EPUB 3 Working Group Telco — Minutes

Date: 2021-07-08

See also the Agenda and the IRC Log

Attendees

Present: Dave Cramer, Wendy Reid, Masakazu Kitahara, Toshiaki Koike, Shinya Takami (高見真也), Brady Duga, Ben Schroeter, Murata Makoto, Matt Garrish

Regrets: Tzviya Siegman

Guests:

Chair: Dave Cramer

Scribe(s): Matthew Chan

Content:

Dave Cramer: we had a request to republish core and RS
… can we get a resolution to publish new working drafts of above?

Proposed resolution: Republish the latest revisions of EPUB 3.3 Core and Reading Systems (Wendy Reid)

Dave Cramer: +1

Brady Duga: +1

Wendy Reid: +1

Matthew Chan: +1

Ben Schroeter: +1

Shinya Takami (高見真也): +1

Murata Makoto: +1

Toshiaki Koike: +1

Masakazu Kitahara: +1

Resolution #1: Republish the latest revisions of EPUB 3.3 Core and Reading Systems

Murata Makoto: +10

1. Summer WG break

Dave Cramer: quite a few WG people will be away in the next month. Ivan, myself, etc.
… propose that we resume WG meetings 13th of Aug
… that would get us through the majority of the vacations we are aware of

2. Private use areas in HTML

See github pull request #1751.

See github issue #1732.

Dave Cramer: we had a section in spec that said if you use unicode private use area (PUA) characters, then you should embed a font
… just having that statement in there seemed kind of odd. Its just best practice advice, and don’t want to mess with unicode PUA
… PR would remove this section of spec
… mgarrish was waiting for confirmation from WG this was okay

Murata Makoto: is the proposal to entirely remove that section, and nothing else?

Wendy Reid: yes, and adding that to the change log

Brady Duga: there was also a comment on issue of moving it to discouraged constructs

Murata Makoto: in spec we refer to CHARMOD matching, but not CHARMOD fundamentals. I think we should refer to Fundamentals, too, fundamentals has a section dealing with PUA codepoints
… we should try to rely on these instead of inventing our own. Don’t want to do anything that goes against what is already in Fundamentals

Murata Makoto: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/references.html#references

Wendy Reid: Ivan made the point that we rely on HTML5, which already refers to CHARMOD documents

Dave Cramer: to my mind this is an HTML question, and HTML refers to CHARMOD, so I don’t see need for us to explicitly refer as well

Murata Makoto: does SVG refer to CHARMOD too?

Brady Duga: whether or not SVG does seems like a minor thing. It already encompases so much more, e.g. allowing authors to draw whatever characters they want

Matthew Chan: shiestyle addresses JP members in Japanese

Shinya Takami (高見真也): MURATA’s opinion is not an objection to this proposal

Murata Makoto: yes, just suggesting a minor change

Dave Cramer: propose we accept this PR. If we have big problems with SVGs and PUA, then we can revisit

Proposed resolution: Merge PR 1751 (Wendy Reid)

Dave Cramer: +1

Murata Makoto: +11

Shinya Takami (高見真也): +1

Brady Duga: +1

Toshiaki Koike: +1

Matthew Chan: +1

Masakazu Kitahara: +1

Wendy Reid: +1

Ben Schroeter: +1

Resolution #2: Merge PR 1751

3. TTS Note

Wendy Reid: https://w3c.github.io/epub-specs/epub33/tts/index.html

Wendy Reid: as we discussed couple weeks ago, we’ve moved SSML and PLS out of spec and into its own document
… this would be published as a WG note. So not rec-track.

Murata Makoto: +1

Wendy Reid: proposing that we publish this document

Dave Cramer: as a first draft WG note?

Wendy Reid: yes

Dave Cramer: and just publishing it as a note doesn’t preclude us from continuing to work on it?

Wendy Reid: yes

Proposed resolution: Publish Text-to-speech Enhancements 1.0, with the short name “epub-tts” (Wendy Reid)

Dave Cramer: +1

Wendy Reid: +1

Shinya Takami (高見真也): +1

Toshiaki Koike: +1

Matthew Chan: +1

Brady Duga: +1

Masakazu Kitahara: +1

Murata Makoto: +1

Ben Schroeter: +1

Resolution #3: Publish Text-to-speech Enhancements 1.0, with the short name “epub-tts” as a working group note

4. Media Overlays and Images

See github issue #1745.

See github pull request #1753.

