HTML is unquestionably the central document language of the Web, but it is by no means the only language of the Web. In fact, several other specialized types of documents are widely used and have considerable importance. In this chapter, we look at how specialized document types affect accessibility. We do not attempt to consider all possible specialized documents, but rather focus on important examples that illustrate the key issues including Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF), microformats, and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). The Accessibility for RIA (ARIA) initiative is presented as an example of an effort to improve the accessibility of specialized documents, while the DAISY initiative is used as an example of how the same technologies can be harnessed to improve accessibility.
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Notes
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XHTML Role Attribute Module. A module to support role classification of elements, W3C Working Draft, 25 July 2006
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XHTML- 1.0 The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (Second Edition) – A Reformulation of HTML 4 in XML 1.0 – W3C Recommendation, 26 January 2000, revised 1 August 2002
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Munson, E.V., da Pimentel, M.G. (2008). Specialized Documents. In: Harper, S., Yesilada, Y. (eds) Web Accessibility. Human-Computer Interaction Series. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84800-050-6_16
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