Use Cases

Requirements for Personalization Semantics [[personalization-semantics-requirements]] elaborates many use cases that further contextualize the above summary of user needs. These use cases form the basis of requirements for this technology.

Examples include:

Assuming an author can make it programmatically known that a button sends an email, and based on user preference settings:

• The button might then render as an alternative term, and/or furnish an additional tooltip that is understandable by the individual user.
• It could automatically include F1 help that explains the send function in simple terms.
• It could be identified with a keyboard shortcut that is always used for send (Submit).

In addition, the button could be identified as important and always rendered or rendered in an emphasized form.

Another use-case is the use of Symbols. Some users might have a severe speech and/or physical impairment and communicate using symbols, rather than written text, as part of an Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) system. The use of symbols to represent words is their primary means of communication for both consuming and producing information.

Symbol users face a wide variety of barriers to accessing web content, but one of the main challenges is a lack of standard interoperability between different symbol-sets, or a mechanism for translating how a concept is represented in one symbol-set to how it may be represented in another symbol-set.

• An assisted living home authors adult education courses and life-skills content, for example, how to make dinner using a microwave. Even within their core user-base, different users are accustomed to different symbol-sets. The authors need to be able to create content for all their users.
• A large banking site wants people to be as autonomous as possible while using their services. They have provided augmented symbol references onto their core services so that the user-interface can be rendered usable for users of symbol-sets, without specifying which symbol-set is being used: they need to programmatically support multiple symbol-sets.
• People who know different symbol-sets wish to talk to each other. A government agency is making information sheets about human rights and patient rights and are seeking feedback from impacted users. They add symbols from a common symbol-set to support a majority of different users, but they wish to also support people who use or require different symbols, to enable them to both read the content, as well as edit it.

It should be noted that users who depend on symbols for daily communication needs often also struggle the most with mistranslations, as they have severe language disabilities. Inferring what was meant by using an incorrect symbol will not be achievable for many users. This rules out relying on machine learning until it is almost error free.

In another use-case, a user has dyscalculia and has difficulty understanding numbers. They struggle with understanding websites that use numbers to convey information. For this reason, the numeric information must also be provided in an alternative format that the user can understand.

• The user wishes to get the latest weather report for their city and goes to an online weather site. For the day’s forecast, it shows a high of 95 ℉ and a low of 40 ℉, which is not helpful for this particular user. Allowing this numeric information to be presented instead as an image, symbol, or as written text would benefit the user (i.e. instead of 95 ℉, a picture of someone wearing shorts and a tee-shirt with the sun above or simply a text alternative of “Very warm”, and instead of 40 ℉ a picture of someone wearing a jacket with pants, or a text alternative of “Very cold”).

It is important to note that people with dyscalculia are often very good with words, so long text can be better than short numbers.

Finally, consider someone with autistic spectrum disorder and with a learning disability. They may be a slow reader but find numbers clear and precise. They may go to the same website and find all the word and images unclear and the animations cause cognitive overload. They want the same information with more numbers and less words.

More examples can be found on https://github.com/w3c/personalization-semantics/wiki/Use-cases.

More information on persona and user needs can be found in https://www.w3.org/TR/coga-usable/.

Out of Scope

While the intention of this work is to introduce a new set of attributes to support Personalization, the following work items are out of scope:

• Develop an API for browsers or other user-agents
• Develop or produce supporting technology (browser extension, stand-alone software, etc.)
• Develop or produce an authoring tool to support the new attributes
• Produce a symbol set for data-symbol

We encourage a the development of these items and a list of implementations can be found on our wiki.

Technology Comparison Summary

The task force reviewed various vocabulary options before deciding upon the use of the data- HTML attribute syntax. The list of technologies included:

• RDFa Lite - (https://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-lite/)
• HTML Microdata (https://www.w3.org/TR/microdata/)
• Additional ARIA-* attributes
• AUI-* a new, personalization specific set of attributes
• A new single attribute, purpose, to encode both properties and values
• A new single attribute with properties and values encoded using inline css syntax of key/value pairs
• An extension of the above single attribute using CSS key/value pairs and simple text content
• Three new attributes for token, value, and URI, respectively
• Value pairs - a personalization type attribute and an associated value attribute.
• Negotiate new personalization attributes into native host languages
• Embed personalization data via JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)
• Use of the existing data- attribute mechanism of HTML

• Authoring - ease of authoring and potential ambiguity between personalization and existing features
• User Agents - ease of determining and parsing the properties & values and the ability to implement as an extension
• Host Languages - requirement for special host language support, works in multiple languages, integrates with ARIA and HTML, easy extension of the vocabulary, and needed number of new features
• Functionality - necessity of multiple properties and interaction between properties, integration with other vocabularies, likely search engine support for content alternatives, and typed value support
• Strategy - avoid segregation of accessibility from other features, provide a clear path to join with other W3C personalization efforts, and stable enough to avoid modification of authored content over time

The details of our research and discussion is documented on the Comparison of ways to use vocabulary in content (https://github.com/w3c/personalization-semantics/wiki/Comparison-of-ways-to-use-vocabulary-in-content) and Prototypes with data dash(https://github.com/w3c/personalization-semantics/wiki/Prototypes-with-data-dash-*-(Take-2)) pages in our Wiki.

We presented some of these options at the TPAC 2018 Personalization Plenary Day presentation and provided a working example using the data- attribute to add personalization features. The data- solution was recommended by representatives of several working groups attending our presentation and discussions. See the Vocabulary Implementations section in the Expainer document (https://w3c.github.io/personalization-semantics/#vocabulary-implementations) for further details on the use of data- attributes.

Properties

Properties are the main units of personalization types supported by the vocabulary. A given property supports a specific type of personalization. That property would only be used once on a given piece of content, but multiple different properties could be used on the same piece of content to address different needs.

Values

Values provide the specific personalization information for the property. The possible values for each property are elabrated in the definition of the property in the modules. Some properties require the value to come from a predefined list of possible values, others can accept arbitrary strings, and some may accept multiple values. The value may be one of the following types:

true/false

Value representing either true or false, with a default "false" value.

true/false/undefined

Value representing true or false, with a default "undefined" value indicating the state or property is not relevant.

ID reference

Reference to the ID of another element in the same document

ID reference list

A list of one or more ID references.

integer

A numerical value without a fractional component.

number

Any real numerical value.

string

Unconstrained value type.

token

One of a limited set of allowed values.

token list

A list of one or more tokens.

URI

A Uniform Resource Identifier as defined by RFC 3986 [[RFC3986]]. It may reference a separate document, or a content fragment identifier in a separate document, or a content fragment identifier within the same document.