Planning and Managing Web Accessibility

background: https://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/wiki/Planning_and_Managing_Web_Accessibility

draft updated resource page: http://w3c.github.io/wai-planning-and-implementation/Overview.html

<kevin> https://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/wiki/Feedback:_Implementation_Plan_for_Web_Accessibility

Kevin: Following on from last week, I have put into GitHUb the suggestions, we looked at structure for subsequent document
... in the feedback document, I put a few questions. Consideration of the personas, etc Related to that is the question of how the structure is providing access to the info.
... are the sections right? any missing? The first sections on establishing responsibilities are more robust. The idea is to establish a consistent approach to each, some key actions, and a bit of background.
... trying to facilitate the readability. How well did we do that?

Shadi: Is everyone clear on the current status and what we are looking for?
... Kevin have you seen the current comments?

Kevin: Yes and am trying to understand and incorporate comments.

Shadi: Why the colors?

John: I took sections and color coded what I copied from the document. I used the strike through formatting. The ones that have styling attached to it are my comments and the ones that are plain unstyled are from the doc. So dark brown bold text is inserted, replacement text. Italics are side comments.

Shadi: So it looks as though you have a comment at the beginning, inerted text etc. Thanks for the comments, they are very helpful. Kevin, how shall we proceed?
... let's look at overall page structure. What we have in this page now is the overall structure of what we want the page to look like as a first revision. Note that we expect to do extensive revisions after Sept but for now are trying to work with what we have.
... So Jonathan, can you read and explain your first comment?

Jon: When I was reading, I found many things that I would omit, change and add in order to help people understand how to integrate accessibility. I found that many times in my career I have experinced people trying to do this and wanted to reflect that. I thought it would be useful to break this down into steps that are applicable no matter what size and development philosophy that could be included
to get people to the goal - a state of awesome accessibility.

Jon: depending on how knowledgable your team is, you may need to budget for training, etc. There were many things in this presentation that I think are not realistic. The emphasis of the organizational size should be less, I think. You have to do the same things just more of it on big organizations.
... For example if you're a samll company, you may need just one template for style guides for something like Word docuemtns. If you are a larger company, you need more tempaltes for different departments with differesnt styles, etc. But you will still need the same things...
... a knowledgeable source about what it means to be conformant, an admin to oversee and enforce, training to help everyone understand, etc

Shadi: So by saying that the policy is the starting point, you are diverging from our previous perspective which was that it came further down the line.
... let's open to the group. Where is the starting point, what are the drivers?
... for people who may be accessibility champions with no authority to implement policy, this may not be feasible.

Jon: That was not really my point

Shawn: In Kevin's rework, policy development is the second step. The question I had is what of the exisiting information in the draft or the existing doc, what was not included?

Jon: From this section?

Shawn: You said that in your approach somethings should be deleted...what are those?

Jon: Well, I was not able to get to everything yet, I did not purposely omit anything

Kevin: Jon, you said you wanted to highlight roles. Is that because you found it was not clearly referenced?

Jon: Yes, I think it is extremely important but that this section was not especially clear.

Kevin: I like bringing the personas in as you suggested. That accessibility may be part of the jobs of many rather than something necessarily in the job title of everyone who has some accessibility responsibility.

Jon: Yes and if we want to continue to talk about what I had in mind we can do it off line.

Shadi: Your critique then Jon is that the focus is on the job responsibilities rather than the relation of the roles to the task. You are suggesting a subtle shift, is that right?

Jon: yes

Shadi: So if we change the section title to Roles and Responsibilities it may be useful in order to integrate some of these ideas.

Kevin: That seems to be more concrete and practical as well.

Shadi: So staying on this one section, Jon any other high level comments?

Jon: Wanted to point out that roles are something that should be addressed a bit later in the process rather than to start there. Determining roles happens after the functional aspects, existing expertise and policy matters are determined

Shawn: As I understand it, the next three after the intro are examples from specific cases. I think it needs to be grouped.

Kevin: In terms of format, I would see that type of case examples to be still visible or expandable?

