Accessibility on the Web through semantic and social renarrations

Abstract

The Web was proposed in 1989 with the vision of being an open platform that everyone can access. This vision of providing accessibility to all people is one of the primary goals of the Web. To this end, the (WAI) was launched by W3C in 1997 mainly to improve the accessibility of Web for the people facing physical accessibility barriers. While such work is crucial, it falls short in delivering true accessibility, since further barriers to understanding the information exist. Such barriers are associated with the ability of a person to understand the information that reaches them, such as language, literacy, culture, and expertise. To overcome such barriers, this work utilizes the renarration method, the process of forming an alternative version for a pre-existing web document to reach alternative audience. Accordingly, this work proposes an ontology that represents renarrations, web documents, and social interactions of renarrators and renarrations, and interconnections between them to support creation of an ontology driven social renarration platform. A prototype that utilizes Solid, a web decentralization project, has been created to demonstrate the feasibility of the social renarration approach and the suitability of the ontology for supporting the realization of a decentralized social renarration platform that protects the provenance and privacy.