W3C

– DRAFT –
ARIA Authoring Practices Task Force

10 December 2024

Attendees

Present
Adam_Page, Daniel, dmontalvo, howard-e, jemma, jongund, jugglinmike, lola, Matt_King
Regrets
-
Chair
-
Scribe
jugglinmike

Meeting minutes

Setup and Review Agenda

Matt_King: Is there any utility in meeting next week?

Matt_King: I might not be available

Matt_King: My tendency is to cancel next week. That would mean we had three weeks off and plan to meet again on January 7

Jem: I love canceling meetings

Matt_King: Alright then, hearing no objections, I will cancel that meeting

Matt_King: Our next meeting will be Tuesday, January 7, 2025

Matt_King: Regarding today's agenda: we currently have four topics. Are there any requests for changes?

Matt_King: Hearing none, we'll stick with what we've got

Publication planning

Matt_King: There's one pull request I need to merge. That's "multi thumb slider"

Jem: I still need to test the rail feature. I will do that today

Matt_King: The other thing in this milestone is the practice page for high-contrast. We'll talk about that in a minute

Matt_King: And there are two things which are already merged

Matt_King: So it may be a small release--maybe three or four patches

Matt_King: howard-e can you create the pull request on Thursday morning? That would give us time to land the high-contrast patch

howard-e: That works for me

dmontalvo: The problem with that is that our colleague is based in Europe

Matt_King: So it's almost better if we make it Wednesday afternoon, then

dmontalvo: That, or morning in EST

Matt_King: I'm sure Wednesday afternoon is still preferable, though. howard-e, let's make it tomorrow afternoon in your time zone

howard-e: Sure, that works for me

Matt_King: In that case, it's very likely to be only three of these four items, but we'll see

PR 2991 - Practice Page for Supporting High Contrast

github: w3c/aria-practices#2991

Matt_King: Thank you for all the commits last Tuesday, jongund!

Matt_King: All the checks are passing

Matt_King: We requested review from three people. None of those reviews are in, yet

Adam_Page: I reviewed and requested changes just a few minutes ago

Jem: I plan to review after this meeting

Matt_King: I think this depends on the nature of the feedback. I personally haven't spent the time on this that I planned on spending

Matt_King: I'd like to commit to a specific time for making a merge decision on this pull request (to determine whether it will be included in tomorrow's release)

Jem: (By the way, I wish that our Task Force had a way to announce a new release. This patch is a good candidate to highlight publicly.)

Matt_King: I'd love to talk about that. We can add a topic to today's agenda

Matt_King: If we make the decision at 1PM PT, then will that give you enough time to release, howard-e?

howard-e: Yes, I'm in eastern standard time. It will be 4PM for me, and that works

Jem: I reviewed this a long time ago. Is there any specific aspect that I need to focus on as a reviewer?

Matt_King: This is the final review. Clarity, style, relevance of information. We want to make sure that the guidance we're giving is useful and actionable by our readers. It's got to be consistent with what we want in the APG but also something that authors can actually use in practice

Matt_King: More and more, I want to make sure we aren't stepping outside of our bounds. We shouldn't be trying to take the place of other important W3C resources. We should simply refer to those and remain focused on the APG's mission

Matt_King: If we can get this merged by 1:00 tomorrow, we would like to include it in the next release. There are a lot of unknowns, though, and that includes me (i.e. whether I can fit it in among my other deadlines)

howard-e: For what it's worth, I can wait as late as 2:30 PM PST

Matt_King: Thank you, howard-e! Given my meeting schedule, that extra time might be really helpful

Adam_Page: I have some additional thoughts about dark mode

Matt_King: I think we're looking for minimum-viable product here. We can always enhance later

Adam_Page: Yeah, that makes sense

Announcement of releases

Matt_King: Something that we talked about doing last year but then did not do is a "year-end review" kind of blog post for W3C

Matt_King: Jem, is that the kind of thing you were thinking about trying to call attention in APG, overall for 2024?

Jem: That's what I'm thinking. We used to send something out once a year by collaboration with W3C. I think you collaborated with them, Matt_King, sharing an overview of our accomplishment and context for how that serves our community

Matt_King: Yes, and a blog post can be disseminated across the community group e-mail list, Mastodon, Bluesky, etc.

Matt_King: What is the process like now, Daniel?

Daniel: Lately, we're seeing that blog posts don't have as much traction as they used to have

Daniel: we are advising other ways of promotion, really. The time and effort that it takes to put together a blog post (editors, comms team, etc)--it really doesn't pay off

Daniel: That said, if anyone feels strongly, we can support you. We might just need some explanation

Daniel: that said, we are redesigning pages on WAI where we can craft messages and announcements. We'll be able to maintain those much easier than we have in the past

Daniel: Once the team agrees what those will look like, we'll be circulating it throughout the groups

<Jem> https://www.w3.org/WAI/update/

Matt_King: That sounds like what we need! Do you have any sense of the timeline?

