SADIe: Semantics for Accessibility

	Special Guest Lectures
	SADIe: Semantics for Accessibility
	Sean Bechhofer
	School of Computer Science, University of Manchester
	Johnston Hall 338 August 24, 2006 - 09:45 am
Abstract: Visually impaired users are hindered in their efforts to access the largest repository of electronic information in the world -- the World Wide Web (Web). The web is visually-centric with regard to presentation and information order / layout, this can (and does) hinder users who need presentation-agnostic access to information. Transcoding can help to make information more accessible via a restructuring of pages, but requires potentially costly annotation of pages. I will outline the problem and describe some preliminary work on an approach based on annotation made directly to style sheet information. The annotations are used by tools in order to manipulate and present web pages in a form that provides easier access to content, while the annotation of style sheets allows the annotation of large numbers of similar pages with less effort.

Speaker's Bio: Sean Bechhofer is a Lecturer in the Information Management Group in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. His research interests lie in the development and use of knowledge representation technology to support what is now commonly known as the Semantic Web. He has been involved in the development of languages, applications, editors, parsers, APIs and interfaces to support the use of Description Logic (DL) and knowledge representation technology and was responsible for OilEd, one of the first ontology development tools to utilise a DL reasoner. Sean also has interests in hypermedia -- through the COHSE project Sean was involved in marrying together hypermedia and semantics, producing an early example of a Semantic Web system.

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