Meeting minutes
Setup and Review Agenda
https://
Matt_King: Next meeting: February 3
Matt_King: Any requests for change to agenda?
Daniel: I'd like to share some updates on the WAI website
Matt_King: Sure, we can talk about that during the publication planning
Meeting time pole
Matt_King: Jemma isn't able to attend today, and she'll likely miss the next meeting as well
Matt_King: Survey is now closed.
Matt_King: The most voted date and time for the APG biweekly meetings is Wednesday 11am (CST), which received 14 votes.
Matt_King: The agenda for today's meeting has the top five most-voted meeting times
Matt_King: Normally, we'd go with the most-voted time unless there is an essential member that vetoed one
Matt_King: All of these times work for me
Matt_King: Are there any concerns about that time among those present here today?
Adam_Page: Works for me
Matt_King: If we made this change for February, that would mean that our next meeting would be February 4th instead of February 3rd
Matt_King: We'll do that. I'll update the W3C calendar accordingly
Publication planning
Matt_King: In the current publication milestone, 2 pull requests are merged and ready to ship. The other four are in various states
Matt_King: I think it would be good just to get these two out there
Matt_King: I'm proposing we plan publication for somewhere between February 4th and February 18th
Matt_King: Since these two pull requests are fairly substantial
<Daniel> Technical updates to the WAI website
Daniel: I shared a link describing updates to the way that the WAI site works. It might impact the scripts we have in APG
Daniel: The question is: how do we want to proceed with this? Do we have people who can review this? I think that would mainly be howard-e.
Daniel: ...or should we merge and see what happens, then?
Matt_King: I don't expect any support from howard-e, but perhaps arigilmore or Joe can help
Matt_King: Do we have a dependency on Ruby on anything in APG?
Matt_King: Probably howard-e is the person to ask, but I'm not aware of any such dependencies.
Matt_King: What is the timing on this, Daniel?
Daniel: It doesn't have to happen tomorrow. We would want to close this out--this is one of the "external" repositories--all generated.
Daniel: If we don't have howard-e, then we could try merging. We can always revert
Daniel: This project uses Jekyll, which relies on Ruby
Matt_King: It might be the case that some things it could break would not be obvious
Matt_King: I don't know if there's any way to test this in this branch--if it were to break something, it would have to be in "main" for us to detect it
Matt_King: Otherwise, we'd have to redirect--we'd have to make all the actions work against... I'm not sure I understand enough about the architecture to say whether we can test it from a feature branch
Daniel: I could discuss with Remi, if that's something we want to be sure about
jugglinmike: When I'm testing statically-generated sites, I'll sometimes manually generate the files locally on the two branches, and then generate a diff of the generated file
<jongund> https://
Matt_King: Ideas on how we could get more people contributing would also be helpful
Matt_King: I've thought about setting up a "practices" community group so we could organize a regular call with a larger group of people--design and engineering talent from a broader base
Matt_King: That's something I haven't managed to pull together yet
Matt_King: Setting up a Community Group is trivial, but actually making it work is a whole other challenge
jongund: What would we lose by making this group a Community Group?
Matt_King: We would lose W3C staff support for a lot of our processes
Daniel: We could arrange for staff support regardless, but in addition to that, if you're not a W3C member, you can't participate in Task Force meetings
Daniel: Rather, I would picture this in the sense that a Community Group would open it up to participants who are not W3C members. The Task Force could be a liaison to ARIA
Daniel: There is some precedent for such a structure
Matt_King: It becomes sort of a leadership challenge. I have already been doing both the ARIA-AT Community Group and the APG Task Force. The overhead of running both of those things is part of why we're reducing the meeting cadence
Matt_King: It becomes a little bit of a challenge. I couldn't personally take that one. I think it would be different if we had, say, 20 members in this group, and we had a collection of people who were gung-ho about leading an effort to engage participants for a new Community Group
Matt_King: I'm particularly curious about being proactive versus reactive. I think it's important to be able to respond in a timely manner to people who are using APG. I think we got better about that in 2025
Matt_King: If we look at issues raised in 2025, those were more likely to be closed in 2025--compared to earlier years
Matt_King: Our backlog didn't grow a lot. It's still at around 500 issues, and there are a lot of good ideas in there--we just haven't had the resources to triage properly
jongund: We worked on color-contrast guidance. I don't know what the priority of that is. It would be great to revisit that
Matt_King: I do want to complete that. It's still in a milestone
jongund: We can probably get rid of my work on high-contrast in Windows. The more I work on it, the more I find bugs and feel as if the best recommendation is to simply ignore it.