Daniel: It will be something that will probably happen in the first quarter of 2025

<Jem> we used above page to share info about APG work tow years ago

Matt_King: That might be the answer we're looking for--even better than a blog post, we'll have the ability to make announcements multiple times a year with relatively lightweight process

Daniel: What we're working on will be complimentary to the page Jem has shared.

Daniel: The new system will be less about what we've done and more about what we plan to do

Daniel: So that may not be as appropriate for the kind of 2024 retrospective you are discussing today

Jem: do you have specific information about the platform?

<Jem> https://www.w3.org/WAI/news/

Daniel: It's either a wiki page on the W3C website or on the GitHub repository

Daniel: We're thinking of reducing the WAI pages to the minimum and then just pointing to whatever the Task Forces or Working Group decide they wish to use

Jem: Maybe this is another place we can post the information https://www.w3.org/WAI/news/

Daniel: I've been talking about the announcements, promotions, etc. We could decide as a group whether they are on GitHub or on the W3C wiki.

Daniel: I think, for us, it would make more sense to use our main repo... But that's probably for future discussion

<Jem> This is the wiki page https://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/wiki/Main_Page

Matt_King: We could use our wiki today and then share a link on social networks

Matt_King: I was thinking of the GitHub wiki, actually

<Jem> https://github.com/w3c/aria-practices/wiki

Matt_King: We can put something on there any time we want. It won't be noticed unless we socialize it, but we could do that

Daniel: The difference would be that, today, there is no pointer from the WAI site to the information you published on the GitHub Wiki. In the future, that will be possible

Matt_King: I think it would be fine to make announcements on the GitHub Wiki today, and to just promote those via social media

<Jem> https://github.com/w3c/aria-practices/wiki/Authoring-Practices-Change-Logs

Jem: What's the next step here?

Matt_King: Craft a "year in review" page on the GitHub Wiki. Then, we can figure out where to promote that

Matt_King: I guess that would be good for me to write. It's always nice to be able to point to something that says "look at what the task force did" when you're doing your own performance review!

Issue 3145 - Mailing list question about disclosures and pattern choice

github: w3c/aria-practices#3145

Matt_King: I'm not sure what to think of this particular issue. It says "see attached screenshots", but there's not a lot of information in the text of the message

Matt_King: Is there anything useful we can say in response to this question based on the content of those screenshots?

Matt_King: It sounds potentially not accessible that you enter text into an input and that fails to cause something to expand

Jem: I added a comment on October 15, explaining that the choices ultimately depend on the desired user interaction

[Jem reads her response]

Jem: This was reported on the mailing list, but I may not have copied my comment to the mailing list

Jem: Actually, I did in fact send that as an e-mail

Matt_King: It sounds like your explanation sufficiently addressed the question

Matt_King: So I think we can close this

Issue 3146 - Mailing list question about select drop downs

github: w3c/aria-practices#3146

Matt_King: This is another question from the mailing list

Matt_King: I don't know if there's enough information in this issue to answer the question

Jem: The reporter is asking if there are any examples of a select drop-down

Matt_King: There are no screen shots or additional words, right?

Jem: no

Matt_King: I don't know what they mean by "select drop-down." Well, we have a select-only combobox, we have the action menu button. There's a menu in the toolbar, as well. We also have listbox examples

Matt_King: I don't know what else they would like

Jem: They may be asking about the select-only combobox...

Matt_King: It says "the nearest pattern seems to be the combobox". I don't know if they looked at the "select-only combobox"

jongund: Can we just ask for the specific URL?

Jem: It feels a little like we're serving as a help desk here

Matt_King: Yes. I don't know what they're looking for that we don't offer

Jem: I can mention that there is a select-only combobox

Matt_King: There's also the menu button and the list box

Matt_King: I guess there isn't anything else for us to add, then

Jem: Maybe we should not add everything from the mailing list to the GitHub issue tracker

Matt_King: This seems like they might be asking if we have a specific kind of example, but it's not clear how what they're asking for is different from what we already offer

Matt_King: So lets point them to the three patterns we have which address this type of interaction. We can tell them that if they're looking for something different from one of those, then they would need to be more specific about the differences

Jem: I'm writing a comment to that effect, now

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 240 (Tue Dec 10 03:59:59 2024 UTC).

Diagnostics

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Maybe present: Jem

All speakers: Adam_Page, Daniel, dmontalvo, howard-e, Jem, jongund, Matt_King

Active on IRC: dmontalvo, Jem, jongund, jugglinmike, Matt_King