W3C

– DRAFT –
Silver Conformance Options Subgroup

10 feb 2022

Attendees

Present
Azlan, DarrylLehmann, GreggVan, janina, maryjom_, MichaelC, PeterKorn, shadi, Wilco
Regrets
Todd_Libby
Chair
janina
Scribe
Wilco

Meeting minutes

Agenda Review & Administrative Items

Janina: Had some additional comments, some from me, some from Jeanne.
… Thanks to Shadi for helping to put them in.
… TPAC planning continues. We'll start asking who might be there in person.

User Scenarios: Additional Considerations

<shadi> https://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/task-forces/silver/wiki/Talk:Substantial_Conformance/Example_Scenarios

Shadi: I dropped a summary of the comments in the talk page
… Going to situation 9 heading
… Would suggest lack of AT support should factor in.
… Two example, one on limited support for accessibility; immersive environments.
… 9.2 talks about experiences that can not easily be translated.
… I'd like to suggest a 9.3 highlighting the lack of accessibility support
… Graphs, there isn't really a way to visualise that.
… There could also be something like music, where music notes and words are side by side that is not easily rendered by AT.

<PeterKorn> Would we want to use the phrase "Accessibility Supported" for this/these scenarios?

<DarrylLehmann> +1 Janina and Shadi example addition

Shadi: Question to the group is do we add such example?

Shadi: We'd have to phrase that carefully, accessibility support related to technology.

Janina: little nervous about accessibility support. It may get controversial. I'd rather phrase it another way.
… If we get a standard for doing something. The process is usually we get a spec, and then over time we get AT support for that.

Darryl: Another example is WebGL, online 3D. There is basically no support.
… There was a 3D model online which had labels, we replicated that with a 3D printed model with braille

Janina: The only place we have accessibility support built into graphics is SVG 2

Gregg: If you had graphs with lines, would it be more useful to have a table?
… We have the ability to take a picture of a chart and give a table with the data.

Janina: Tables if you concentrate well you can get the picture, but there's a reason for charts.

<PeterKorn> [I need to step away; be right back]

Janina: Things communicate more quickly

Gregg: I would suggest diagram of a heart, instead of lines on a graph.

Shadi: Sounds good

Shadi: Janina mentions an APA note on how to approach real-time calls. I had further discussions on that.

<PeterKorn> [I'm back]

Shadi: WCAG 2 already has different requirements for live vs prerecorded media. One of the things Janina raises is synchronisation of captions, and the transition from live to prerecorded.
… Suggestion is to add this to the guidance section.

Gregg: There's a task force looking at real-time text in ISO, which could have impact.
… I don't think we want to add requirements, but we could have examples.
… For example you can have word by word live captions.
… There is also caption synchronisation software.
… In life captions is behind as you won't know what someone will say, but after it should be put in sync.

Janina: We've been living this. Many things happen on Zoom, but then are put on YouTube hours later.
… We can leave it to policy how much someone needs to do.

Gregg: If we can put tools in the understanding docs so people can find them.
… Saying they exist doesn't help, putting a link does.

Shadi: Hearing agreement
… The next item is on situation 2. There is a new bullet from Janina.
… It occurred to me that maybe framing, the question is does all content need to be accessible.
… There is an upon request, but there is also content that is not essential.
… It's not about relevance. It's under which condition can you say pieces will not follow all the requirements.
… There is a role for policy here.

Gregg: If it's important enough to post it for anybody, it shouldn't be not important for some people.
… If you have a huge archive, what we'll do if we need it we'll be responsive, I hate for us to say some things don't need to be accessible because they're not used much.
… I'd rather we make a comment on policy.

Shadi: Some content won't have the highest priority. It's being phrased as relevant.

Janina: We should not perpetuate the assumption that we'll do everything for all content. It gets in the way.
… This is about prioritisation. You should be able to do it.

<PeterKorn> ack

Shadi: I'll go forward and rephrase that in terms of priority.

Shadi: Under the heading Overall comments. Jeanne and I feel we need another section.
… The key datapoint is that 98% have fewer than 100 employees. There was more in the comment here. From that I have a few suggestions.

Peter: We have examples of this in the US today. We might note that this has already been done in accessibility laws

<PeterKorn> No objection; I think it makes a lot of sense - especially because this is already practice

Shadi: Also in EU legislation, EAA exempts micro organisations. Still is there any downside, would anybody object to a situation of a small business who have difficulty finding the right professionals, tooling, knowledge.

+1

Janina: I think the concern to consider, are we saying enough that a small business is likely to rely on a scripted website provider.
… Are these number big enough that we need to say more?
… We've covered a lot of user generated, but third-party HTML / CSS. Apparently that's been on a rapid rise.

Shadi: This is the first of several additions to address small business. This particular suggestion on situation 11.
… I want to mention that policy makers should consider the size and capability of the content provider.
… It's one thing to say for a small shop that they can't make all images accessible. That's a policy question.
… Policies will now exempt small businesses, and sometimes have reasonability concepts built in.

Darryl: I agree adding this example is useful. Just the fact that there is a lack in the space to creating accessible content.
… Companies should find good specialists, that'd kind of the problem as well.

<janina> https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2021/third-parties

Shadi: There is a strong dependance on tools. In 4.1 we have an example; website that allows users to create their own website. It's written from the perspective of the tool provider.
… The suggestion is to create a similar example under 5; I created a website using a tool that creates websites. That tool has limitations and I'm dependant on what that tool can provide.

+1

<maryjom_> +1

<Azlan> +1

Shadi: No objections; I'll get that drafted.
… Following that we can add guidance around selecting appropriate tools.
… EO is working on a list of authoring tools supporting accessibility.

Janina: There's an implicit guarantee, if you get in trouble over not being accessible. You should be able to duck out of it.

Peter: We have two proofs in this space, architects in the ADA, and now web business that promise overlays fix problems.
… I would not go down this road other than to say this is all about policy.
… This can suck our time.

Shadi: If we can phrase this as a consideration rather than a solution?

Azlan: It's quite the can of worms. One thing I've been working on is an authoring tool. Needing to provide enough tooling for someone to create whatever they want. I don't want to be too restrictive, but still protect them from causing issues.
… Where do you draw the line of who's responsible?

Janina: I think this would be a win if we get this in appropriately.

Gregg: I think we should say people need to put it in the contract. If you don't put it in the contract, you can't get out of it.

Janina: I'm not sure that's true. They may not know they need to think about it.

Gregg: That's why we need to tell people to put it in their contract, and that they have it checked.

Shadi: I'll see what I can do with that. I'm hearing we don't want to get into detailed solutions, but maybe there's something on considerations for tool providers.
… We have situation 6. Janina has a point where she says we need to be clear that bugs do happen, so that we make a strong case. There's no bug-free software.

Peter: I wonder if we can say something between "will" and "can". Virtually all software has bugs.

Janina: I'd love to see us cite some things.

<maryjom_> https://www.mayerdan.com/ruby/2012/11/11/bugs-per-line-of-code-ratio

Shadi: Situation 5 is on dependencies on other services. There's maybe more interlinking between sites than people think.
… We didn't have any specific suggestion / conclusion. Maybe we can get back to it next week.

<janina> https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2021/third-parties

Janina: I think we need to be comprehensive when we return with third-party to AGWG. We have a good start, but there is a lot more going on, but someone has to be responsible.
… It goes a lot further than I had realised. Hopefully we can think more globally on how to draw lines.

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 185 (Thu Dec 2 18:51:55 2021 UTC).

Diagnostics

Maybe present: Darryl, Gregg, Peter