The event was organized by the Institute for Information and Documentation (IID) in the Faculty of Information Science and supported by the German-Austrian office of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

In the German words of the organizers:

Die Veranstaltung gibt einen Überblick über die Grundlagen der Barrierefreiheit in der technischen Dokumentation. Dabei stellt das Seminar auch die speziellen Anforderungen an zugängliche Dokumente aus der Sicht der Betroffenen als entscheidende Experten in eigener Sache dar.

My role was to describe the environment in which technical documentation is created and provide an overview of current “best practices” in technical documentation that provide a foundation for accessible documents.

My main point was that accessibility need not be viewed as an expensive afterthought tacked on for the benefit of a minority, but rather as a natural byproduct of documentation done well. This borrows from the concept of “universal design” in that the same best practices used to produce good documentation also provide a solid foundation for accessibility – built-in for the benefit of all users.

In keeping with one of the most important principles in information design – the separation of content and presentation – I prepared my slides using a plain text file in Markdown format and converted to XHTML for presentation via the Simple Standards-based Slide Show System (S5).

If you’d like to see the slides (in German), an archive of the source file and XHTML output is available here. The S5 file is the plain text version that can be opened in any text editor. The HTML version contains the slides as they were presented (requires a standards-compliant browser such as Chrome, Firefox or Safari, with JavaScript enabled).

Recommended Reading

For more information on universal design, PDF accessibility, and issues with the latest version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the following articles on A List Apart are a good place to start:

• The Inclusion Principle
• Facts and Opinions About PDF Accessibility
• To Hell with WCAG 2

Version 1.1 of DITA provides enhanced print publishing capabilities with new DITA Bookmap specialization, including extended book metadata. The standard offers more indexing capabilities with new elements for “see” and “see-also” references. It features new elements for defining structured metadata as well as the ability to add new metadata attributes through specialization.

If enough people in upper management read this article and begin to understand the importance of interoperability and separating content from presentation, it might make designers’ lives much easier.

As the “King” himself says:

It might even help designers who aren’t named Jeffrey Zeldman as they struggle to explain the benefits of web standards to their bosses or clients. At the least, its publication in Business Week will command some business people’s attention, and perhaps their respect.