CEN Workshop DPA
Given the widespread adoption of ICT within the publishing industries, there is a general interest in the creation and provision of well-formatted digital documents. For those people who are dependent on accessible information, this interest is of central importance, and it is this convergence of interests that stimulated the creation of this Workshop. The WS/DPA has examined some of the ways in which this convergence is helping to build consensus and create new strategies and technologies for the provision of information in formats that are more accessible for everyone.
In the real world, publishers rely on accessibility experts and generally consider accessible information only at the end of the content production chain. This requires considerable amount of efforts to make information accessible for everyone and it is a very hard problem to tackle. This workshop introduces accessibility as a design element in the content production and provides guidelines and best practices how more accessible documents can be produced. Another important issue is that the user requirements for accessible information are not well defined. In this work, we therefore base the elaboration on publishing use cases and scenarios that have been derived together with publishers in order to analyse at least partly the user requirements. Additionally those scenarios provide specific examples of accessible information provision as an entry point to publishing stakeholders.
The CEN Workshop DPA (Document Processing for Accessibility) had the following objectives:
- To bring together all the players in the information provision and e-publishing chain in order to achieve the critical mass significantly to enhance the provision of accessible information at a European level.
- To provide guidelines needed on integrating accessibility approaches and workflows within the document management and publishing process rather than as just a specialised, additional service.
- To raise awareness and stimulate the adoption at local, regional, national and European levels of the emerging formats and standards for the provision of accessible information and to find ways of ensuring that technological protection measures do not inadvertently impede legitimate access to information by people with print impairments
Based on those objectives the workshop document :
- describes the outcomes from the DPA Workshop activities
- provides an elaboration of relevant standards and their possible use in the publishing sector
- examines the different formats required for accessible information provision
- provides a systematic overview of relevant conversion processes and related structured information activities
- examines possible scenarios of use within the publishing sector
- provides real-life case studies and instances of best practice
- identifies areas for further research and systematisation
The Workshop was initiated by the EUAIN Network, managed by NEN (Nederlands Normalisatie-instituut) and is available from the CEN website.