The EOWG meeting was convened to review the editor's resolution of previous issues with the Tables tutorial based on EO survey input, to confirm the process of tutorial review in general, and to set expectations for how EO will work in 2015. Shawn and Eric resolved to check on how they respond to public comments on the tutorials and how to formally to do that going forward. In review our work processes, EO participants indicated a desire to have "Work for the week" posted to the wiki and pointed to in the weekly email reminder, but not duplicated in each place. Surveys are agreed to be a good way to communicate and minimize the time needed in meetings. Jan introduced a need within her company for a simplified way to communicate the impace of different levels of conformance on real people. Jan will work with Wayne and Sharron to define a deliverable and bring for group consideration. Recognizing that the friendliness and camararderie of this group is one of its strong points, we agreed to agreed to leave personal story telling out of the main business discussions of the meetings in recognition of the volume of work coming our way. As we use the surveys to become more efficient we will set aside sharing time at the end of meetings when time allows.
<yatil> https://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/35532/EOweek7Jan2015/results#xq1 -> Survey results
Shawn: Look at agenda, link to survey answers, let's take a minute to skim the responses
... Eric, what is your perspective as editor?
Eric: In HTML4, scope was an option for table headers. Even though that is not an option in HTML5 a request was made to add that as an example in simple tables. Most EO members agreed not to add it and I am with you there.
Shawn: Are the comments in there accurate?
Wayne: I misread the question and will update my answer to the first question.
Eric: Yes although other comments, inlcuding yours Shawn, are correct.
... OK we will inform the commenter and point to the discussion.
... We could discuss how we want to handle and priortize questions about Techniques in the future.
... this one is pretty clear, it is not a priorotized thing or recommended technique but more of a fallback if you can't do anything else. How do we want to handle in future?
Sharron: Probably best to discuss when Shadi is on the call
Shawn: Eric, will you make a survey question about that?
<yatil> https://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/35532/EOweek7Jan2015/results#xq2 -> Survey results
Shawn: Take a moment to skim the comments. Eric what is your response.
Eric: The June 6th meeting indicated that in the real world, the scope attribute leaves much less ambiguity and we agreed to add scope to most all of the tables except the very most basic simple one. I have a hard time to write an example to write it and say it is optional.
Shawn: Is there something like "not needed for conformance but is useful for real world accessibility based on screen reader support for tables"
<yatil> [[If the table is larger or its content is more ambiguous, the scope attribute should be used to avoid confusion. See Multi-directional Tables for more guidance on such tables.]]
Wayne: I still don't see how the upper left corner cell can ever be programmatically determined without scope
Shawn: What if you changed the first sentence to something more like the offered example. Are you comfortable with that?
Eric: Yes to make it more clear.
Shawn: To make the difference clear between best practice and requirements
RESOLUTION: Leave scope in examples and edit one sentence to make distinction more clear.
Shawn: The feedback from Shailesh included several comments. Only two were ut in the survey for comment, but I encourage everyone to review the full exchange and be sure you are OK with Eric's response and how he handled it. And Eric, you and I should check on how we respond to commenters and how formally we need to do that.
... Any other comments on this?
Shawn: There are two different surveys, thanks to the several of you who have completed them. The Forms tutorial has not yet had full review. We may make some changes still but would like the first round of comments to act upon. When can people do this? If we adjourn early can people do it today?
Sharron: I am sorry I missed it, but yes, I could do it today
<Wayne> +1
Shawn: AnnaBelle, please put typos into the GitHub rather than the survey
AnnaBelle: I soemtimes have trouble finding the GitHub page, can you link to it?
Eric: Sure and you can always scroll to the bottom and there is a link
Shawn: The priority is the first survey - Tables/Images/Cover page. Look in detail and approve for publication. For the next survey, the Forms, look at organziation, the flow, etc even if not time for a typo-level review for approval.
Shawn: Jon can you do this today?
Jon: Yes I have some time
<Jan> Can you put the priorities in IRC?
<Jan> can
Brent: I am not a technical person but could review from a newbie perspective to make sure that everything makes sense.
Shawn: That is a useful perspective, you can even make a note of that perspective in your comments.
AnnaBelle: Yes, I missed that survey link as well
Sharron: I am really excited about the upcoming things we are working on
... There are a lot of really practical useful things.
... One of the things we talked about last year was how to best use our teleconference time.
<yatil> Surveys are good to use for editors as well :-)
Sharron: The survey is helping with providing focus for participants, but I know that picking up new tools might bring problems.
... If there are any issues, do bring them up.
... The friendliness of this group is a real asset that allows for some really interesting open discussions.
... Any ideas to make things more efficient and collegial are welcome.
... One of the things I wanted to share was some thoughts/questions from Jan regarding prioritization of work.
... It is great to have these things raised so that we can improve our working practices.
Shawn: Any other comments?
