Accessibility at the Edge, One Year On
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Prado: Okay, so that we succeeded.
… So next agenda is to give you an overview of what we've been up to for a year. After a couple of starts we kind of settled down into it might just be really useful.
… iterate through and list out the various kinds of things that overlays are doing in a very specific way. List out their capabilities.
… What they're being used for.
… and then do some assessment on that. So we started just randomly making a list. Everything done. Hope we don't have that yet. Put it on the list then a lot of times sorting that list, and eventually sorted into 2 main categories things that users
… do or should be, or ought to be, able to control for themselves.
… and second, one, that content providers, the the offering, the the content provider complex of
… the stack need to do and need to do appropriately. And then for each of those. We decided, after some further discussion, that we could break that down we ended up using definition lists. This all started in spreadsheets and then went to HTML, which is where we are now.
… Lionel. Maybe so, people can actually look at this document while I talk about it briefly. Thank you and we're so we we went to definition lists.
… And we said, Okay, if we try to do this in source, is that a good thing? Does that cover everything we need? Or
… second area, the definition, what are the trade-offs between doing this at the source and doing it at the edge? And then, in many cases we come up with conclusions and say why we like Edge for this, or why sources as good as or
… whatever we can be. I think we start with the premise that if we get every you know, all of the accessibility needs met and source, we're certainly ahead of the game. There's that part is not an argument, or or actually ever in contention, I think, with any of us, in any of our discussions or in this document. The situation is that by the time the user gets content.
… it's coming from multiple directions. There is documentary evidence, some of which we cite from the Internet almanac that there could be well over 90 different sites feeding content into a mashup that's
… being created for the user by some constant delivery network.
… some way proximate to them. And even to the point that if you hit refresh you get a somewhat different base that you had the last time around. So somehow, making all these pieces work together becomes the edge challenge.
… Overlays are part of possibly the solution for a lot of them, and
… they work. And sometimes, as we know, because things have been controversial. There are ways that these things get break, and we need to be honest and forth right about all of that. If we we want to make it work. Last, but not least, as we're doing this analysis, we realize there are some opportunities. Here
… we started to notice patterns. so we tried to call them out.
… some of those conclusions would call aspirational. We think this is going in a direction to where, if we put this together and get a service provider in the middle that is trusted, we might, for instance, be able to help to kill Captcha using dids and and similar sorts of technologies.
… Sort of the the same way. Your your bank is a trusted intermediary for you and your money nobody knows you. They're not gonna trust you with with money or a loan, or whatever. But they know the bank. They cut the bank
… today has your account knows, but you trust you to whatever degree they trust you. And that facilitates the relationship. That kind of model seems to be possibly appropriate here for various kinds of services that can preserve privacy
… keep people's anonymity
… in all respect, including accessibility. In many cases. So we see that. And we, we label those aspirational we think that the analysis could be used in in multiple ways. For instance, we think we could build a chart now with the the capabilities that we have, and just go through the various companies doing overly since check them out.
… Does company have to do this company. Why did that? Yes, no.
… Kind of what? Whatever the answer is, that seems to be one next possible step, and we can talk about that in a in a little while one pattern that did pop up, that I really kind of liked.
… And I think that's a lot of legs that we previously discussed in Apa, and we're beginning to see some of how it might get put together, and it might be something I mentioned things that may end up in in one of the Apa task forces. This is one of them.
… going site by site and configuring things to work well for individual users. My needs are a little bit different from
… my, my Co. Chair Matthews needs. Since they're more low vision. Mine are very much Pts screen reader user. But certain amount of braille support from time to time when they get my braille display working. Other people have different needs.
… We call that personalization. We're trying to facilitate better personalization. Some of that's complexity management. But what it is tends to be the same complex, the same set of features configured a certain way what edge possibly can do for us? And this is what's beginning. Look very promising
… to make that configuration choices once and have them apply the all the sites revisit. Why should I have to go configure myself on Google book, configure myself on Wikipedia, go configure myself on Walmart, on Amazon, or wherever else. I want to do regular business
… as a customer, as a consumer of the digital publishing. If I can just do this once and have a portable profile that could travel with me. That would be a win.
… The whole idea in my mind. It's always been that the computer supposed to serve the user and not the user, the computer. That's that
… a goal. It's not always a reality. But possibly we can get affordable profile. That would be one way to do that. So we wanted to do a deep dive and just show you some of these capabilities.
… Lionel, you want to get into going through through these overview so that people get a good look before we get into what can we take this to? And where are we? Definitions?
… Thank you, Dana, for the introduction. The first agenda item is to as as I indicated to our achievements the year and review. Why don't we just pause for a second. We are very much here to listen, very excited that so many voices in the room. We will
… make sure everyone is heard. But let's just sticking to the agenda, using the prerogative of chair of this meeting. Keep us focuses anybody want to comment on the year and review, or do they have questions about the activities this year.
