CSS2 Status from a WAI(HC) Perspective

Types for MEDIA

Status: requirement

Discuss: Thursday

We have the beginnings of a strategy worked out with HTML. We should work within the framework established there if at all possible. There is room for clarification and refinement in CSS2, beyond the constraints agreed with HTML.

Generated Text

Status: desire

Discuss: Monday, Thursday

This is an area where the CSS group hopes to add capability and the WAI hopes they do. The WAI can help by painting a clear pattern of the scenarios which typify our needs.

Write capability

Need capability to write content composed by style into output

for any element type.

Read Capability

Need capability to insert content into compose buffer

Automatic attributes

The first(), etc. functions cited under headers and footers are auto-selectors. There are some enumerators there, too. This list talks about what is needed, does not assume it's all not there. On the other hand, it's not clear it's all there yet.

Numbering

Need capability to autonumber classes of entities such as sections, list items and notes as well as pages. Typical and desired user controlled aspects of this is the class of entities to be numbered, the scope within which they are numbered, the starting position and enumeration literals to use in output.

First/Last/Only booleans?

There is a question in the draft about //P/ vs. /P// vs. //P//. I read this as a selector (i.e. boolean function) which matches only the first, last, or only instance of the pattern which would be there without the first/last/only designator. Could be doable with standard functions and first/last/only named pseudonumerals.

Infer HEADERS from SCOPE

The proper header cells for a body cell are determined jointly by the action of SCOPE and HEADERS attributes. The implicit HEADERS inferred as a result of SCOPE must be determined before populating SPEAKROW etc. forms.

Applications

Print page number in header

Print Page Number is an attribute value in the document tree.

It is used in headers and footers and may be used in response to a "Where am I" query from the user to the browser. So it could be considered a dynamic attribute of the cursor.

Table Readout

Structured forms for articulating the content of a cell, a row, a column, or the whole table are desired. These use the contents and/or attributes (ABBR) of cells related to the current cell by the HEADERS relationship (with defaults populated pursuant to SCOPE) and literal text.

Notes

Notes imply inserting generated text combining automatic numbers and literal text depending on the medium. It is also desirable for the body of notes to float to the bottom of the page or to a dedicated section later in the document. This appears to require ability to gather from an ancestor scope beyond the parent or write to arbitrary location. One strategy is to employ a "minimized" display value for notes and then be able to recall all notes contained in some scope and inject their un-minimized value somewhere else.

This may amount to another predefined attribute, predefined function, or class of queries supported.

Notes seems to be the most stringent application for generated content. People with disabilities care that this be solved, but not more than other users.

Minimize directive

Status: desire

Discuss: Monday, Thursday

Under the "display" property is hidden the capability to suppress content with a value of "none." GUIs normally operate with show/hide/minimize states for objects. Having a minimize directive would help to work some speech-user heartburn with overlong parades of pro-forma links at the start of a page. If one could then call the content back later, as discussed for endnotes, that would be enough tree-breaking for the accessibility applications, it would seem.

[From the discussion Monday:

There also might be a "maximize" directive which transforms a link into an inline.

The primary scenario that this would help with is migrating banners and navigation bars to the foot of the document for speech styling. It was suggested and agreed that a full-freedom audio "positioning" capability would also meet that need.]