Shawn: I had not thought about hidden or expanded...no strong feelings

Kevin: But the section title would be visible

Shadi: I'm inclined just to be skeptical of providing another layer of heading to group the examples

Kevin: Given the constraints we have, I will look at how to integrate and maintain visual appeal

Shawn: If a heading was provided with no additional text other than the heading examples (with text within them) - that would be easier for me to process
... another question for the group..if you expand smaller teams, international web sites, what is your opinion of the improtance, value of that info?

AnnaBelle: Well, my inital reaction is kind of "Duh, yeh of course" But I am not yet grounded enough in the document to know if it is actually useful

Wayne: I am kind of wondering if scenarios are not better in this section than personas. They may be more useful. Situational without a back story to cut it down a little.

Shawn: Your questioning if the responsible roles are useful here?

Wayne: No, just present it as a generic actor in the organization without a name or background.

Shawn: We may be looking at different documents

Shadi: Go to the section called "Background" and look at establish responsible roles.

Wayne: Yes this is just what I was thinking.

Shadi: Now Jon, want to talk more about your suggestion for changing to a more persona approach?

Jon: It might be better to establish the personas early on that we will use later

Shawn: We developed the personas originally to help US develop the document, to help us be sure we address the needs of the all who we think would need different kinds of info.

Jon: Personas are more often used as marketing vehicles these days to help people identify

<shawn> [ shawn also didn't mention that there are sooooo many differnt personas that it would be quite lengthy. also risk if there is NOT a persona that matches my situation, I feel left out ]

Kevin: It can be a quite powerful tool for encouraging reader engagement. We may not have the opportunity to explore that thoroughly at this time.

Shadi: The reason for the examples here is that this info is fairly generic and general. The problem is that once we give examples, people think why is MY particular profile not included. It may raise expectations we may not be able to meet.

Wayne: And we must consider what we need to do in the short vs the long term. We had considerations of space.

Shawn: We have a short term assignment to update the existing document and then follow on phases that will allow us to do more.

Shadi: What are people's reactions to "Accessibility Outsourcing"

<AnnaBelle> Like it

<Wayne> +1

Shawn: It doesn't quite seem to fit here. Something might be good to say about this, but not sure that all of the content makes sense in this context.

<metzessive> needs work

Shadi: With smaller teams is there a benefit that we are signaling how this docuemnt might be useful to you?

Shawn: If so it should be in the intro, not here

Shadi: Is it worth a mention somewhere else?

Shawn: There are two very long sentences here. Like with "Smaller" and "Intern'tnl" there is useful info but could be said much more succinctly.
... like "Make sure to add time to complete tasks"
... some of the points that take three paragraphs can be said in a few sentences

Shadi: In a smaller team, individuals will have more roles, this may be more of an issue.
... how about adding a small sentence, in some situations, such as on samller teams, one individual may have multiple roles. In that way, we could address smaller teams inline rather than a separate section.

Kevin: what do you mean "inline"

<shawn> +1 to shadi to put the small team comment along with the main point - "Assign responsibilities across different areas of the project, such as design, content creation, development and quality assurance"

Shadi: The concern is that if a smaller company reads about all of these roles they may think "Well we are a three person shop,not way for us to assign all those" So early on, make the point that one individual may be able to take on several roles.

<shawn> +1 that "In this case it is important that sufficient resources, such as time and training, are provided to ensure the role can be performed along with any other responsibilities." really applies to *all* orgs, not just small teams

Eric: I asked someone who had been in the business of implementing accessiiblity, and the reality is that organizations say - Just go and do it - and hard to get the support from the organziation that is actually and practically needed.
... You must have a clearly defined goal in order to outsource effectively. And many of these things apply not just to small teams and so this could be much more straightforward and not sectionalized.

Shadi: What are you proposing?

Eric: I think the aspect that an organization has to have distributed responsibility for accessibility itself. That will support communication to the hired agency.

Shadi: So you are saying that responsibility still resides within the agency regardless of outsourcing

Wayne: Someof this relates back to the section, the background about roles. When we do that table where we give examples of responsble roles, we are confusing people with the roles. Use Design Management rather than Design Manager, so it is not creating expectation of person.

Kevin: Yes it does confuse a bit the function with the person. Again, though we are trying to come back to a practical scenario and touching on the responsibility of the functional role not necessarily the person.

