20 years on: the Dexter Model of Hypertext and its impact on web accessibility

  • Authors:

  • Robert Dodd

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Teesside, UK

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing - 20 years after Dexter Hypertext Reference Model
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

In 2008 the Dexter Model of Hypertext will be 20 years old. Even after 20 years, the structure of Web documents, and the syntax we use to describe them and their relations to one another is still noticeably bound up with that 1980's view of content navigation. With the W3C having launched a consultation exercise on HTML 5, and a browser war imminent over the future of ECMA/Java Script, it is time to reconsider what the discipline of accessibility requires of a hypertext model. This article considers both the original Dexter Model, and, briefly, the related Amsterdam Model of Hypermedia, in terms of the needs of assistive technology, and proposes an alternative, extended view of Hypertext of which the original Dexter Model can be considered a subset.