FINAL REPORT
DE 4105 - WAI
Appendix/Deliverable 3.1 - Part of WP03
Exploratory PICS Rating System
WEB ACCESSIBILITY INITIATIVE
Daniel Dardailler
TELEMATICS APPLICATIONS PROGRAMME (DISABLED & ELDERLY SECTOR)
A PICS rating system is a file (standard extension is .rat) that represents a set of categories and vocabulary used to assess a particular domain.
In our case, the domain is the level of accessibility of web pages.
This can be used in multiple ways, for instance by search engine (as in: give me all the pages about that *and* that are "Non Graphical Access Level" < 2) or just as a storage format in a static database of page rating.
The most difficult part if to come up with a semantic mapping as to what the various scale level means (Fully accessible, Mostly accessible, etc) and this is clearly a task for the newly formed WAI Evaluation&Repair Interest Group.
In this prototype, we have defined 2 categories:
Each category has a 5 scale-value:Fully,Mostly,Poorly accessible and Mostly, Fully inaccessible
Here is the full access.rat file.
((PICS-version 1.1)
(rating-system "http://www.w3.org/LabelBureau/WAI")
(rating-service "http://www.w3.org/Ratings/WAI")
(name "WAI")
(description "The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) rating service for the Internet")
(category
(transmit-as "ng")
(name "Non Graphical Access Level")
(description "Level of access to the information on a page for a
user agent with no graphical screen capability")
(label
(name "Full")
(description "Fully Accessible without a graphical screen")
(value 0) )
(label
(name "Most")
(description "Mostly Accessible without a graphical screen")
(value 1) )
(label
(name "Poor")
(description "Poorly Accessible without a graphical screen")
(value 2) )
(label
(name "Bad")
(description "Mostly Inaccessible without a graphical screen")
(value 3) )
(label
(name "None")
(description "Completely Inaccessible without a graphical screen")
(value 4) )
)
(category
(transmit-as "na")
(name "No Audio Access Level")
(description "Level of access to the information on a page for a
user agent with no sound capability")
(label
(name "Full")
(description "Fully Accessible with no sound")
(value 0) )
(label
(name "Most")
(description "Mostly Accessible with no sound")
(value 1) )
(label
(name "Poor")
(description "Poorly Accessible with no sound")
(value 2) )
(label
(name "Bad")
(description "Mostly Inaccessible with no sound")
(value 3) )
(label
(name "None")
(description "Completely Inaccessible with no sound")
(value 4) )
)
)
Labels are encoded in PICS in the form of:
(PICS-1.1 "http://www.w3.org/Ratings/WAI" labels exp "1997.12.31" for "http://www.foo.com/foo.html" by "DD" ratings (ng 1 na 0))
meaning the page http://www.foo.com/foo.html has a
Since modern browsers already implement the PICS standard, we can try out this access.rat file in Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer for instance, and look at the generated User Interface.