Accessibility SC Minutes from February 23, 2006

[Nathaniel S Borenstein <nborenst@us.ibm.com>]

OASIS ODF Accessibility SC Meeting MINUTES
Thursday February 23, 2006

Attending:  Dave Pawson, Nathaniel
Borenstein, Jerry Barrier, Mike Paciello, Chieko Asakawa, Hironobu Takagi,
Tatsuye Ishihara, Steve Noble, Peter Korn, Rich  Schwerdtfeger, Malte
Timmerman, Janina Sajka

I.  The minutes of the February
9 meeting were approved.  Dave Pawson was welcomed, and introduced
himself.  He then proceeded to take better notes than the chair; these
minutes borrow heavily and gratefully from Dave's notes.
        
II. Deadlines, priorities, and long
term plans

Nathaniel reminded everyone that we
face a June deadline for specifying things well enough so that developers
have a chance of meeting the Massachusetts requirements.  Our first
goal is to try to meet those requirements by June.  We want to do
much more than that, but that can wait until July.

Mike concurred about the importance
of the deadline, but also notes that we don't want this committee to become
a slave to Massachusetts.  He's comfortable with the two stage approach.

Rich pointed out that there's also the
ISO deadline to worry about.  It would be nice to get our first-pass
accessibility modifications into the first ISO pass.

Nathaniel isn't sure that's possible,
but took an action item to check.

Rich pointed out that it would be good
if action items and interim deadlines should be in the minutes or somewhere
easily accessible.  Nathaniel took an action item to fix this.

III  In-person SC meeting:  It
was quickly decided to discuss this on the mailing list.

IV. Selection of a document editor

We need a document editor.  This
is the person who will "own" the document in the sense of maintaining
the authoritative version of that document.  This is not a full time
job, but it requires a volunteer who can put some time into it.

Rich pointed out that the list of proposals
in the gap analysis from IBM Japan is a good starting point for our deliverable
document.

Nathaniel clarified that he believes
that the best way to deliver this document is as an "errata"
or "diff list" from the ratified version of the standard.  Such
a difference document will be needed anyway for reasons related to the
interlock of the OASIS and ISO standards process, and it's easier to use
such a difference document to modify the primary spec than to rederive
the difference document by comparing two thousand-page specs.

V.  Relation of ODF to Daisy 

Dave gave us a little bit of Daisy education,
and expressed the opinion that there are no short-term ODF problems that
will prevent Daisy from working.  This led to a happy discussion about
further steps that might leverage these two technologies.  

Dave's notes from this discussion:

PK. Any use to embed audio in a source
document? Then use an IBM tool as an authoring tool. Could turn OOO into
a way of authoring a daisy book? 
JS. Could be of use. OOO could be an
authoring tool. 
PK. Not for near term. Better for longer
term discussions. ODF could be a reasonable RFE. 
JS. Future could include other formats.
Becomes a multimedia authoring tool. 
JS. Daisy provides 2 things. 1. SMIL
for sync media at any granularity. 2. Smarter way of next, previous, also
other granularities. 
PK. This suggests would want some knowledge
of structure and or style. 
RS. Would that be of use? Could perhaps
add later, also to practice document. 
DP. Lack of support for structure is
tentatively low use. 

Nathaniel pointed out that people could
start working on these ideas today, with an eye to bringing them to the
attention of this subcommittee in July or so.

VI.  The table/SVG issue

Dave's notes from this discussion:

RS. Apps render tables using SVG. SVG has no semantics. An accessible table gives access to structure and semantic info. There are cells. How to get that structure into a presentation? Posted request to Michael Brauer Could we use the Writer structure? Then user agent could assist and provide navigation. How to provide kbd access. Tables in SVG could be tricky.

• ?? Writer table not sufficient.
• RS. Not enough styling for presentation. Note, dragging an SVG table is slow.
• ?? Proposals for changes are doable in 6 months. Tables are important, but may not be a reality in 6 months. Key question is, is this a big enough omission to make it a weaker alt to MS office.
• How do we get from MS office presentation to ODF presentation?
• PK. If we don't have it, how will it compare with office? It may not be a problem from this point of view. If it goes to ISO. If we create presentations then a legacy problem may be developing. A challenge going forward. Docs need to be well authored. This is what makes PDF hard to access.
• ?? Don't know if this is a big piece of work.
• How to get larger TC onto same timetable?

Nathaniel took an action item to talk
with Michael Brauer about a timeframe for resolving this issue on TC

VII.  Sequencing into and out of
embedded objects

Chieko says that we've done the best
we can given the nature of OLE, and that sequencing into and out of embedded
ODF objects is not a problem.

Notes from Dave:

• CA. I think we're done. We don't have an agenda. It's a problem created by MS.
• ODF permits insertion of OLE objects.
• Is there a tag to describe the embedded object.
• What can we tell the UA?
• RS. This falls into UA environment. Appropriate for TC to have a recommendation.
• RS An 'access out' key?
• RS. How to hack an embedded spreadsheet. Do we need markup for this? How to handle this?
• PK. Reluctant to add this to spec. Seems not the right way.
• PK. On exit, Next item in document order. E.g. picture. If anchored to the page, then no into and out of. From screen reader perspective, go into, and return to the same point. If nav scheme is greater than character granularity, then could skip over something. A ua policy decision? Our task to flag issues for UA solution.
• User agent guidelines would help.
• If there is a chapter tag in writer, should there be one in presentation.
• RS. Is there sync between audio and captions.

Dave took an action
item to provide a mediaobject proposal by next week.

The next meeting will take place on
March 2.

Summary of action items:

Nathaniel:
        1.
 Check if ISO schedule will permit June accessibility mods
        2.
 Make sure the action items are easy to find.  (Done, you're
reading them and they're on SC site in this email.)
        3.
 Talk with Michael Brauer about a timeframe for resolving the table/svg
issue.

Dave:  Write a mediaobject proposal.