Overcoming barriers in virtual museums

Oreste Signore

«Archeologia e Calcolatori» 2007, Supplemento 1, 221-241

Abstract

A virtual museum is a real challenge, especially when the goal is to contextualize its content and overcome physical, cognitive and cultural hurdles. A good user interface should provide everyone with an equivalent experience, irrespective of their disabilities. On the other hand, disability is a stage in everyone’s life. Web accessibility has several components, and is not merely a technical issue. A good quality web site should be designed for usable accessibility, considering both usability and accessibility issues, giving to the disabled user the sense of inclusion and equal opportunity to participate. Web accessibility has been a concern to several governments, and in many countries accessibility is required by law. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has provided web accessibility guidelines since the birth of the web, addressing all the web accessibility components. Presently a new release of WCAG is going to be issued, characterized by several important novelties (baseline, conformance level, etc.), which will be a big step forward from the previous WCAG. W3C Recommendations also include some accessibility features for 2D graphics and multimedia. The Rich Internet Applications are emerging, and W3C defined a roadmap towards a declarative markup. To overcome the difficulties related to different cultures, Semantic Web technologies and ontologies can give the appropriate support for exchanging and sharing knowledge.

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