… Look, I'm moving to Irc problem. That's fine. I wanted to ask specifically what we could
… dig a little bit into Friday concerns today. I'll pick up excellent. So we will make sure to dig into privacy concerns.
… anyone else have questions about the year in review.
… Okay, let's move quickly and onwards. So we next suggested that we do a deep dive. We will not read all of it, but it will probably help center the conversation coming. So I'm going to move to that agenda. Item, a guided reading of the capabilities draft reports.
… I'm gonna share my screen for those who alright excited, it will help
… and
… here it is.
… So I'm just going to fly over it very quickly. The title currently is overlay capabilities, inventory inventory of edge capabilities.
… One. Frankly, to be very frank, one of our goals is to move away from a word that seems to excite
… really trauma and polemics.
… to move to a word that helps us to center on the technology. So that's why the title is over. The capability for reminding this is edge
… capabilities.
… Now, I think, looking at the table of conference on the left would be most helpful. So there's an introduction. What is meant by edge. That was important cause. As people would join people came with different.
… We
… presuppositions. Of what Edge meant. We did very much want to include a diagram. We haven't yet curated it, but it is in the blog. I have also opened community groups Wordpress blog, and I'm scrolling down to the diagram because we have it in the blog. We did not yet put the diagram in the report.
… The diagram makes very clear that what we're doing is simplifying the entire web architecture to
… there is a source, multiple sources. Perhaps
… there are lots of stuff in between mediating this. And then there is a user. It's that simple. So there at the top is a cloud content provider this kind of a direct arrow to the user because users tend to feel when you open Google when you open Cnn dotcom, you open mics so they tend to feel you're in touch with your
… provider. But
… there are all these edge services in between, as we all know, there's a Cdn. It could be up to 30. In fact, the evidence shows some sites of 90.
… And of course, the classic one is, advertisements are coming from somewhere else. So that's a diagram. And we based it on this beautiful diagram from Samsung. We actually reached out to Samsung for permission to use it, but never heard back that we, perhaps the person who originally drew it longer
… but the Samsung had cloud and devices, and then they defined Edge computing as all the stuff in between.
… and we just found that to be
… very helpful. So going back to this rapid, read of the document as you indicated, we found quickly that we could sort things into 2 big buckets.
… So the next heading headings disappeared to zoom. The next setting is meeting users needs, which means that edge where the user is. And there's a list here. I'm gonna look at. Then the next bucket is beating content. Providers needs
… content. Providers put great effort into curating and stipulating and defining the experience. So we have that bucket, and we did find
… there. There might be some things that don't
… neatly fit in either one, and at the bottom there are appendices, including design principles which, by the way, came up very early, we thought it was important to include it that we basically are phone human centered design, an approach that focuses on individual needs and user empowerment.
… The topic of user agency comes up a lot. So I flow, flew over the top level. I'm now going to touch base on what is inside each.
… So we have an introduction. As I mentioned, we define edge
… We would like to approve the definition.
… and we then assert web content today is dynamic. By the way, one step on this journey
… we made a slight edit in Woocet 2.2. You'll find that we finally eliminated a phrase that was troubling us for a while in Wuke, 2 point O and 2.1 partial compliance.
… The specification says, sometimes
… web content is changed dynamically.
… On viewing, I forget the exact word.
… This always bothered us. Sometimes
… it seems that whoever wrote that was there when the web was born, because today we would say, the opposite is true. Sometimes web content does not change dynamically.
… and we need to keep that in mind. I think it's a paradigm shift
… the committed from activists and contributors at need to make sure that we're in the world of 2,023
… and not in the world of 2,000.
… Okay, we, we did some work defining power, restructuring the document.
… And let's go now to Section 2 meeting users needs so very first.
… And why don't we read the first one? Because it will really show you how the document is intended to work? We were, as usual, maybe more ambitious when we could accomplish in one year.
… So if you need a sip. we use a definition semantic markup. So each item this item is preserving user agency. It will then say, stores
… trade offs
… benefit, implying what's the benefit of doing is at the edge and then related topics. I'll just read this one cause it's the first one, and it does give a good clue as to how we're working.
… So it says, users will not care how a function of accessible experience is assembled. As long as their needs are met.
… however, they are, and must always be understood as the ultimate articles of whether the needs are actually being met.
… Consequently, user experience processing should be easily discoverable and defeatable users need to be empowered to act so they believe in unmediated experience would be superior.
… Reserving. User agency is simply smart business strategy. No matter how excellent technology may be.
… then the definitions for each item we would like to clarify the role of source. So here it says source. And then we try to express the role of source in this capability content providers can and often do provide various levels of content transformation opportunities to users.
… So content provider the source
… if they're interested in preserving user agency would likely offer some options.
… trade-offs. Nothing about us without us is a deeply held Pittsburgh, expressing a core criterion of disability co equity.
… For this reason alone it is important to preserve user agency by offering a defeat option. Nothing is gained when users a force to contend with mediation technology, they suspect, maybe contributing to their accessibility challenges, even if the ultimate reality demonstration is actually incorrect.
