Exploring making site navigation more accessible, with "well‑known destinations"

Welcome

This is a presentation on the latest work of the WAI-Adapt Task Force.

Facilitator: Lionel Wolberger (UserWay AC rep)

Task Force home: https://www.w3.org/WAI/APA/task-forces/adapt/

This talk: https://raw.githack.com/w3c/adapt/main/presentations/breakouts-day-2024/

Presenters:

• Matthew Atkinson (Samsung R&D UK; speaking as APA WG co‑chair)
• Abhinav Kumar, SAP Labs India

What is this all about?

1. The need for WAI-Adapt

2. Site navigation barriers

3. What support could look like (browser extension demo)

4. WAI-Adapt's proposed solution

5. Next steps (including seeking review)

6. Discussion

The need for WAI‑Adapt

User needs differ

Content Usable

The WAI-Adapt ethos

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and Making Content Usable for People with Cognitive and Learning Disabilities can help us make content accessible, but an adaptable approach needs semantics.

We're aiming for the sweet spot, where a small addition of machine-readable semantics supports a wide range of helpful adaptations.

One area we're exploring is…

Site navigation barriers

User goal

Get to a specific part of a site, quickly and easily.

Website common destinations

• Accessibility statement

• Contact

• Help

• Home

• Log in

What support could look like

WAI-Adapt's proposed approach

Build on existing infrastructure

• The Cognitive Accessibility Task Force identified a series of common destinations; the challenge was how to expose them…

• Through APA WG's accessibility review work, we discovered A Well-Known URL for Changing Passwords, and realised we could do similar.

• Our now-colleauges from SAP approached us independently with the same idea for the accessibility statement.

• This builds on well-known URIs (IANA registry), providing a standard way to expose sites' common destinations.

Explainer and draft specification

• We wrote an "Explainer" of our proposed approach, for review..

• We are also working on a draft of the specification.

We are intending to propose some extensions:

• Registering a namespace; seeing our common destinations as pointers into a site's information architecture.

• Providing a simple, efficient way for the UA to query for all common destinations supported by the site in one request.

Next steps

Next steps

• Seek review from other W3C groups—on the proposed approach; and the destinations to be standardised.

• Establish our basic set of features; refine their design.

  • We are investigating how we might indicate the relevant area of the page, if applicable, when it is visited.

• Seek implementations (sites that follow the spec; assistive technologies that present the results to users).

Discussion