WAI Web Content Accessibility Working Group
Conference Call - Thursday, 18 February 1999
4:00 - 5:30 EST.
WC: Wendy Chisholm - discussion leader
DD: Daniel Dardailler
IJ: Ian Jacobs
CL: Chuck Letourneau - notetaker, co-chair
CMN: Charles McCathieNevile
Regrets: Jason White, Gregg Vanderheiden
CL: Apologised for losing last week's notes.
WC: do we remember the sense of the item regarding cognitive
disabilities?
CMN: make it a P1 and draft some better explanatory language around appropriate
level of text.
ACTION ITEM: Wendy to draft some new wording for this.
Wendy responded to Daniel's e-mail note: is this what we want?:
Charles has raised a related point in regards to A.6.4 (see http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/1999JanMar/0217.html): "Simple tables cause simple problems. The simple solution is to avoid saying, anywhere, anytime 'use tables for layout'. It is a bad thing. People will still do it, and people need to be able to use tables for tabular information, so solutions are still necessary. But we are currently giving a mixed message by encouraging people to use simple tables.
WC: so just get rid of the note and leave A.6.4 as it is. Add A.8.1.
WC: This closes issues for the Guidelines document unless anyone has further comments
Some discussion about the injunction against auto-refreshing pages. We
agreed it should be P2 and should have clearer example(s) in the
techniques.
CMN: example pages that need to be freezable might be stock-ticker pages or
sports-score update pages.
P1 if there is real information that is auto-refreshing
P2 for pages that automatically redirect to "the real page"
WC: we should reword the checkpoint and draft some more useful examples in the
techniques document.
DD: definitely describe the various ways
ACTION ITEM: DD: volunteers to draft the language for the techniques
document
DD concerned about showing examples of things we don't want them to do in the
first place. Instead he will work on the wording of a statement rather than
show examples.
ACTION ITEM: Ian and Wendy to look at format of checklist to distinguish priority 1, 2, and 3 statements DD: suggesting grouping them.
WC: Last call scheduled for end of next week. With proposed rec in 4 weeks. Are people feeling the Guidelines are ready for last call?
CMN: has vague reservations on the Dynamic HTML sections and the way to
resolve it is to indicate clearly that we cannot fully deal with it and will
revisit in the near future.
IJ: there is a note in the UA guidelines - he read it.
CMN: wouldn't use that in the WCA since we really don't tell people how to make
scripts and events accessible since we really don't know how to do some of
those things. Suspects we haven't addressed all the issues and should make some
statement that there will be further work in this area in the future.
WC: where should something like that go? In an introductory section.
IJ: it is in an introductory, definition section in the UA guidelines.
WC: UA has definitions up front while WCA has it's glossary in the back. That
is one difference.
IJ: would rather not mention it at all.
CMN: but that would be a problem if there is nothing concrete (and no
indication of the importance)
WC: originally we would include a definition like UA has, then point to the
various checkpoints that deal with it.
CMN: certainly mention the bits and pieces we do mention.
ACTION ITEM: CMN will write something he thinks covers his points and
post it to the list for discussions.
WC: read the proposed options from the Issues list. Asked which one (if any)
option we should recommend.
CMN: Embed does support alt-text (at least some browsers do).
Some further discussion.
WC: has had a student working on EMBED and can ask to look at the accessibility
of EMBED.
CMN: should go with option 2.
DD: Wants a in guidelines checkpoint that mentions EMBED that links to an
appropriate section in the techniques doc even though it is proprietary.
Don't use it. It is only supported in Netscape 4. much less used than
EMBED.
WC read proposed options.
WC: it is proprietary and covered in A.14 - proprietary - don't use it.
Consensus: don't mention it.
IJ: can the techniques mention that layering should be done through layout,
positioning, ...
WC: Daniel propose in an e-mail on Feb 15 (CSS guidelines) some guidelines
for CSS usage in the Techniques document. These were collected from throughout
the CSS guidelines.
Some discussion followed.
WC: we will put these into Techniques doc in the section about CSS.
IJ: Do we have anything that actually tells the user how to make an
accessible frame set?
CMN: not really. In a reasonable complex frame set you can use noframes fairly
easily and it is not terribly difficult to implement an accessible. We don't
have any first class examples.
WC added an example that used longdesc, noframes, and everything else.
CMN: would make the example a larger example - i.e. a more complex example of
what would appear in the frames.
ACTION ITEM: He has an example that he has built and will send it to
Wendy and Chuck (who might be able to use it in the Page Author Curriculum
examples.
IJ: Frame-like effects can be created using CSS. Should we give examples or are
we going too far there.
WC: do we want some discussion in Techniques about frames and CSS.
ACTION ITEM: Wendy and Ian to take this discussion offline.
Using NOFRAMES in the BODY element - needs more testing. Wendy will do that this week.
ACCESSKEY - will leave it until more browsers and people use them. We can't really see what the issues will be until more implementations are available. Are there implications for future versions of HTML and since we can't answer that, we will ignore for now.
Device Dependent Events issues.
WC: have other groups been dealing with it?
IJ: UA has been dealing with it.
CMN: and it went to PF to HTML etc.
WC: how about asking that both mouse and keyboard events be supported for each
action?
DD, CMN : if it is eye-candy it is irrelevant. If it doesn't change the meaning
of the document then the injunction is not necessary.
CMN: thinks it really needs to go out to PF etc. for fleshing out.
DD: scripts that require the x-y mouse co-ordinates to fire the action should
be strongly worded against.
WC: everyone agrees that there should be some wording in the techniques.
ACTION ITEM: Wendy and Ian to draft some appropriate wording.
WC: Ian and Wendy have been working on an introduction section. When should
we send it to the WG for review. Thinks today would be good.
ACTION ITEM: IJ: lets Wendy and IJ talk after the conf call.
Next meetings scheduled for Feb 25, March 4 and March 11