Wendy Reid: can you TTS an image in a media overlay document?
… question comes down to, in MO we make mention of the fact that there should be an audio alternative to media (i.e. audio, video, AND images)
… and whether TTS and alt-text could fill this requirement

Dave Cramer: https://pr-preview.s3.amazonaws.com/w3c/epub-specs/1753/0c4b16f…692aabc.html#sec-embedded-media

Dave Cramer: this diff preview seems to be working better for me
… basically it splits out embedded images separately from audio and video
… says that audio for embedded images is optional, and TTS reading out alt-text will be used as a fallback
… to me this makes sense

Brady Duga: not sure it makes sense to me. The purpose of MO is to have narrated text associated with the elements of the MO. Not sure why you would reference the image in MO but not have narration, and instead rely on the TTS and alt-text fallback

Matt Garrish: in embedded images we include ability to embed audio, video, and images. This is so that playback of audio, video, etc. could be started via the MO

Brady Duga: my reading of spec is that audio element is required for every text element

Matt Garrish: so what happens when the “text” element is an image?

Brady Duga: well i don’t think it would be valid to include a reference to an image without audio. Spec says audio must be included unless it is “content intended to be rendered via TTS”. Not sure if image (within a div) counts.

Matt Garrish: in HTML normally TTS would pick up the alt-text of the image
… so why can’t the TTS be used to voice the alt-text of the image in this case

Brady Duga: not sure what normal TTS behaviour is. Perhaps this is why use of this fallback TTS feature is rare

Matt Garrish: My guess is that the purpose of having TTS as a fallback to narration is that you might not want to get a professional narrator to narrate some parts of a MO book. e.g. backmatter
… so you could leave this to TTS

Dave Cramer: I think we should wait for more comment. From Marisa, from NNELs, from other users of MO in the wild

5. Page progression direction

See github issue #1482.

Dave Cramer: spec requires that when page progression direction (PPD) is not explicit, RS MUST assume value of “default”
… not sure how to test this requirement
… also, what happens when having just the language element is not enough for RS to set the PPD?
… I proposed some alternate language in the issue, but there didn’t seem to be consensus

Murata Makoto: are you trying to relax requirements? Saying that MUST is too strong?

Dave Cramer: it’s more that requiring the RS to assume “default” is essentially saying that RS can do whatever it wants

Murata Makoto: ah, so if we are going to impose normative restriction, then it should result in something observable

Dave Cramer: e.g. what should happen if PPD is unstated, but language is Arabic? What are we requiring RS do in that case?
… not always possible to determine what “correct” PPD is based solely on language

Murata Makoto: so can we drop the entire second sentence in the proposed language? Not specifying the ppd is already inviting a trouble.

Dave Cramer: right, in case the RS has some better way of choosing PPD (other than looking at the first language element)

Shinya Takami (高見真也): SHOULD is a little strong because JP content uses both RtL and LtR PPD

Dave Cramer: so we’re thinking of deleting that sentence entirely, so that there is no longer a should at all

Proposed resolution: Change text for page-progression-direction to “When the default value of the page-progression-direction attribute is specified, or the attribute is absent, the Reading System can choose the rendering direction.”, drop assertion, close issue 1482 (Wendy Reid)

Dave Cramer: +1

Murata Makoto: +1

Shinya Takami (高見真也): +1

Ben Schroeter: +1

Matthew Chan: +1

Toshiaki Koike: +1

Matt Garrish: +1

Brady Duga: +1

Masakazu Kitahara: +1

Wendy Reid: +1

Resolution #4: Change text for page-progression-direction to “When the default value of the page-progression-direction attribute is specified, or the attribute is absent, the Reading System can choose the rendering direction.”, drop assertion, close issue 1482

6. AOB

Matt Garrish: ivan wanted to do a republication of the spec using his new setup

Dave Cramer: yes, we resolved to republishing core and RS. Do we need to republish the others?

Matt Garrish: might need to republish the a11y. Can’t remember when we last resolved to publish that one
… I suspect we may have changed it since then

Proposed resolution: Publish latest version of EPUB Accessibility 1.1 (Wendy Reid)

Proposed resolution: Publish latest version of EPUB Accessibility 1.1 and EPUB Accessibility Techniques 1.1 (Wendy Reid)

Dave Cramer: +1

Ben Schroeter: +1

Toshiaki Koike: +1

Matthew Chan: +1

Wendy Reid: +1

Matt Garrish: +1

Shinya Takami (高見真也): +1

Murata Makoto: +1

Masakazu Kitahara: +1

Resolution #5: Publish latest version of EPUB Accessibility 1.1 and EPUB Accessibility Techniques 1.1

Dave Cramer: thanks everyone, we’ll reconvene Aug 13th

7. Resolutions