Wayne: Yes, I got the specifics of the roles, but the inital impression is to encourage the perception of a person, not a collection of job duties. I think the classification of job duties should be emphasized rather than the person.

Shawn: It looks like right now, the example within the table/box, has people roles which might help people identify. But Wayne is saying it needs to be presented more as a function.

<shawn> [ for the record - I'm not sure which I prefer ;-]

Wayne: Yes and then there is created a need to talk about samll teams because of the need for so many "people"

AnnaBelle: Inconsistent use of Oxford comma - Shall I clean it up?
... the standard we have agreed to I beleieve is to use the Oxford comma.

Shadi: OK there are things that are related to this, such as the ensuring of sufficient resources. Maybe this is one of the places we need to expand and a hint is sufficient here.
... there are several things here, even more apparent than Roles that can be referenced without blowing up this section so much. Kevin, how does it sound to you...like maybe there are things that are a bit tangential in this context, can be summarized and then expanded later in the document

Kevin: So many things are interrelated in the planning it is hard to unravel. There are verticals within each topic. So we have to determine what of this is essential and what is too much

Shadi: Yes we should look at what we can merge and look at other ways of addressing these interrelated topics without saying too much here. Can we return to the overall document structure?
... we can always slice these topics in different ways and we will most likely create sub sections. But for now, what do people feel about the flow of these sections? Making sense? Is it clear that they are not necessarily squential? Is anything missing or jarring, should be differently positioned?

Eric: I immediately wondered why it is an ordered list. If you say it is not sequential, why is it numbered? It is not clear to me since som of the things at the bottom should be done before others that are higher in the list.

Shadi: Making it more clear that these are not meant to be sequential and the default order can still be changed around. Why do you think one comes before another?

<shawn> [ cannot get a policy accepted unles there is awareness ]

Eric: Only if you have awareness within your organziation will you have the impetus to create a policy and apply it.

<shawn> [ me not think of org buy-in a part of policy]

Kevin: There may be terminology questions here. I meant for organizational awareness to be the way in which the motivation and skills for accessiiblity and corporate responsibility are increased more than the intial organziational buy-in which seems to be what Eric is referencing

Shadi: I wonder if some of the steps can be rolled together, esp around maintaining and monitoring

Shawn: Agreed to not have them numbered, say explicitly in the intro that different sequence is likely, developing buy-in comes before policy and may be one of the most important aspects for success (or at least minimizing pain)

Shadi: is this new content? is it something that we don't already have?

Kevin: Yes it is but it is a quite significant aspect, we can incorporate buy-in into the introduction.

Shadi: It could get lost from a pure content view

<AnnaBelle> Like term "buy-in"; speaks more clearly to me

Shawn: There is a lot of stuff in the intro that does not show up later on. Many people skip, so intro content is at risk of getting lost if not repeated elsewhere.

Shadi: We had said we do not want to create new content, but it seems as though we are suggesting to make an exception for this important concept.

Eric: Kevin told us what was his intent about organizational awareness is more about implementing accesibility.

Shadi: Other reactions to the flow? the sections? We are trying to find the balance here between what we have - tools, training, etc - and that titles themselves have enough content to provide a quick start. Not sure we are there yet.

<shawn> [ one of the things I missed from Jon's list was Tools ]

<shawn> [ /me did like a lot of Jon's list, ftr :-]

Shadi: Lots of take aways. Kevin and I will need to debrief and take another pass. We'll come back with a more developed iteration by mid week. Please allocate time to have alook at that

Shawn: They will be thinking about what to do for this first step. We have a plan and commitment to continue to expand

Evaluation Tools

<shawn> http://w3c.github.io/wai-eval-tools/

Shawn: This is the latest prototype

Eric: The first thing is to ask for a fresh perspective from those who were not here last week
... I have implemented the suggestions for how to dispay the filtering criteria
... what do you think, those who were not here last week? first impressions?

Helle: The filters look very good. My first impression is very positive, nothing jumped out that I did not like.
... I was trying to set filtering parameters and not sure that it worked for me.

Shadi: eric, known bugs?

