Providing Universal Accessibility using
Semantic Web Technology

The numerous factors in the prevalent context can leverage the overall accessibility to its full potential, only if those are orchestrated together. In absence of a common and unifying approach the industry has little choice in abstaining from legacy and is therefore not very successful in producing universally accessible software. The research being carried out is focused towards achieving a generic accessibility framework by using the notion of "Connecting Ontologies". This is about identifying the existing ontology patterns for making those persistent by applying explicit rules with the help of available rule engines in the semantic web framework. One of the test cases will show how two heterogeneous ontologies, one describing the user impairments and the other describing the user interface characteristics can be connected to generate suitable user interface suggestions.

The presented approach tackles the interaction of application components from a holistic point of view using Connecting Ontologies while preserving the freedom of components' reuse by having individual ontologies of their own. Some open research questions indicating the need to provide accessibility at levels deeper than user interface will be outlined.

His research interests are in the area of information presentation for people with special needs and data integration. He is also a faculty member in the Computer Science Department of Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad. He has worked for seven years in the software design centre of ALCATEL telecom involved in the production and testing of OAM software for Alcatel switches. Also, he worked for two years in Carrier Telephone Industries, Islamabad (a subsidiary of Siemens) for the development of ERP solutions.