17:58:06 RRSAgent has joined #aria-at 17:58:11 logging to https://www.w3.org/2025/01/29-aria-at-irc 17:58:11 RRSAgent, make logs Public 17:58:12 please title this meeting ("meeting: ..."), Matt_King 17:58:59 MEETING: ARIA and Assistive Technologies Community Group 18:01:09 jongund has joined #aria-at 18:02:04 mmoss has joined #aria-at 18:08:36 jugglinmike has joined #aria-at 18:10:02 present+ jugglinmike 18:10:05 scribe+ Current status 18:10:09 scribe+ jugglinmike 18:10:19 Topic: Current status 18:10:42 Matt_King: We have a pull request in review that changes the reference example 18:11:06 Matt_King: It doesn't affect all tests, though--it only affects the tests that Joe reported where the heading is being hidden 18:11:09 howard-e has joined #aria-at 18:11:17 present+ 18:11:48 Matt_King: For now, it would be best to skip the tests in the radio group test plan where the heading is hidden by the setup script 18:11:55 present+ IsaDC 18:12:06 IsaDC: The name of the group is "pizza crust" 18:12:21 IsaDC: I would advise against running any of the tests 18:12:36 Matt_King: I'm fine with that 18:12:50 Matt_King: In terms of the bot, though, once we have the new version of the test plan in the queue 18:13:08 Matt_King: Was the question about the bot regarding the version of the bot? 18:13:13 present+ dean 18:13:26 dean: I was just wondering if someone would run this test plan with the bot before I do 18:13:33 Matt_King: I believe the answer is "yes" 18:13:51 Matt_King: Though there was recently a macOS update... What version of macOS is the bot currently running? 18:14:11 howard-e: It should only be able to run the latest version of 14 18:14:20 Matt_King: But now, we have all the testers running macOS 15 18:14:52 IsaDC: Yes, and it is important to have the bot running that version because there have been regressions with VoiceOver. The bot wouldn't catch those if it used the older version of macOS 18:15:04 Matt_King: Is something preventing us from upgrading the bot? 18:15:33 howard-e: There have been issues that were previously reported to GitHub; I'm trying to pull up the details on that, now 18:15:57 Matt_King: Okay, well, for disclosure. mmoss, you are recording those without the use of the bot, right? 18:16:03 mmoss: That's correct 18:16:32 Matt_King: It looks like you're just getting started. I guess we don't have any problems there, then, right? 18:16:48 mmoss: Nope! The recorder was doing something strange, but I think I've worked that out 18:17:30 howard-e: We don't support macOS 15 yet because GitHub doesn't fully support it, yet 18:17:41 Matt_King: So we're dependent on GitHub, then 18:17:45 howard-e: That's right 18:17:54 Matt_King: I guess there's no way for us to work around that dependency 18:18:17 Matt_King: I wonder what's holding things up. That could end up being a real inhibitor to the project. What if it takes them a year to support it? 18:18:28 Matt_King: Should we raise a support ticket with GitHub? 18:19:35 jugglinmike: I believe the maintainers of Guidepup have reported it, already 18:20:16 https://github.com/actions/runner-images/issues/11257 18:20:28 howard-e: And it looks like they've replied within the last few weeks. We at Bocoup queried just a couple days ago 18:20:47 Matt_King: I wonder if that kind of dependency is a risk to the project that we should be thinking about other ways to work around 18:21:05 Matt_King: Perhaps Assistive Labs has more control over their systems... 18:21:22 Matt_King: I suppose the alternative would be building a new approach to how we run automation 18:22:49 IsaDC: We did some work with Assistive Labs, so I may be able to ask them. What do we need, exactly? 18:23:27 Matt_King: I think jugglinmike or howard-e would be the best to write a request like that 18:24:03 Matt_King: I'm not sure we want to request it just yet. But GitHub's lack of support does seem concerning, given how long that version has been publicly available 18:24:58 Matt_King: So for the link examples, I see a new 2025-01-23 version here 18:25:06 Matt_King: We need to assign people, right? 