AnnaBelle: I love the idea of having time to be ourselves with each other. This pays huge dividends.
... For the surveys, is it possible to have a prioritized table of the surveys with the opportunity to initial when done?
Shawn: So they are listed in 'Work for this week' at the moment.
AnnaBelle: Might be useful to have a clear priority order, and the option to initial when done.
... I don't want to add to workload though.
Shawn: This might not be automatable based on the survey responses. Could we do something with the 'Work for this week' section?
AnnaBelle: Just to explain, the email gave me one impression, the agenda gave me a slightly different view. Would be nice to have one authoritative description.
Sharron: Prioritizing 'Work for this week' is probably the best approach as the Agenda is often used in a fluid manner. The one go to place is the Work for This Week.
AnnaBelle: Shawn, maybe the email could point to the 'Work for this Week' section instead of reiteritating the work so we know we have one go to place whenter we get an email or not.
Sharron: Jan, do you feel your email question was addressed?
Jan: I didn't really until I followed up with you.
shawn: Thanks everyone for helping to improve how the group works. Feel free to share any more ideas.
Jan: In terms of the challenges at Pearson, we are trying to expand accessibility across all products. The interest is huge but we need to make a legal and commercial case. We have more than 40,000 employees. While there is a big effort on policy and training, we need expertise across product lines. We need clear explanations to help people understand.
... One of the most useful synopses that I ever found was for WCAG1 about how if sites don't meet Priority 1 they will be impossible for some users with disabilities, not meeting Priority means soem users will have a significant difficulty, etc. There is not similar explanation for WCAG2 level A, AA, and AAA
<Wayne> +1
Jan: explanation of what the Levels mean for users. This would be so tremendously useful in order for me to make a case at Pearson.
Shawn: Do you need a general case, or is it needed for it to be tied to Levels?
Jan: They need to hear what it means by level for users in order to prioritize.
Shawn: At some point, EO had wanted to write up a blog post or something that says even if you are only required to do AA you should consider some AAA SCs because they are easy and make a huge difference for some user groups.
Jan: We really need that and if Pearson can help we would like to. I am trying to get the development teams to include and prioritize and having support from WAI would be so very useful.
Wayne: I agree that the W3C literature is vague and pretty unclear. The way the law works however, if you can identify a user group that is excluded the law is still in place to enforce discrimination.
Wayne: we can demonstrate that even if A and AA are met, there are user groups that are excluded.
<metzessive> http://www.karlgroves.com/2015/01/06/to-hell-with-compliance/
<Jan> The other issue I have tried to find information on is the cost of developing for accessibility. We can talk about this issue at another time, but there are some unique opportunities in Pearson to do some research on this and try to get some information that is useful for making a business case.
jan: We need the human impact of the levels
Shawn: Jan, you want the wording but need it coming from an official source and not just from you. If EO thinks it is a priority and if Jan or someone else would be the lead editor, we can consider it.
Shawn: It is not as clear as it was in WCAG1
... we would have to coordinate that very closely with WCAG-WG
... the second one is to consider level AAA even if the legal requirement is just AA
Jan: People do not understand why this is important, especially not AAA
... I hear "We need something simple, Jan and I can't dig through all this to figure out how to approach this"
<Wayne> I suggest an operational definition of Level A and AA and encourage use of Level AAA. I know this well and will take the time to edit it. (Please include this.)
Shawn: the question is whether someone wants to be the lead editor on this, what would the deliverable be, and does the group want to take it up?
Kevin: if we are talking about connecting the Levels to the people. If you look at SCs they are not ties to users either. So I don't see how we can make meaningful connections to the Levels when they are not within the SCs
Wayne: So you think about it in terms of the absence of the SCs. If you remove the SC, you introduce a barrier which will impact a certain disabilty group.
Shawn: Everyone on the phone...what are your thoughts about EO priorities and whether this is something we want to take up?
<metzessive> I think we should take this on, but I do worry this will be a little time consuming due to certain risks.
Brent: At Texas Virtual School Network when we first started looking at accessiiblity, the first thing we noticed about WCAG was that there were Levels. The first question was - what level do we need to conform to? It was not a question of who will be helped by what - it was a question of what were we legally required to do?
... settled on AA becasue we were told that was going to be the 508 legal standard. We never thought about the students and that impact. Legal coverage was the concern.
Shawn: Great to hear these stories. Jan did you see the Principles page, let me know if that might help.
Sharron: Next steps for me Jan and Wayne is to develop a collaboration plan with WCAG-WG
AnnaBelle: Working with Wordpress I signed on a couple of years ago to help Joe O'Connor develop accessible themes.
... it occurs to me that they should be members of the W3C
Shawn: Jeanne Spellman is ATAG W3C staff contact so would know more about this
<metzessive> https://make.wordpress.org/accessibility/
Shawn: Welcome to 2015, lots of good work to do, happy tutorial reviewing, thanks all!