Lightweight Mark-Up for Low Cost Semantics
Proceedings of the ISWC 2004 Workshop on Knowledge Markup and Semantic Annotation (Semannot'2004), Hiroshima, Japan, CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org), (November 2004)Abstract
Visually impaired users are hindered in their efforts to access the largest repository of electronic information in the world, namely the World Wide Web (Web). A visually impaired user's information and presentation requirements are different from a sighted user in that they are highly egocentric and non-visual. These requirements can become problems in that the web is visually centric with regard to presentation and information order / layout, this can (and does) hinder users who need presentation-agnostic access to information. Encoding semantic information directly into pages can help to alleviate these problems and support users who wish to understand the meaning as opposed to the presentation and order of the information. If this is to happen in the 'real world', however, authors must incur no 'semantic overhead' when creating pages. In addition, resistance will be encountered to measures that threaten to compromise web design. In this paper we describe preliminary work towards an approach enabling a low-cost, lightweight solution to semantic encoding.