18:25:31 IsaDC: no--Luke from PAC is re-running them, and I've already run some in NVDA to catch up with VoiceOver. It should be out of the queue by the end of Friday 18:25:35 Matt_King: Awesome! That's really good 18:26:01 Matt_King: So, at this point, dean is on hold and mmoss is plugging away 18:26:46 Matt_King: I think we'll get dean back on pretty soon. I think what I'm going to do, IsaDC, is prioritize the review of the radio stuff (because I think that's simpler), then I'll come back to slider after we solve the issues in the next discussion topic 18:26:57 Topic: New slider assertions 18:27:15 Matt_King: The best thing for people to do, to make this discussion really concrete, is to look at the examples while we're discussing them 18:27:38 Matt_King: In the agenda, I put links to two different APG examples. I also put a link to a draft test plan 18:27:53 Matt_King: Now, for the question 18:28:37 Matt_King: there are four different properties associated with slider. Three take numbers, and the fourth is aria-value-text (a textual value that is used in the event that the author believes that a number on its own is not understandable) 18:29:19 Matt_King: A good example for that is if you have, say, days of the week that are represented by numbers. The author can use aria-value-text to associate those numbers with names of week days 18:30:00 Matt_King: The author is also required to set value-min and value-max. In that example, those would be 1 and 7, respectively 18:30:25 Matt_King: If the screen reader is going to read, say, "Monday," and you were to hear "min one max seven" 18:31:15 Matt_King: It seems relatively clear most of the time that those minimum and maximum values are not relevant to screen readers 18:31:25 Matt_King: But we have examples in APG that make that a little less clear 18:31:43 Matt_King: In the first, we use "value text" so that it can say "degrees Celsius" when you're hearing the value 18:32:12 Matt_King: The slider goes from 10 to 38 18:32:36 Matt_King: For whatever reason, ARIA requires the author to set those. At least right now, JAWS is dutifully reporting those in certain circumstances 18:33:03 Matt_King: The way I hear with with JAWS as the example exists in the APG, "temperature up down slider 25.05 degrees Celsius min 10 max 38" 18:33:23 Matt_King: That makes sense. In this case, there's no harm in hearing the minimum and maximum 18:33:36 Matt_King: However, if you look at the "Seek slider" example in APG 18:33:59 Matt_King: In this case, the slider goes from 0 to 300 seconds, but humans don't think very well in terms of time using seconds. 18:34:28 Matt_King: When you go to this slider, JAWS will say "1 minute and 30 seconds of 5 minutes" that is the value text when the value is 90 18:34:42 Matt_King: JAWS goes on to say "min 0 max 300" 18:34:59 Matt_King: So the question is: is the maximum 300 minutes? 18:35:09 Matt_King: So there's an argument that there's harm for JAWS to be doing that 18:35:26 Matt_King: This example makes it more clear what the problems with announcing the numeric min and max 18:35:48 Matt_King: So that's the problem, in a nutshell 18:36:22 Matt_King: Do you folks understand the properties, how authors use them, and what screen readers are doing? 18:36:28 mmoss: It all makes sense to me 18:37:07 mmoss: And I agree that it's very confusing for the horizontal slider 18:37:14 dean: I'm sorry, I missed that. 18:37:19 dean: I'm not assigned to the slider yet, right? 18:37:36 Matt_King: No, you're not. We're still trying to figure out what we should be asserting for the slider 18:38:42 Matt_King: There are at least two possible ways of approaching this problem 18:39:24 Matt_King: But before that, I wanted to know if what I was saying makes sense to you (about the numeric properties and how they interact with aria-value-text) 18:39:27 dean: Yes 18:39:40 Matt_King: Good 18:39:43 Matt_King: So, for the ways we could approach this 18:39:59 Matt_King: We could say, "you must not say the min and the max if value-text is specified" 18:40:15 Matt_King: Right now, they don't say "value-now" if "value-text" is specified 18:40:34 Matt_King: We could write "negative assertions" (i.e. "MUST NOT" or "SHOULD NOT") 18:41:12 Matt_King: Another option could be to not have any assertion at all and label it "unexpected verbosity" and call it a negative side-effect 18:41:25 dean: I can't see this because it's not in the test queue 18:41:29 Matt_King: I put a link in the agenda 18:41:39 dean: I didn't bother to look at the agenda. I apologize 18:42:26 Matt_King: These are two examples in the APG where the APG example author intentionally are trying to show how to go beyond--how to use "value text" in a way that is helpful to users 18:42:50 Matt_King: By the way, I have seen media seek sliders where the value of the slider is in milliseconds 18:43:00 Matt_King: This media seek slider was actually inspired by that nonsense 18:44:00 dean: I'd go so far as to say that--and I haven't done a lot of work with sliders--we need to give people the ability to turn off the noise. As in, I don't need to