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Summaries and
Captions
Many people insist
on putting data on the Web in tabular form. Tables are sometimes incredibly
difficult to comprehend. HTML recommends, and provides a method for including
textual summaries and captions for tabular data.
Language
tags
Every HTML document
is required, by the standard, to provide an indication of the main language of
the page: English, or French, or German, or whatever. There are special codes
for every language. This element can be used either by the browser to
automatically get you a copy of a multilingual document in your language of
choice, or by certain special applications to do an automatic translation of a
unilingual document into another language. But beyond that, if you have just a
snippet French in an otherwise English page, you can identify the language of
just that snippet. Some future application might be able to translate snippets
on the fly.
Metadata - Information
about information
Another way to aid
comprehension of a Web document or Web site is to briefly summarize its
content, and provide a standard set of keywords to better identify its
subjects. This kind of information can be stored in something called metadata,
which is made available on request to things like search engines or specialty
browsers. By the way, I heard someone talking about meta-metadata a little
while ago, and I still have the headache it gave me.
The
Future
So, what challenges
face us? Well, the most common complaints we hear from Web developers who have
been told to implement the W3C guidelines is that they don't know what plain
language means, that in any case their subject couldn't possibly be made more
understandable, that the audience they care about does understand and to hell
with the rest of the world, and really who decides what is plain enough
language to meet the standard.
I am pleased to be
able to tell you that the working group currently developing the second version
of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is trying to address these issues
in a more detailed fashion. They even have a plain language professional
involved this time: Avi Arditti (who is attending this conference), with the
Voice of America, has been quite active in this regard. You can search on the
W3C's Web site for more information about the most recent work in this area.
Look at the list-serve archives of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
Working Group for message subjects that contain the subject: 4.1, or plain
language, or natural language. The URL is www.w3.org/WAI/GL. There you can also
find links to the latest drafts of the new guidelines and see their progress on
the new plain language checkpoints. |
