DPUB IG Telco, 2016-03-07: Accessibility Note, Use cases

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

Accessibility Note

Charles LaPierre reported on the Task Force's activities. Task Force is working on a document (to be published as a Note). The has been a lot of discussions, the document was also presented at IDPF meetings, and received reviews by experts in the relevant W3C WAI groups. The current plan is to rewrite the current set of "suggestions" in the document and to do a GAP analysis instead. Indeed, using a GAP analysis instead of terms like “WCAG should…” will make this document easier to adopt for groups like EPUB A11y. (The Task Force has also reached out to the IDPF EPUB WG on the subject of accessibility profiles.). Other plans include to rewrite the abstract, convert some Google documents into wiki tables, change the “tone” of the document in general.

The plan is to organize a meeting with the WCAG WG (probably March 25) as well as with the IDPF groups, after the current re-write round, to then go for a publishable state.

Subsequent discussions on the call were around the exact scope and choice of topics in this document.

There are issues that are currently in the document but they may not have to. A characteristic example is the area of drop caps. On the one hand, that feature is now part of CSS, under the responsibility of that WG; the accessibility aspect of usage is not relevant to the WCAG (which concentrates on the principles) but on the correct usage of that CSS property with regard to accessibility. Problems around this feature drifts towards issues of authoring practices, techniques, which is different than what the note is all about. Which may mean that, as a future work, accessibility techniques may have to be picked up by this task force eventually.

The other major area is the accessibility issues surrounding publications of, e.g., mathematics, chemistry, music, etc, i.e., more complex structures. The accessibility requirements for these are significant, but their solution probably does not come from WCAG but, rather, by turning towards approaches like ARIA. Again, these may be part of a future work of this Task Force, but not necessarily a topic for the current document to be published. It has been agreed, however, to add some words about future work into the note.

The task force urgently need other volunteers to help in this editing round!

Use Case Document

Prior to the call, Romain Deltour published an overview of the current use cases.

Previous work reviewed the older use cases; many of them are out of scope, many have to be reworked and/or rephrased. The Wiki page above listed the identified areas where more use cases are needed. In any respect, the document has to start from scratch, because the use case collection is is very uneven in terms of details and quality. It is probably necessary to merge use cases, because the current collection is too fragmented, some of them just one-liners and not very developed.

There were some discussion about the exact scope of this document. It has been agreed that the goal is to collect use cases for the purpose of PWP. Other, legitimate use cases for publishing are covered by the feedback to the CSS Working Group, the accessibility task force, etc; the goal in this case is to have a solid basis for an eventual, more standard-oriented work on PWP.

The discussion started late on the telco, and are to be followed on the next call.