Improving the Accessibility of Wikis
On Friday, July 11 2008, there will be a special talk on wikis and accessibility on the 11th International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs ICCHP, which will take place from July 9-11, 2008, University of Linz, Austria (see http://www.icchp.org/programme/friday). There, the results of our research conducted over the last time with the MoinMoin Wiki Engine will be presented. The full paper will be published in the conference proceedings, which are to appear within the Springer Lecture Notes Series in Computer Science.
The main aim of the talk is to bring attention to wiki accessibility for scientific community and to give practitioners a first overview on relevant topics and a first guideline. However, scientific theoretical and empirical work as well as more practical engagement of wiki developers and accessibility experts is needed in future to make wikis more accessible.
Abstract
During the last years wikis have become important information portals. Nevertheless, research in wiki accessibility is an often neglected topic. This talk takes a basic analytical and systematic step inside this new and complex area, explores the peculiarities, possibilities and limitations of wiki accessibility. Wikis give rise to certain accessibility limitations but also do offer new ways and concepts to improve accessibility.
We present basic concepts and extensions to the wiki markup that are to our minds inevitable for improving the accessibility of wikis. It is pointed out, that wiki accessibility is not something totally new but mostly a complex conjunction of yet separated classical discussions. However there are also wiki specific accessibility aspects.
Keywords: Accessibility, Wiki editing, Wiki viewing, Wiki markup
Status of the Project "Accessible Moin"
The project is pending at the moment. There has been a diploma thesis on wiki accessibility. You can find the code on the Moin repository at http://hg.moinmo.in/. Besides that, a lot of coding has been done also in this wiki, see AccessibleMoin. Currently the project needs a new maintainer which tries to refactor the code, discuss it with Moin core development and integrate it step by step in the Moin standard distribution. Also real people with certain disabilites are needed which help testing the concepts and give feedback on improvements. For people with color vision deficiency, color blindness and blindnessd maybe the people at the Nikolauspflege Stuttgart, Germany http://www.nikolauspflege.de/ can help here. Some user tests were already conducted there.
Events
ChristianeTaras will be on the ICCHP on 9th of July.
OliverSiemoneit will be on the conference http://www.einfach-fuer-alle.de/tagung/
Related Pages
BieneAward2007 AccessibleMoin http://hg.moinmo.in/