Overview
The communication of digital content is predicated upon the assumption that participants in the information chain are generally able to interact with that content in a manner with which they are comfortable and where their specific preferences regarding comprehension, usability and applicability are coherent and sustainable. Naturally these preferences may become requirements over time, for whatever reasons, and the changes in the demands of participants must be reflected in easy to use and easy to re-use information processing technologies. These shifts will be reflected in the marketplace as businesses strive for accessible repositories of processing resources.
Without access to such resources, however, the cost of incorporating notions of adaptivity into products, services and research goals will remain prohibitively high and the fundamental connection with accessibility will be lost, just as populations grow older and encounter information consumption difficulties. We must find new ways to help people interact with emerging technologies by engineering frameworks that provide a more creative access to knowledge. And if we are to mainstream access to information, we must provide service infrastructures that can offer accessibility on demand.
The EUAIN Network is the result of extensive preparation in the area of accessible content processing alongside the CEN workshop on Document Processing for Accessibility (managed by the Nederlands Normalisatie-instituut) and the Pro Access project (co-ordinated by the Italian Publishers Association) which will also contribute industry-level guidelines for this area. The EUAIN Network benefits greatly from having as a partner the Federation of European Publishers who represent the collective interests of approximately 85% of all European print publishers, and from the involvement of the enterprise content management industry and several key European publishers active in elearning and multichannel publishing.
Based on this extensive work over the last 5 years, it has been possible to identify key trends in accessible content processing that are likely to be of some importance in the coming years.
The first principle is the clear need for accessibility on demand. There are many different motivations for wanting to create accessible content: be it legislative requirements, good practice, conformity with national guidelines, commercial imperatives etc. In a sense the motivation in itself is a secondary consideration: what is required is a suitably flexible infrastructure to enable on-demand services to thrive.
The second requirement is for accessibility to be embedded within mainstream content creation and production processes at the earliest stages; that is, accessibility from scratch. This principle can be captured by considering the move from accessible content processing to adaptive content processing. In order to build extensibility into a system, the architecture should be such that every element used for processing the information is adaptable. This can be achieved by creating a representation layer which builds an object oriented structure from the information and which is free to adapt the meta relationships and hierarchies intrinsic in that data genus. This is defined by identifying the parameters upon which the structure is built, and ensuring they are interconnected in such a way that promotes future adaptability without degrading the system: which is to say, using the right parameters for adaptive content processing.
The EUAIN Network includes industrial European players with expertise in system integration, content management, large scale content providers, excellent academic partners in structuring and retrieving digital content, semantic indexing, as well as mature networks that bring complementary expertise into the project.