know how much time is left because I don't care 18:44:08 dean: I don't know if we have that mechanism available 18:44:42 Matt_King: If you had the focus on the slider while the media is playing, you might get that kind of behavior. As a screen reader user, though, you wouldn't keep the focus 18:44:57 dean: Oh, that makes sense 18:45:15 Matt_King: When I looked at the plan, I started to get a little uncomfortable with these "negative assertions" 18:45:53 Matt_King: I am not happy with what ARIA is doing here. It feels to me that we should have an "ARIA min text" and an "ARIA max text" 18:46:20 Matt_King: ...or we should say, "if aria-text" is specified, you don't have to specified min and max. Maybe even make it an authoring error to do so 18:46:37 Matt_King: Right now, it's on the screen readers to ignore the numeric values if text is specified 18:47:12 Matt_King: I'm not sure changing ARIA is a good path forward for this project right now. I'm not even sure it's feasible (there could be important and valid reason for the current design) 18:47:26 Matt_King: I'm mostly thinking about how we deal with the status quo if we don't change ARIA 18:48:09 Matt_King: A negative assertion makes it really clear to screen reader developers what needs to be ignored in cases like this. There's a part of me that leans against negative assertions and to just code this behavior as excess verbosity 18:48:55 Matt_King: If we just rely on testers to identify excessive verbosity, then that's not a very robust test 18:49:22 IsaDC: I think it would be more appropriate to use it in the media slider to demonstrate how disruptive it is to hear those min and max values 18:50:17 mmoss: Thinking about verbosity in general and whether or not some people might want that verbosity... We probably want the default behavior to change but to keep optional behavior 18:50:35 mmoss: I hesitate to circumvent testing first 18:50:48 Matt_King: So would that mean leaning in the direction of a "SHOULD NOT" kind of statement? 18:51:40 mmoss: I've always wondered about the specification itself as it relates to min and max 18:52:00 Matt_King: Yes. It is actually written in the ARIA spec that if you have value-text, it is a replacement for value-now 18:52:08 mmoss: That's my understanding, as well 18:52:26 mmoss: IsaDC mentioned leaning in to the media slider as the test case to demonstrate. I think that might be really helpful 18:53:03 IsaDC: Yes, that would should "one minute of five" with a minimum of 0 which is fine, but the maximum would be 300 18:53:52 Matt_King: We could have made this more obvious if we designed it to use milliseconds... 18:54:11 mmoss: Is it verbosity? 18:54:27 Matt_King: I'm not sure I would call it excess verbosity in the strict sense 18:54:35 Matt_King: I mean, technically, it is. It's extraneous 18:55:44 Matt_King: There is a rating slider which uses the same technique in the APG 18:55:58 Matt_King: It uses a slightly different approach 18:56:16 IsaDC: It uses stars. I think media seek slider is a much better illustration of the problem 18:56:31 IsaDC: I'm leaning toward using a negative assertion because it's more clear for testers 18:59:01 jugglinmike: TODO 18:59:23 Matt_King: This is unique because it's a case where rendering attribute values is a problem 18:59:58 Matt_King: This might be another argument in favor of negative assertions 19:00:29 Matt_King: Telling authors about what to expect based on their markup makes it more clear in my head about why it is really clear to have negative assertions 19:00:41 Matt_King: So I'm glad you asked that, jugglinmike 19:01:06 Matt_King: So I think the plan is for IsaDC to do what she's done with this plan but to use SHOULD 19:02:20 IsaDC: I expect to be able to bring a draft to our next meeting. Then we'll be able to review the effect of a negative assertion in a more practical way 19:04:25 s/TODO/Historically, when we've observed excessive output, we've simply failed the test. We're discussing a lot about this, though. Is that because we recognize the cause of the behavior and we feel that other screen readers are likely to make the same mistake?/ 19:04:34 Zakim, end the meeting 19:04:34 As of this point the attendees have been jugglinmike, howard-e, IsaDC, dean 19:04:36 RRSAgent, please draft minutes 19:04:37 I have made the request to generate https://www.w3.org/2025/01/29-aria-at-minutes.html Zakim 19:04:44 I am happy to have been of service, jugglinmike; please remember to excuse RRSAgent. Goodbye 19:04:44 Zakim has left #aria-at 19:04:53 RRSAgent, leave 19:04:53 I see no action items