DPUB IG Telco, 2016-02-01: Outreach, Accessibility Note, CSS Table Samples

See minutes online for a more detailed record of the discussions. (The headers below link into the relevant sections of the minutes.)

Outreach

Karen Myers and Nick Ruffilo reported on outreach plans. One area is to do a summary for the work we're doing—and providing them to reporters and let them come to us for more information, so we're not guessing or doing speculative work. We still want people to volunteer for blogs and writing, but we want to provide packaged information to people.

The group also spent a certain amount of time collecting a list of relevant events, conferences, workshops, etc, and see who in the Interest Group may be present on those. This may help in media outreach, synchronizing messages, etc. The plan is to put this list on the group's Wiki page soon.

Accessibility Note

Charles LaPierre and Deborah Kaplan reported on the work of the Accessibility Task Force. The TF worked on a draft note. When we went through the existing W3C documents and looked at things that digital publishing said is important—we found a set of 8 items that can be addressed by existing W3C and WAI groups. We can say that “we would like a particular thing to be included”. We have precise things we need to ask—but we know specifically what to ask for. The future work section in the draft is more “someone is working on it and we want to follow it” or “this is going to require more work” and we really need to think about it.

Some additional accessibility issues came up during the discussion, related to logical reading order (CSS may make things look very different than in the document itself) or the overall problem of accessibility vs. (CSS) generated content. The latter is, potentially, a huge gap.

The group also spent some time on what the best way forward is in contacting the right experts in the WAI activity in the group. The plan is to talk to the relevant groups as soon as possible and, eventually, to publish the draft as a W3C Note. It is also possible that works will be done in direction of the WCAG Extension mechanism (the first draft in this direction has just been published at W3C).

CSS table samples

A number of examples for complex tables with complex alignments have been collected, showing the difficulties and complexities of what is used in publishing. These tables will be, eventually, forwarded tot the CSS Working Group for further analysis, although the IG may have to find the right expert who can check whether those tables can be reproduced via HTML+CSS or whether there are gaps in the current specifications.