One of the goals of Access For All (AfA) metadata is to improve the findability of resources that meet individual user needs. This page describes a proposal for creating a microformat for Access For All metadata. For our purposes, microformats are essentially collections of pre-defined HTML class names added to elements to provide descriptive information about those resources.

Notes on AfA metadata as classes

Boolean properties in AfA effectively have a third value, which is "not known." For example, the AfA property "colour coding" is used to convey whether or not a resource uses colour to convey information (and therefore may be inaccessible to users who cannot perceive colour). A colour coding value of false implies that it is known definitely that colour is not being used. If it is not actually known for sure (e.g. in the case automatic inference), a property should be ommitted. For this reason, each boolean AfA property would require two alternative classnames: a positive one and a negative one.

Non-boolean AfA properties also give pause for thought. One example is the "display transformable" property which defines a vocabulary of attributes that are (or are not) transformable: font size, foreground colour, etc. Here, a single classname would not be fully sufficient (though it might be adequate for an early draft).

What would this look like in OER Commons?

The primary resource types currently of concern within OER Commons include images, videos and the document as a whole.

Sample Image Markup

<img class="afa-resource has-alt-text has-no-long-description" src="http://foo.org/img.png" alt="alt text here"/>

Sample Video Markup

<video class="afa-resource has-caption has-transcript" src="http://foo.org/img.png">
</video>

Sample Document Markup

<body class="afa-resource is-mouse-accessible afa-is-keyboard-accessible has-no-hazard">

    ...
</body>

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