DPUB IG Telco, 2015-05-11: updates on Accessibility, DPUB ARIA, Packaging

See minutes online for a more detailed record of the discussions.

Accessibility TF update

The A11y TF put together detailed spreadsheet of what aspects of WCAG are relevant or not relevant to DPUB. This also helped us understand what aspects of publishing are not addressed by existing standards. Our plan is to pull the spreadsheet into a note, to be published, eventually, by the IG. The skeleton of the note is already available, should be completed shortly.

There are discussions with the Accessibility Working Group at BISG; the plan is that, at the upcoming DPUB IG F2F, we would sit down with them to see how we can cooperate. We would want to assist in a communication between BISG and W3C on that matter. If we see gaps in the publishers' knowledge, we let BISG know; if BISG sees holes in the standards, we would let the relevant W3C people know.

DPUB ARIA Update

We did a consensus call on the DPUB ARIA Role draft, and the DPUB IG agreed to publish it. However, some issues surfaced in the PF WG (the guardians of ARIA); indeed, this is the first time an extension to ARIA is being defined and the limits and approaches seem to be undefined yet. There is tension within the ARIA group on whether the @role attribute is bound to Assistive Technology usage, or whether it can be used more generally for structural information. If the former, that would drastically reduce the number of @role attributes in the DPUB ARIA module and would make it unusable for the purpose of structural semantics.

This issue must be sorted out by the PF Working group and, until then, the DPUB ARIA publication is put on hold. One alternative may be that we would have to move away from ARIA towards a separate, targeted extension of HTML5, possibly identifying a number of values that would also have their counterpart in the new version of the core ARIA spec (ARIA 1.1). Hopefully this will be sorted out soon.

Packaging Update

There has been some discussion with the chair of the TAG (co-author of the packaging specification), and it seems there are discussions now within the community on whether packaging is something browser vendors really want in the first place. For some of the use cases (web applications access) a combination of service workers with manifests would seem to work, too. One of the goals of the discussion at the F2F is to clarify the requirements and needs of the publishing community in this respect and forward it to the TAG and the Web Application Working Group asap.