Report on DocBook plans for Table Accessibility

[Don Day <dond@us.ibm.com>]

I am forwarding the following information from Nancy Harrison:

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At the last DocBook TC meeting, we spent a lot of time on basic accessibility issues with DocBook. We came to a tentative conclusion that we would add two elements to the class of inline elements, which can appear pretty much anywhere, the way indexterms can appear pretty much anywhere in DocBook. The two elements are:

<alt> for short pieces of text (PCDATA only)
<annotation> for more complex information; this could contain what DB calls 'block-type' elements;
that is, elements that would be set off in text, like a paragraph or list, rather than elements
that appear inline within a block element, like a book title or an author's name.

Coming to this conclusion took us a large portion of the meeting and a fair amount of discussion, and we didn't manage to get to a complete discussion of table accessibility, which is now on the agenda for this month's (November's) meeting. .

Currently, we're considering the following to be the issues that we need to resolve for DB / HTML 4.0 compatibility re table accessibility:

1) Title attribute for ulink, link, xref and any other elements producing an <a href=""">" result.
we might resolve this by either
allowing the new <annotation> element (which would already be allowed within links) for this purpose, or
just adding a 'title' attribute to the link elements

2) Summary attribute for tables
this is the trickiest, since the attribute would have to be on the <table> itself, and would therefore impact the CALS model

3) Abbreviations of table headers .
we might be able to implement this so it only applies to the HTML model table.

Sorry I'm not able to present you with a more finished package, but as with DITA, it was a bit of a thorny subject, and had to follow a discussion of another item which we felt was also important to discuss during that meeting.

As an fyi, the way we implemented a 'merged' CALS/HTML table model was to make the CALS model the default. If someone wants to use the merged model they modify some of the parameter entities in the CALS table DTD driver file that's called from DocBook. So someone who wants a completely pristine CALS table model when using DB can avoid getting the HTML one at all. That gives us a bit more freedom to alter HTML table models without contaminating the CALS version, though it's not easy. Hope this data is useful.
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Regards,
--
Don Day <dond@us.ibm.com>
Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
IBM Lead DITA Architect
11501 Burnet Rd., MS 9037D018, Austin TX 78758
Ph. 512-838-8550 (T/L 678-8550)

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
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