Accessibility Matters

XML, by itself, does not have any support for accessibility. XML is extremely flexible, but it needs to flex in the right directions if it is going to support the information necessary to make a document accessible. DITA includes some accessibility features, including some that are unique to DITA. This session is a guided tour of some of the features of the DITA, HTML, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and PDF/UA (Universal Accessibility) standards. It concentrates on file formats rather than User Agent behavior, since the information needed to make accessible HTML or PDF usually needs to be included in, or able to be inferred from, the source XML.

However, it’s rarely the raw XML that is presented to users. The session will also stray into some aspects of styling the content to make it more accessible.

Meet the Presenter

Tony Graham is a Senior Architect with Antenna House, where he works on their XSL-FO and CSS formatter, cloud-based authoring solution, and related products. He also provides XSL-FO and XSLT consulting and training services on behalf of Antenna House.

Tony has been working with markup since 1991, with XML since 1996, and with XSLT/XSL-FO since 1998. He is Chair of the Print and Page Layout Community Group at the W3C and previously an invited expert on the W3C XML Print and Page Layout Working Group (XPPL) defining the XSL-FO specification, as well as an acknowledged expert in XSLT. Tony is the developer of the ‘stf’ Schematron testing framework and also Antenna House’s ‘focheck’ XSL-FO validation tool, a committer to both the XSpec and Juxy XSLT testing frameworks, the author of “Unicode: A Primer”, and a qualified trainer.

Tony’s career in XML and SGML spans Japan, USA, UK, and Ireland. Before joining Antenna House, he had previously been an independent consultant, a Staff Engineer with Sun Microsystems, a Senior Consultant with Mulberry Technologies, and a Document Analyst with Uniscope. He has worked with data in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and with academic, automotive, publishing, software, and telecommunications applications. He has also spoken about XML, XSLT, XSL-FO, EPUB, and related technologies to clients and conferences in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia.

⇐Return to Agenda