Case Study: Management and Sharing of Personal Accessibility Needs and Preferences

Introduction

By and large, purveyors of online services and resources have fallen short in accommodating the accessibility requirements of many of the people they want to serve. The problem is challenging but its urgency  is undeniable. This case study suggests that UMA could address one of the core challenges: Providing users the ability to express personal accessibility needs and preferences and to control the release of subsets of that information so that online services can tailor themselves accordingly.

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UMA provides some crucial missing pieces of the puzzle.  UNSD could stand up (or work with an externally hosted) UMA Authorization Manager (AMResource server (RS) and Authorization Server (AS). With appropriate user interfaces, this would allow faculty, staff and students to manage not only their Access4All information itself but also to manage the policies around to whom, and under what conditions, specific subsets of that information are released. In addition, The USND Accessibility Program has worked with the Shibboleth/SAML team to add an attribute to assertions that the SAML Identity Provider issues when users access a SAML-protected resource. This attribute, access4allSet, carries a URL that points to that user's access4all information set on the USND-provided AM.  If the Service Provider/Relying Party at deontix.com is UMA-ready, they the eText service can initiate an UMA protocol conversation to obtain appropriately controlled access to the user's accessibility needs and preferences.  If deontix.com then modifies their eText service to support the UMA protocol modelOnce this is all in place, Madeline could finally take full advantage of the modal logic eText as originally envisioned. I

Solution Scenario

Solution Flow

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