… So here we I would say, we didn't quite meet
… the goal of expressing trade offs. I'd like to see more that it would say, this is what's good about doing it. Source. Okay? Then we have the benefit. If you do do it at the edge for use product. And finally, related topics.
… Too often this capability cycle there is missing when fully automated transformations are applied. Reserving user agency is so critical, we call that out separately as a critical capability for each technologies. Too often it is the only feature missing.
… So that's one example. That's a very heavy, cognitive example.
… I'd like to go now to a very simple, much simpler one, and then I'm going to wrap up this deep dash.
… so a simpler one will be one of the most popular ones, which is text transformations. So that's done. Okay.
… a moment. Here is text transformations. Okay.
… some users require different fonts
… or different 5 characteristics in order to comprehend and interact effectively web content, especially group sales. This is the kind of thing it's very so popular.
… We actually see on whitehouse.gov. There's a origin on the left. And when I hover over it, says Toggle, high contrast. part of a large font size. This is a classic example. He's a very popular
… overlay or edge widgets.
… And it's important that we provide a platform for discussing this, because my experience some people.
… Yes. why would you offer this? It's built into the operating system. Questions like that. We need to honor those questions. We need to give the web community and ability to weigh and discuss
… this capability. So if we look
… again as how we expressed it, pardon me, so here we go. Here's an optimized text size. Some users need to enlarge, or perhaps diminish funds in order to recover content comfortably. This capability allows increase or decrease font size by supporting, clicking, and interacted with in order to make appropriate adjustments.
… I think that really captured it.
… Source source code specifies text size as per the original target audience and design, but only for content coming from the source. Now that's important. We reiterate the web is crazy dynamic today. Okay, so the content provider
… specifies the product that they like.
… Remember that time period. We're all funds turned right period
… and but they don't specify the fonts in the advertisement set us serve and use a comments widget that serve in the chat box that's on the page. And all the third party service
… trade-offs. Text size is typically configurable in the operating system. However, not all applications consistently honor the setting
… and can defeat the user's intent.
… so benefit of being on the edge, learning how to make such changes in browser, and our operating system configurations is challenging for many and particularly challenging for the communities that most needed offering, overlay access raises awareness that such capabilities are present and does not prevent users from learning how to configure it in other places.
… Hopefully, these are site specific, making such accommodations on the sites where they are requested.
… and over. They can propagate such preferences across sites, browsers, operate system, or devices to manage the complete experience, including injected in our dynamic content.
… and finally related topics, this capabilities. Yet another example of configure once use everywhere, only available through accessibility edge.
… So I did. I touched on 2 types of entries here. One is large conceptually. And I think, we're gonna talk about privacy. In a few minutes that will Co. Brought up. I think that would be a larger.
… and maybe those things need their own. One of the things we're considering, and this is a very atomic very. It's like a a guideline.
… and something that we feel can then be cite.
… So that if you go to a site like.
… and you are the accessibility specialist working with it.
… And they say we want this overlay
… and then you might say, well II would rather we coded in the source. Well, now, you have a something to answer to was, if you're advocating that white house.com only coded into the source.
… and you need to, at least, make explicit or understand your position on changing phones, which will likely be you could do it in the operating system. You can do it in phone. I think that that's where it should be done, and that would be your position.
… And
… I might find this hope is that this opens a door for us to understand that there is this other position, that it's really great to have a widget on my site that allows people to dial up the phone
… pause.
… We know that people will use it.
… Question on my page. It's a form of personalization.
… So So
… peaking to our rapid agenda. I'm going to wrap up what I tried to do here. I showed you a taste
… of what is written in this document.
… I showed you the deep thinking behind it.
… I touched on a high level one and a quite atomic one.
… I'm tempted to touch on one more. So Anita mentioned aspirational ones. As we did this, the conversations were very exciting.
… People started raising other things. They'd like to edge to do
… like participating Turing tests
… which are real.
… So and still out there. So for example, we put here 3 onefour fully automated transformations.
… automatic transformations that are applied based on conditions. A technology discovers in the users technology.
… So here content provides that long sought to tailor their ux to what the end user is doing.
… We all websites became dynamic with reflow to try to cope with the different suite sizes that are now standard desktop tablet.
… Oh, well, we're seeing moving to watches and ubiquitous computed the edge will always be a very busy place.
… So what we're saying here is that if you have a website that was made 5 years ago.
… There's some kind of new requirements at the edge you don't understand. We can imagine a service provider comes along and says, Put mine
… service on your site and then at the edge. If they're using a watch.
… I'm going to cleverly rejigger all your stuff. and it will work.
… We think that a lot of people will want or or desire such a capability. We talked about the benefit of doing it, and then we wrote related topics, keep in mind that only the edge knows for sure. That's another general principle that we found.
… And we repeat here, we emphasize the critical importance of preserving user agency.
… Okay? I would like to conclude that because we really need to leave time for discussion. Are there any questions or comments based on this deep dive and taste that I gave