ODF TC accessibility summary from meeting earlier today

[Peter Korn <Peter.Korn@Sun.COM>]

Greetings,

I attended the ODF TC meeting earlier today.  Roughly the last half of 
the meeting was devoted to our 14 page submission.  Most of the TC 
hasn't had enough time to review it, as the TC has been focusing on 
remaining ISO issues (and specifically a set of comments that may or may 
not have officially come from China, and how to verify, validate, and 
address those comments).

We have one question thus far, as raised by Bruce D'Arcus on how to 
implement caption support.  I believe Dave Pawson & Bruce have had 
several exchanges about this, with no final conclusion as of yet.  So, 
one action item is for you Bruce & Dave - to draft XML schema to address 
the caption requirement (Requirement #6).

Michael Brauer proposed that the TC members review the accessibility 
proposal, and submit comments/corrections/suggestions over the next 2 
weeks.  After that, the TC would assign somebody(s) to draft a formal 
proposal for ODF 1.1, to by out by mid-July.

I asked whether this TC review could occur in 1 week instead of 2, and 
the TC agreed to try to do this.  The main concern in doing this in 1 
week is that for Requirement #1 (soft page-breaks) we have no XML schema 
proposed.  Lars Oppermann agreed to produce draft XML schema for this 
(though if anyone on the subcommittee has something they would like to 
propose, that'd be welcome I'm sure!).  One question came up (from 
Florian Reuter) with this: is there any accessibility requirement for 
soft line-breaks?  Dave Pawson - does DAISY usage refer to lines that 
things are on, or just pages, paragraphs, sections, and such like?  
Implementing soft line-breaks is not something the TC is eager to do (it 
would significantly increase the file size!), but they don't want to 
miss anything we feel is important.  So Dave, can I have your thoughts 
on this, either via e-mail or in our meeting this coming Thursday?

Finally, we talked about an accessibility guidelines document.  The TC 
(and specifically Michael Brauer) suggested that we do this in an 
appendix to the ODF specification, and that we use as our model the Bidi 
appendix.  Lars will send a link to that appendix for us to look at.  
I'd like us to schedule work on our accessibility guidelines document as 
one of the next things our accessibility subcommittee works on.


Regards,

Peter