W3C

– DRAFT –
ARIA WG

12 September 2024

Attendees

Present
CurtBellew, Francis_Storr, giacomo-petri, jcraig, katez, keithamus, pkra, present, Rahim, sarah, scott, smockle, StefanS
Regrets
-
Chair
-
Scribe
sarah

Meeting minutes

New Issue Triage

jamesn: one new issue, focusability of elements with aria-disabled

pkra: I think this can be closed, it was a question and was answered

New PR Triage

<aardrian> +present

jcraig: implementors have taken up a pretty strong stance that ARIA should stay an accessibility layer and not change mainstream functionality

jamesn: even with that, there are instances when it is useful to allow disabled things to become focusable

jamesn: no new PRs

WPT Open PRs

jcraig: nothing new

jcraig: if anything has been updated, let me know, otherwise we can move on

jcraig: also worth mentioning, the WPT a11y interop group did resolve to bring Valerie's work into the scoring criteria for this year's interop investigation. She's been working on taking the old core AAM tests that were difficult to maintain, and making it more automated so we can get some more results long-term out of this. Really impressive

work, called acacia, excited to see what comes of it

spectranaut_: next topic is TPAC, I think we'll have a meeting with the browser tools and testing to talk about acacia and getting that landed. There are unresolved kinks and questions, would be great to have the WG in the meeting.

jamesn: would it be nice to demo to the group what acacia can do in the empty slot?

spectranaut_: we can do that

TPAC planning

jcraig: I've had good results demo'ing things to overlapping groups

jcraig: there are different types of questions that come from different groups as well

jamesn: we have a wiki page with our proposed agenda for TPAC. We've put the topics into the various days and time slots, we have only one open slot that we can put acacia into, or we can have some other things

jamesn: if you have any issues, let us know so we can make changes to this

jamesn: we have two joint meetings, AGWG on thursday and APA on friday

jamesn: apparently the AGWG is to discuss WCAG 3 ARIA techniques, which is news to us

matt: apparently the APA group expect me to drive that one, it's related to having other content that's not currently part of APG better supported or integrated into APG. Things like the media accessibility, MAU

matt: and Using ARIA, which we've already agreed to take on. I don't know how meaty this can be, and I think the bigger challenge is that there are a lot of good ideas, or potentially good ideas. We don't have people to do the work. So I don't know how fruitful this can be, unless there are any people who are willing to work on these things. I'm

not confident that we need it.

jamesn: it's also on friday afternoon, so everyone will be wiped out

matt: I'm leaning towards not having it if it's totally up to me

jamesn: I'll ask Janina if there's anything else to ask during that meeting. I'd be quite happy to not have that meeting on friday too

Rahim: I had a question about the agenda setter and their role. Is their role to lead an effective session, outcomes, should we make a deck -- what should agenda setters be doing?

jamesn: I'm not going to tell you how to do it, having a deck would be helpful, but it doesn't have to be a presentation. Having something written down that's not just a topic, and having specific things to talk about and questions that need answering would be helpful. You can do that however you like. I assume there will be the ability to present

something on a screen in the room, and there will be remote participants as well.\\

jamesn: there's no formal way to do this, but having something is useful to prevent going in circles

jamesn: we scribe the same way, there will be a rotating scribe, we'll ask most people to try to scribe at least one session

jamesn: these are like normal meetings but more in depth and in the same room

jamesn: think of it like a deep dive sessions, where the successful ones have a plan and an outcome

jamesn: vs the ones where we talk around a topic without progressing it towards a conclusion

jamesn: some information about where all the cool people talk to eachother

Table without table headers

jamesn: this was filed, and I just want to know what our plan is for this. We have in the issue the code links to webkit's and blink's isDataTable implementation, and the gecko TableAccessible implementation

jamesn: scott had a related issue

jamesn: I don't know if folks think this would be a good idea or not, but it would be nice to detail in words or in an algorithm what each of the implemetations are and we can look to see where they are common and where they differ. I think it would be nice if all browsers treated them the same. If every table in every browser was either a layout

table or a data table the same way, that would be a positive

jamesn: aaronlev is on the queue and is going to tell me I'm wrong

aaronlev: you're right

aaronlev: don't get used to it

aaronlev: I talked to Brett-Lewis at Vispero, and they used to do it in there code, but now they use a variable in our code that tells them what our guess is

aaronlev: the algorithms are so similar, it shouldn't be hard to harmonize them. We need someone to go through the source code and harmonize them. You don't really need to know C++, and create a table

jamesn: could ChatGPT do this?

aaronlev: It could do it incorrectly

aaronlev: we just need a volunteer to do this, I don't think we need to evaluate this in a big group

keithamus: I volunteer as tribute

aaronlev: if you have any questions about the code, you can ping me

jamesn: you probably wrote most of it, right?

aaronlev: I wrote the code in FF, then found the code in Chrome had been copied from Safari, which had been copied from FF. The same comment code was there

jamesn: if we can get this in browsers and tests for this, that'd be awesome

jcraig: and then the layout list reconciliation

jamesn: that's going to be more c--

jcraig: inside joke

aaronlev: keithamus do you mind doing it as a google doc at first, and then turn it into a wiki? It'll just be easier to collaborate

keithamus: OK, google doc with a table, enumerating similarities and differences?

aaronlev: rows would be general rule, columns would be each browser, if they do it, and if they do it differently, then a column about why the rule is good or bad

jamesn: can everyone who wants to collab on this use google docs?

jamesn: sounds like we have progress, let's move on

Make aria-relevant and ariaRelevant reflect

jamesn: last one, I think this has been concluded, but I want to confirm because it's not the conclusion I expected

jcraig: what I missed was that this is what implementations do anyway, so I approved it

jamesn: so, no action needed?

jcraig: just needs to be merged

jamesn: need reviewers, I guess

spectranaut_: you can add me

Rahim: (also volunteered)

jamesn: no implementations needed, right

jcraig: I think there might be a line needed in a WPT test, but I think so. That'd be easy to add anyway

jamesn: believe that's it for this week

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 229 (Thu Jul 25 08:38:54 2024 UTC).

Diagnostics

Maybe present: aaronlev, jamesn, matt, spectranaut_

All speakers: aaronlev, jamesn, jcraig, keithamus, matt, pkra, Rahim, spectranaut_

Active on IRC: aardrian, aaronlev, CurtBellew, Francis_Storr, giacomo-petri, jamesn, jcraig, katez, keithamus, pkra, Rahim, sarah, scott, smockle, StefanS