Re: [office-accessibility] ODF TC accessibility summary from meetingearlier today

[Richard Schwerdtfeger <schwer@us.ibm.com>]

See response below.


Rich Schwerdtfeger
Distinguished Engineer, SWG Accessibility Architect/Strategist
Chair, IBM Accessibility Architecture Review Board
blog: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/dw_blog.jspa?blog=441

"Bruce D'Arcus" <bruce.darcus@OpenDocument.us> wrote on 06/15/2006 08:03:26 AM:

>
> On Jun 15, 2006, at 8:41 AM, Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 -
> Hamburg wrote:
>
> >> But this still does nothing to address my concerns about a) weak
> >> semantics, b) overlap with metadata.
> >
> > I do understand your concerns. But we would like to solve the
> > accessibility issue for ODF 1.1, while meta data is for 1.2. So, I
> > think we have to accept that we specify something now that we maybe,
> > or maybe not, would specify in a different way in a year or so.
>
> Michael, your arguments make sense.
>
> So let me turn this around: is there any value to having the link use a
> generic term like "described-by", or would it be appropriate to make it
> more narrow, e.g. "caption" or "caption-id"? Is there any other kind of
> object -- textual description link that ODF would need?
>

Hi Bruce,

Some background: We chose describedby is there is a notion of an accessibledescription in platform accessibility APIs. Caption-id would work fine to. In the Dynamic Web Accessibility Work we are defining a describedby property for DHTML/AJAX type applications to allow an author to tie text in the document (visible - such as in prose, or hidden) to an element to provide more information to the author about it: http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/adaptable/. We were trying to be consistent. In the ODF case the caption happens to be visible.

At the end of the day, for 1.1 the id reference mechanism has the least impact on the ODF specification. I agree that for 1.2 we should all look at the meta data effort being proposed and see how that can also support accessibility. The accessibility subcomittee will do that as part of the 1.2 accessibility effort.


> Bruce
>