Edit comment LC-954 for Accessibility Guidelines Working Group

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Comment LC-954: Comment Shortname:; Commenter: Al Gilman <Alfred.S.Gilman@IEEE.org>; Message-id:; Section of the document concerned:

or; Refinement of the section concerned:; Status:
assigned to; Type:; Resolution status:
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Commenter's response (URI):; Comment:
A sympathetic reading suggests what you want to mean, but this text does not say it.

As rendered, text is represented by glyphs, not Unicode characters. Unicode characters are integer index values into the catalog of characters.

And the critical property is the independence of any structure beyond the stream arrangment of the characters, as demonstrated by the fact that the character sequence is effective in conveying the intended understanding. The sequence of characters in the encoded form is not suffucient. This has been recognized and expressed by the "as rendered" language. But you need to make the cognitive effectiveness aspect of the test more overt.

When natural language is written down, it is often encoded in alphabetical writing systems or scripts. Other forms of communication such as mathematical notations and symbolic identifiers have re-used the characters, or bits and pieces of these writing systems, which have been atomized into recombinant elements by the invention of movable type.

This issue clearly illustrates the superiority of stating separate requirements on the as-rendered representation of the content and on the as-communicated representation thereof.

Proposed Change:

Try:

"Text content is content which conveys its intended meaning when rendered in a sequence of glyphs recognizable as representing the characters from some writing system.

"Content where character sequences are used to form a symbolic code to reconsrtruct media or action scripts, such as the Base64 encoding of a GIF format image, or an ECMASCRIPT imperative instruction set, are to be considered non-text content. Likewise, character sets where the glyphs must be presented in a particular two-dimensional arrangment such as ASCII art are to be considered non-text content."

Add separate encoding requirement:

Text content is to be conveyed from the author's automation to the user's automation [in accordance with | in a mannter interoperable with] the Character Model for the World Wide Web (CharMod).

Consider lifting language from the IMS accessibility metadata documents. IIRC that is where I got this concept.; Related issues: (space separated ids); WG Notes: [EDITORZ] Discussed in the 01 March 2007 telecon: Leave Open. Action: Sean and Christophe to find formulation of electronic text that a user agent can look at and know what it is - pronounce it etc. based on Unicode http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2007/03/01-wai-wcag-minutes.html Note: Christophe's suggestion from http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/35422/20070222editorz/results#xlc954 included in proposed resolution below. Issue: should private use areas of Unicode (or other areas) be excluded? Surveyed at: http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/35422/20070426moremisc/results#x954 Discussed in the 03 May 2007 telecon: resolution: accept 954 definitions of "text" and "non-text content" as amended http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2007/05/03-wai-wcag-minutes.html Proposal: <http://tinyurl.com/2m5u2f> Response: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/2007Jun/0108.html; Resolution: The working group is trying hard to use language that is as simple as possible. We have revised the definitions of "text" and "non-text content" as follows: text sequence of characters that can be programmatically determined, where the sequence is expressing something in human language non-text content any content that is not a sequence of characters that can be programmatically determined or where the sequence is not expressing something in human language Note: This includes ASCII Art (which is a pattern of characters) and leetspeak (which is character substitution).; (Please make sure the resolution is adapted for public consumption)