labels and descriptions.
- The screen reader announce that extended information exists and starts rendering the page.
So, by using RDFa to reduce ambiguity for machines it is likely that humans too can benefit from the added information. It will be very interesting to see what makers of assistive tools can come up with.