Matt_King: Guidance like that is useful, even if we can't express it so bluntly
Matt_King: It could also help explain why we observe such limited uptake across the industry
jongund: I think getting rid of high-contrast settings in Windows makes the document a lot smaller. I think there's something there
jongund: And the other thing I started to work on last year was getting rid of some of the landmarks examples
Matt_King: Oh, right, I'd like to finish that, too
jongund: I can revisit it
Matt_King: I'll add that issue to a future agenda so that we can talk through where we actually want to go with it
jongund: Okay. The last I thought was that we would just try to put mostly content in the practice, and the pattern page would just refer people to the practice
Matt_King: And the question of "do we want a functional example page or not?" It's possible that we don't want a functional landmark page because APG is itself something of a demonstration of most of the landmarks
Matt_King: Anyway, that kind of simplification is definitely the direction.
Matt_King: Well, I'm always open to feedback and always looking for ways of making the Task Force stronger and most efficient. We're always operating with limited bandwidth, but we're making a big different. That includes aria-actions and soon, aria-notify.
Matt_King: If any of you are coming to APG from organizations that have opinions, then your voice is welcome here
Adam_Page: In general, I'm a big fan of the way the group is working now, and its mission. When I look at our backlog of issues on GitHub, it is intimidating. We have over 600 open issues--that's more than in ARIA and more than in WCAG. It would be nice to start to chip away at that and improve the signal-to-noise issue. Especially for newcomers.
Matt_King: We did work on an issue triage process last year. The idea was to be able to enable more people to help with issue triage, but we weren't really successful. We could revisit that, but maybe there is a more important function--like figuring out what the good first issues are
Matt_King: Or it could be like what James and Val have done in ARIA: asking others to suggest a prioritization, and then discussing that prioritization as a group
Matt_King: I think the lighter-weight, the better
Adam_Page: Based on my experience in the WCAG 2.x Task Force, I've come to appreciate that every week, it's easy to get an at-a-glance view of what everyone is working on and what is a good candidate to get picked up
Matt_King: Do you think we should have a discussion around that in a future meeting, Adam_Page? Do you want to possibly talk a bit more in a future meeting about how it works for them and how it might work for us?
Adam_Page: Yeah. Let me collect my thoughts about get back to you about scheduling for a future meeting
<Zakim> Daniel, you wanted to say there is new people now that weren't as involved by the time we tried this triage process
Daniel: We tried last year and didn't succeed, but there are different people here, now. I think taking action on the issue backlog should be the highest priority for us
Daniel: So +1 to Adam_Page's suggestion
Matt_King: Okay. That's certainly valid. There's probably a fair number of issues that are just overcome by events and can simply be closed
Daniel: I suspect a lot of them can be closed. Maybe even most of them
Daniel: Also, you wrote something about how to organize this process last year...
Matt_King: Yes, we had an issue triage process that we were working on. It is in the wiki, but it feels a little too heavy to me--a little too complicated.
<Daniel> APG issue triage process
Matt_King: I think one of the big things is figuring out how we can make something work where any member of the group can say "I have an hour to dedicate to APG" and find something to do with that time.
Matt_King: And for them to be confident that they are making the best use of their time
Daniel: I've shared a link to the process in the minutes, so people have a starting point to think about revisions
Zakim: end the meeting