Eric: (reads from email) http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-eo/2014JulSep/0021.html

Helle: When I choose Sec 508, WCAG2 is greyed out

Eric: Yes, because we don't have 508 as a filter yet

Shawn: But you cannot deselect

Shadi: It is a particular combination becasue there is no tool that does both. In this tool, WCAG2 will be auto-preselected shich will grey out some other slections

<Helle> q

Shawn: I am not sure you want to prevent people from choosing

<Wayne> +1

Shadi: Do you prefer that if you select two things for which there is not tool that does both, would you prefer 0 results?
... to prevent you from adding filters and ending with no results

<shawn> +1 to not expand the hover

Jon: A tangent but is there a way to not make it expand on hovers? Self-expanding list.

AnnaBelle: I was trying hard to hang on to beginner's mind and not pay attention to discussion too much. I like the layout, echoing the tutorials. But my initial reaction is negative. The hover and things scrolling down, may be minor and could possibly get used to it. But if I were to come into an evaluation tool from the W3C I would want a qualitative filter.
... once I realized this is not qualitative, it seems useless to me and I would not use it.

Shadi: An unsolvable problem since we have a mandate to remain neutral.

AnnaBelle: My background as a librarian says that it is not unsolvable. it does not ahve to be a judgement but can get usage, metrics, and auto filter according to platform - I am approaching on Mac, filter against Windows.

Sahwn: To clarify. There are things that as W3C we absolutley cannot do - privilege one vendor over another.

Shawn: The scope is to filter by search criteria

AnnaBelle: I understand but I want you all to hear that without that, it is not especially valuable and will probably be less used than we want it to be for developers like me
... what about auto-filtering by platform?

<Jon> Confused why we're using only these specific guidelines? Are they just placeholders?

<yatil> Yes, Jon.

Shadi: But because I search with a Mac does not mean I am looking for a Mac tool. I personally do not like when they assume they know what I want because of the device I happen to be using at the time. We can consider a possible extension

Jan: Rather than autofiltering for platform, maybe platforms could be added to the filters for selection.

Shawn: Or to be able to save or send a set of filters to someone else.

<shawn> add to list: ability to save the filters and send link

AnnaBelle: My issue was that I felt "overwhelmed" from the first. So a suggestion to provide only what is needed.

<shadi> [I totally hear you AnnaBelle!!!]

<Wayne> We should use Query By Example logic

<shawn> [ Shawn reminds people that we encourage you to look at this during the week and send comments before the meeting! (Jon wins the award for that this week) ]

Wayne: On the logic of the query, and/or and that kind of input. Since this is a convention that has been used, the possibility of checking two filters and having no result is what people expect and are used to.

Helle: First of all, the checklist is like you are doing both, but why not allow it to be either / or - find me either 508 or WCAG rather than both. And I would NOT like the system to filter for devices.

<shawn> [ shawn has other comments that she will put in wiki ]

<shawn> +1 for AND filters

<AnnaBelle> Is there time for usability tests or is deadline too tight?

Shadi: Agreed to think as a future consideration, but AB's main point was the overwhelming nature and the lack of qualitative. But now, we want to consider that as you add filters, you get fewer results. Another approach, suggested by Helle is to have it be a "find either of these"

WAI WG documentsfor review

<shawn> Developers' Guide to Features of Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools Draft http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2014JulSep/0014.html

Shawn: First is the "Developer's Guide..." timeline is mid-August

<Wayne> ok

Sharron: yes I will review

Shawn: Approach is to generally submit individual comments and if you want EO discussion, bring it to the group.

Sharron: Will convene the three of us, post our comments on the wiki and with no objection, will send along to WCAG

Shawn: EO point of view, so be aware of Denis's hat at the time and separate his personal and EO perspectives
... also update to WCAG support docs, check the email

<shawn> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2014JulSep/0013.html

Shawn: comment deadline coming up in August as well

Wayne: ARIA?

Shawn: Yes new ARIA techniques

Wayne: will review

Tutorials schedule

Shadi: Is now ready for final review - the Cover page, Images, and tables
... now is the time for copyedits, small revisions, have addressed major comments previously made

Shawn: So this becomes Priority 1, Sharron will you finalize the email to send to the group? Would like to have sign off early next week.
... thanks for staying late, details for tutorial review coming, happy Friday