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SEMANTIC STYLE SHEETS FOR RENARRATING THE WEBAuthor: Sai Gollapudi Date: 2020-07-09 Report no: IIIT/TH/2020/73 Advisor:Venkatesh Choppella AbstractWe are intrigued by the problem of Web Accessibility. While it is somewhat intuitive to imagine the barriers a disabled person may face in accessing content on the web, they are not the only segments of users facing accessibility challenges. For instance, users with poor English abilities, or users with less domain exposure, or users with different thinking levels also face access barriers when reaching out to mainstream targeted public content. English-only text for the non-English users, technical jargon for the non-technical, scholarly material for the novice user, and local cultural references to those uninitiated may also be seen as barriers to accessibility. To such non-mainstream users,who are often in the minority, the content on the web – which is often designed for the majority – could, at times, be perceived as complex, foreign, incomprehensible and even inaccessible. In our work, we are focused on this aspect of the Web Accessibility problem. We adopt the existing social technique of Renarration as a mechanism to overcome the accessibility problem. At a social level, when humans communicate with a diverse group of listeners, they vary the content to suit the needs of differing communities of their users. For example, a child who is trying to discuss a new mod1 in a game may elaborate it more for a fellow gamer, but may instead simplify it for a parent. Similarly, a scholar may formalize an explanatory text for a fellow scholar, but may simplify or abstract the same to suit the needs of a conventional listener. We use the term renarration to describe this act of generating a variant version of the content from an original source. More formally, renarration can be treated as a semantic transformation function applied on a given web page to generate a variant. In our work, we have chosen to overcome some of the accessibility barriers on the web by applying the technique of renarration to it. And, we equate renarration of web content to a semantic transformation function. And finally, we aspire to find a web architecture that would facilitate such semantic transformation of web content. Given this, the problem statement for our research can now be stated as: What is that web architecture that would enable one or more volunteer users to manipulate, modify, process or transform published web content into one or more alternate views, such that each variant view now may deliver a different meaning to its targeted community of viewers? We move towards the solution space by reviewing the current approaches that are already in use, and also by exploring any earlier work from the e-publishing industry. The design of our solution is further informed by a series of nearly two dozen research undertakings consisting of multiple surveys and experiments. As part of our research, we also explore the theoretical underpinnings for semantic transformation. We study the notion of ”semantics” (as applied in Computer Science literature), and also the notion of ”transformations” as discussed in the mathematical disciplines of geometry and algebra. Through this work, we capture our notion of semantic transformation of web content in an abstract, symbolic notation. Citing ease of use for non-technical users, we focus on the notion of style sheets as one of the many ways to transform web content. As part of this study, we explore the general notion of style sheets and see how specific style sheets – namely, the popular XSLT and CSS style sheets – have been used on the web. We take an abstract view of CSS as a transformation function t operating on HTML marked content c and augmented by style information s, resulting in t = f(c,s). Our notion of semantic transformation is informed by this abstraction and is represented as yet another semantic transformation function t = f(c 0 , l, a, n) where f is still a transformation function, c 0 is now the semantically annotated source, l is the location and description of the semantic structure imposed upon the page by the user, a is the new set of actions that are inclusive of semantics, n represents the conditions that are to be applied, and t is the transformed target page. We call this new semantically oriented style sheet as Semantic Style Sheet or SSS. We take the core ideas behind CSS rule-set and use that to inform the design of our SSS. For instance, the notion of a rule-set underlying a CSS is given by selector : { property : value}. We enhance this rule-set in three dimensions, and infer a simplistic rule-set representation for SSS, which is given as locator : { ( action , condition ) } where {attribute : value} pairs are predefined for each of the locator, actions and conditions parameters. To automate the better instrumentation of a web page we found the conventional tree metaphor inadequate. We further explore other conceptual representations of a web page and present an ontological model as our representation of an arbitrary web page. In the process, we also provide a more comprehensive definition of what is a web page. Additionally, to better facilitate semantic transformation of web content, we propose a method to overlay multiple semantic structures on a given web page. This semantic structure, the original HTML structure and the rendered DOM structure is what constitutes our web page ontology. We validate our ideas of renarration and semantic transformation of web pages by discussing various proofs of concepts that we built and test. We show viability of renarration of web content, and end by showing how a style sheet – i.e. SSS – can be used to generate multiple variants out of a single original source web page. Our belief is that by allowing renarration of web content by way of SSS, we can now empower the end-user, facilitate Inversion of Control (IoC) and lead to a more democratized web. In summary, in this research, we address the web content accessibility problem, especially as it relates to the able-bodied but non main-stream users. We use the existing social technique of renarration and apply it to web content. From a computer science point of view, we treat this renarration as a semantic transformation problem. Keeping the potentially non-technical end-user in mind, we approach the web page transformation problem by way of style sheets. That is, we see semantic transformation being aided by a Semantic Style Sheet. The notion of SSS is realized as a Domain Specific Language. The grammar for this SSS is essentially derived as an extension of the abstractions we unpack from CSS. We further contribute to the case of semantic transformation by proposing an ontology based conceptual model for an arbitrary web page. And we show a way to juxtapose multiple semantic structures on a given, already published web page. Finally, we present this SSS based work as a framework consisting of a SSS-Maker, SSS-Renderer and a SSS-Database. This is how we renarrate the web for improving accessibility. Full thesis: pdf Centre for Software Engineering Research Lab |
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