Group Makes Strides in Improving Web Access for the Disabled
PC Week Online,
by Brian Hannon
September 2, 1998
BOSTON -- XML and Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language are being used to help improve the Web for people with disabilities.
SMIL, which is an Extensible Markup Language-compliant specification, describes media content and the relationship of different media elements. Such things as the spatial layout of a Web page, time spacing between actions, metadata, and the source and destination of links can all be defined using SMIL, which is being developed by the World Wide Web Consortium.
During a meeting here this morning of the National Association of Webmasters at the DCI eBusiness World show, Geoff Freed, of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media, said SMIL enables the media elements of a presentation to be stored separately. This makes it possible for deaf users to download captions to accompany online video, or for blind users to exclude a multimedia file's video portion in favor of an audio description of the action.
The NCAM operates the Web Access Project, a research and development effort for integrating technologies that enhance handicap access to Web sites. The project currently focuses on delivering technologies such as captioning and audio descriptions to the Web sites of public television stations, including Boston's WGBH.
In addition to SMIL, the project is working with Microsoft Corporation's SAMI (Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange) streaming media format and has developed a Web Access Symbol that designers can place on a site to indicate it has been developed with technologies that accommodate users with disabilities.
