This specification provides web content authors a standard approach to support web users who are persons with various cognitive and learning disabilities, including users who:
The technology described in this specification is intended to be used to programmatically transform the appearance of typical web content including form controls, icons, and other user interface elements into a rendering more familiar and comprehensible to an individual user. Providing additional help is supported, as is automated page simplification. Use cases and relevant vocabulary terms are defined which allow user agents to augment or adapt content to better fit a particular user's particular needs. This helps users with varying needs to understand web content more readily, by simplifying the web interaction, and by avoiding forcing the user to grapple with unfamiliar representations they are ill equipped to comprehend.
This Personalization Tools Module 1.0 is a component of the Personalization Semantics series introduced in the Personalization Semantics Explainer 1.0 document [[personalization-semantics-1.0]].
This specification module enables authors to add semantic information about content at the element level, in order to indicate the priority level of a message for the individual user, or programmatically enumerate tasks that the user is required to complete, so that users who have memory issues can keep track of the steps previously completed. It is anticipated that multiple screen renderings (transformations) will be supported in order to meet the differing needs of different users. Final renderings — generated via helper apps or 3rd-party tools — will be ultimately defined by the user's configuration settings.
This document lists examples of the personalized tools properties, an extension of Personalization Explainer 1.0, including the properties of messageimportance, messagefrom, messagecontext, messagetime, and stepindicator.
Personalization semantics defines a set of properties and values to annotate content. The specific mechanism to apply these properties to content and semantics has not been decided. Several approaches are under consideration and future drafts will show progress. To help understand the proposed properties, this document provides many examples of personalization semantics applied to content, which show attributes beginning with the prefix "data-". This prefix has not been decided on as the definitive approach, but is used as a way to illustrate the examples.
Personalization Tools Module is the third and final part of the Personalization Semantics technical specification, which provides personalization semantics and vocabularies that can be used to mark-up web content with additional semantic information, enabling user agents to augment or adapt content to various user-scenarios based on the user’s personalization settings or preferences. The Tools Module enhances web content by providing additional information about message importance (for filtering), and tracking multi-step activities. User agents can use these semantics to augment or adapt content to the user’s scenario — for example allowing for the prioritization or filtering of on-screen messages. This helps users with varying needs to filter the content by providing support for a way to manage unnecessary distractions.
All the vocabulary in Personalization Semantics Content Module is constructed of properties and their values. Please see our Personalization Semantics Explainer.
The vocabulary implementations included in this document are available at our implementations wiki page.
Note that the attributes and values in this specification do not overide the semantics exposed in the accessibility tree, but rather augment them. In the case of conflict between an element's semantics and the attribute values, validation algorithms should issue a warning but not an error.
The Requirements for Personalization Semantics describes use cases and requirements. This module provides properties to fulfill requirements related to user support tools.
This document uses a number of specific terms related to various cognitive disabilities and related user-needs. Those terms have been defined by the Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility Task Force. See the COGA Glossary for specific definitions.
This specification adds context information about content to the document, and should not affect security.
Although this specification does not expose personal preferences and personal information, third party user agents or proxy server(s) acting upon our semantic information may need to store personal preferences on how to present content to a specific user. It is recommended that any user agent or proxy server implements best practices to protect all personal preferences and personal information.
Any user agent with user settings are recommended to follow best practices to keep user information secure.