Accessibility: What Is It? ========================== Liberal democracy requires communication, communication requires accessibility to content. "Tyranny of the majority" (Plato, Mill, de Tocqueville) can only be prevented by (a) education and (b) universal rights. Transcendent access must be distinguished from universal access. The former suggests technology which is utterly transparent, knowledge that is nomenal, with complete unity between the id, ego and superego, and a degree of understanding in the symbolic exchange between participants that is the equivalent of telepathy and utterly undistorted social relations. Following the semantic of Perry, Macken and Israel, disability means the loss of functional ability that is part of the species-specific standard and handicap is the inability to perform some task according to the species-specific standard. Actions are defined as the property of agents, which acts are the particular example, classified according to their properties as executions and accomplishments, with regards to the results. Content Accessibility: Physical =============================== Strong correlation of Internet access with computers per capita (r=0.91), urbanisation, bandwidth. Based on the selected data, an extremely strong correlation coefficient of Internet connectivity is with purchasing power per capita (r = 0.96). Geographic proximity and bandwidth of course is a precondition to connectivity and any other correlations, thus international and intercontinental bandwidth is a highly significant and necessary variable (r = 0.79). Significantly strong one based on urbanization ( r = 0.73), indicating strong advantages of infrastructure concentration as well as industrialization of agricultural production. Use of Unicode character set in content and domain names. Taiwan adopted the Dawu Ma encoding set in the mid-1980s. Hong Kong adopted the character encoding method in 1995 as the "Government Chinese Character Set" with additional Cantonese characters added in 1999. In comparison the People's Republic of China and Singapore have adopted the Guojia Biazhun Ma encoding set. In the recent past, other character encoding sets such as CCII (used for Taiwanese library systems), Chinese Windows 95 etc., were also in common use. ICANN has approved the Internationalized domain name (IDNA) system, which maps Unicode strings into the valid DNS character set. Alternative peripherals to help enablement (motor and dexterity, visual impairments). e.g., the DAISY (Digital Accessible Information SYstem) Consortium. Content Accessibility: Social ============================= An operating proposition is that rationality is best served by providing all the capacity of communication and content. The greater the range of participants or accessibility, the greater the potential universality of the grounded propositions. One other attempt of Internet media censorship is monopolistic telephone companies restricting use of Voice-over-IP connections. Panama's legislation to prevent all VoIP in 2002. In 2010 James Murdoch argued that the BBC, by providing news media online for free, has an unfair competitive advantage. Data security is a critical issue as secure information conflicts with free information. The degree of insecurity and unreliability of computer-mediated communication is distance from the ideal speech situation."You may have heard that 'knowledge is power,' or that information, the raw material of knowledge, is power. But the truth is that only some information is power: reliable information". cf., The Advance Fee Fraud. Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies assert content use by those who hold copyright, including technologies that restrict the use of digital files in terms of access quantity (number and length of views), alteration and saving or copying. These may be managed through the operating system, the application or through device hardware. DRM systems may prevent the anonymous consumption of content, requiring identification for use, work only on specified operating systems or hardware, cause system reboots or even engage in self-destruction. Content Accessibility: Mental ============================= Cognitive impairments and illiteracy (literacy ( r = 0.58),. The biggest challenge in computer accessibility is to make resources accessible to people with cognitive disabilities - particularly those with poor communication skills - and those without reading skills. Content Producer: Solutions =========================== Content producers typically argue in favour of adhering to these standards (e.g., W3C Markup, WCAG, IETF RFC/ Internet STD) and other metrics (e.g., Flesch–Kincaid). Content Producer Reality ======================== IT Enables Conferene sending material with attachments. Why not a URL?. MP's aide who sent an email with an an 8 megabyte attachment with two lines of useful information. http://www.vicnet.net.au/component/content/article/1-category-standard-content/32-it-enables.html Note; programme is only available as MS-Word, PDF or RTF format. Errors found while checking this document as XHTML 1.0 Strict! Result: 13 Errors Top posting: Inline replying is to single out lines or paragraphs, and make comments from the previous email. It makes it much easier to read comments underneath them. It directly targets the questions or and it also means that you don't get off-topic! It also ensures that you actually address all the points in the original email. Apocalypse ========== When the subject is first discovered, there is a burst of research activity in the form of discussions, papers, and meetings. After a while this subsides, corporations discover the subject, and the billion-dollar wave of investment hits. It is essential that the standards be written in the trough between the two ‘‘elephants.’’ If they are written too early, before the research is finished, the subject may still be poorly understood, which leads to bad standards. If they are written too late, so many companies may have already made major investments in different ways of doing things that the standards are effectively ignored.