September 11, 2003 - WCAG WG Teleconference Minutes

Present

Ben Caldwell, Andi Snow-Weaver, Gregg Vanderheiden, Doyle Burnett, Bengt Farre, Roberto Ellero, Cynthia Shelly, Kerstin Goldsmith, John Slatin, Michael Cooper, Jason White, Roberto Castaldo, Roberto Scano, Avi Arditti

Regrets

Three proposals on the table - comments?

No major issues going through WCK proposal, because most issues were taken care of through editorial notes.  Otherwise, no other comments

Three models on the table:

1. first proposal: success criteria could be met, additional notes were just for noticing and not necessarily complying with (2 levels of sc and notes)
2. second proposal: attempt at making mandatory versus optional clear (one level of sc in each checkpoint, and moved some sc to extended)
3. third draft takes all Best Practices out, leaving benefits and notes – but otherwise just has the checkpoints and success criteria (only one level of success criteria, all second level [or Best Practice] sc were moved to gateway techniques

Which do we want?

Drafts can be found:

1. The latest Review draft of WCAG 2.0:http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2003/07/review_draft.html
2. An initial reorganization proposal, prepared in response to teleconference discussions: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/2003JulSep/0226.html
3. A third proposal, due to the joint efforts of Wendy, Cynthia and Kerstin: See the documents cited at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/2003JulSep/0500.html and the explanations in that message.

Discussion of details of the drafts followed.

• how do people know how they can go further, past what is required, if they cannot see the Best Practises?
• are all Best Practises really just techniques?  Are not all sc techniques?  Are they HOW to, or WHAT to?
• Taking some best practices out to techniques perhaps takes certain ideas off the table altogether.
  • Checkpoint 1.3, required is color through markup, and best practise of doing it through context is completely removed from the checkpoint
  • Checkpoint 1.2, adding the text transcript to required sc is basically making the required harder – we were thinking that if audio and captions are already required, then text transcript is basically already done, therefore just add it to the required set.  If audio description goes away from required sc, then text transcript will get moved along with it to another checkpoint that is already extended, or will get moved to its own extended checkpoint
  • Checkpoint 1.5, best practise #2 is not redundant because it is saying that the content itself must present ways for the user to manipulate structure.  So, how do we take it out without completely taking the extended idea off the table?
  • Checkpoint 1.6, best practise #2 – this is not required, but it DOES simulate color-blind people, but not people who have color deficiency.  Gray scale is not the end of the line for color deficiency, with different types falling on the way to gray scale.  Take “default” out of text, sc can either have a mechanism OR do it by default (Cynthia) – Gregg, but separating them takes away from “going further.” 
  • (Kerstin) Is this really a matter of just presenting Best Practises outside of the normative document without losing the fact that they are extensions of the checkpoint that they sit under, but are not required.  Required, with links to “For those of you who want to go further.”  (John)  Do we, ourselves, need to separate content and structure and layout?  The substantive question is “what do the users HAVE to do, and what is optional” – then we can work with documentation design people to PRESENT it.”  Presentation of all data should be moved to a separate discussion – another discussion is how many levels of requirement are there – people will want to see ONLY required at some point in this game. 
  • Some best practices are actually techniques, and others are really the second level of conformance, or “how to take it further.”  We need to figure out which are which, and then sort them.
  • We need better understandings of the different “gateway to techniques” versus a “techniques document”

Summary:

Gregg: It's not possible to collapse the best practise up or out.  Still a concern about keeping a continuous list for authors, so that issues don’t get lost, but that are very clearly separated required versus optional (or further). Additonal concern is of length (though removing BPs only account for a small portion, removing Notes has more impact).  Four options to go forward:

1. Minimum and BP are in same document, but BP are more clearly separated.
2. Required are in document, BP in second document.
3. Required in document, and BP are in Gateway, where title changes to “BP and Gateway to Techniques”
4. #2, but compound document that is not the standard.

Last two options, and even in the first option, BP are non-normative. 

Andi: like the approach CWK, can we explore the specific issues and not just drop it?  Gregg: we are agreeing that there are two levels of conformance.

Gregg: we still have areas of detail to explore where we might just punch holes into our current model of understanding as we have done with other discussions.

$Date: 2003/09/15 14:53:03 $ Kerstin Goldsmith