Hey Pete,
Glad to see this :-). There are several features of Atom that have been
designed with accessibility in mind.
1. Explicitly typed text - title's, summary's, subtitle's, rights,
and content are all explicitly typed as either plain text, html,
xhtml, xml or some other media type
2. Required text content - title's are required for every entry and
textual content in the form of either an atom:summary or
atom:content element is required. It is possible for either of
these to be empty, but the elements themselves are required,
allowing applications to know explicitly whether or not text
content has been provided.
3. Language tags - The use of xml:lang attributes allow the language
for every piece of text to be explicitly declared.
4. Link titles - The atom:link element has an optional
language-sensitive title attribute that is a rough analog to the
html img tag's alt attribute.
5. Link href lang - The atom:link element specifies an hreflang
attribute that identifies the language of the referenced resource.
6. Link types - The atom:link element specifies a type attribute that
identifies the media type of the referenced resource
7. Accessible (x)html embedded in an atom text element or atom:content
should continue to remain accessible within the Atom feed.
There are a number of areas where accessibility is somewhat inadequate:
1. The atom:icon and atom:logo elements do not have title or type
attributes.
2. Despite requirements for the use of atom:title, atom:summary and
atom:content, it is possible for an entry to contain zero
human-readable text
It would be helpful if someone with a strong accessibility background
could run some tests on a corpus of atom feeds to see what accessibility
issues appear to be most common. As far as I am aware, no such analysis
has ever been done.
- James
Pete Brunet wrote:
I am interesting in evaluating Atom to determine what the accessibility
needs are. I'd limit this, at least for now, to enhancements to help
blind screen reader users. I'd like to eventually develop a list of
recommendations for improvement, e.g development of new technology or
creating usage guidelines. My primary interest is in relation to the
use of Atom in mashups, for example, a web page may start out being
accessible by using W3C WCAG ( Web content Accessibility Guidelines, see
http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/ ) but by incorporating content via
Atom it may become inaccessible. If you've done any research in this
area or if you have pointers to background material I'd like to hear
from you. I am starting at ground zero with respect to Atom (but have
been in the accessibility field for many years) so it's likely that no
information will be too basic :-)
Should further discussion related to accessibility take place on this
list or atom-protocol?
Thanks,
*Pete Brunet*
IBM Accessibility Architecture and Development
11501 Burnet Road, MS 9022E004, Austin, TX 78758
Voice: (512) 838-4594, Cell: (512) 689-4155
Ionosphere: WS4G
