Minutes from September 27 (Draft)

[Janina Sajka <janina@rednote.net>]

ODF Accessibility SC Minutes September 27, 2007
Submitted By Janina Sajka

1. Assign scribe and role call
Janina will scribe.
Attending: Rich Schwerdtfeger, Peter Korn, Steve Noble, Pete Brunet, Janina Sajka, Tatsuya shihara

2. Approve August 23 Minutes:
http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/office-accessibility/email/archives/200708/msg00023.html
Approved without objection.

3. Review Open Action Items

	a. Do we wish to create the following comparison document (ODF v1.1 Access
features)? Look to WCAG 2.0, TEITAC Content a11y guidelines draft, our own
comparison document, DAISY transformation, Braille generation, our own
experience gqap- to build the list

Peter: There were things that seemed useful in the OXml doc--but the urgency
has passed, so may not be as important to us now.  I think we have more
important items.

Rich: Agree, not as critical as other issues now.  What's important now is to
integrate what we have into our guidelines.

Janina: Conforming to content organization is a nice to have for many reasons, but this isn't a priority for us now.

Consensus to not address this at this time, but to lay it aside as a possible
task for some time in the future. We need to create a list of things we might
do.

	b. Dave Pawson: look at HTML example on slide #3 of Hiro, to see how we
can encode the "San Jose" stuff in ODF (see Hiro's e-mail
http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/group_public/email/office-accessibility/200708/msg00005.html

Laid over to a future meeting when Dave might be present.

	c. Chieko to review glossary changes in subcommittee draft #2, reply
with any concerns/edits/changes
(Verify this is done)

Item was submitted and will appear in the next version of our Guidelines [See
Item e: below].

	d. Peter Korn & Pete Brunet - verify how ATK & IAccessible2 can convey
multiple dis-joint row & column headers (Hiro's slides #8 & #13 from his
e-mail which ODF can encode so long as the headers are in their own groups
http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/group_public/email/office-accessibility/200708/msg00005.html
(Verify this is done)

-Peter: We can't cover this edge case at this time, but it is an interesting
edge case. We might look at our relations interface to convey these
relationships, which might mean we could avoid modifying IA2 and ATK.

In any case this isn't anything we can do just now.

See: http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/office-accessibility/email=/archives/200709/msg00008.html

	e. (From August 23 meeting) - Group Actions Modify next version of
accessibility guidelines to ensure applications respond to system font and
color settings.  Add wording to the next revision of the accessibilty
guidelines to allow control of the animation rate of images in a presentation
Modify accessibility guidelines to state how common field attributes (section
6.7 of the ODF 1.2 spec.) should be supplied to the AT.  Thfield attributes
would indicate whether something were a boolean, gregorian date, etc.

Rich:	We have several items we cannot move until we have the next version of
our Guidelines . Some may require API changes. ...

Peter will post revised Guidelines by October 4, and coordinate an
announcement and prominent posting including top Oasis web page.


	f. (From August 23 meeting) - Janina to create new wording for reload delay
(section 3.13.2) which would allow user agents to control the reload delay and to state the
WCAG requirements for content refreshing to prevent seizures. We need
wording to provide control over flashing Here are some related links
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-WCAG20-20070517/#general-thresholddef
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20-20060427/#seizure-does-not-violate

Held over pending next Guidelines revision.

	g. (From August 23 meeting) - Pete Brunet review review section 4.6 of
the ODF 1.2 specification and see how an application should supply tracking
change information to an AT. Write proposal on how this should be addressed in
the accessibility guidelines
              
Item skipped and addressed at end of call. [See below]

4. Discuss Format for Accessibility Guidelines 1.2

Rich: Comments we received have suggested we follow the ATAG format in our
Guidelines. I'm not sure we should, however. It's a lot of work, and I don't
see that format being picked up very widely.

Peter: I don't  see much value to moving to the ATAG format, it's not a perfect
fit for office document guidelines. We expect many more office document authors
wthan web people in our audience, so we have to be careful how we help them.
Preferably, our tool will help them a lot, and our guidelines will do the rest.

Steve: We aren't sure what direction the new 508 will take, either. There's always been discussion about merging. the various specs and guidelines

Peter: We're seeing more and more in convergence. But, we need to recognize the
different author audiences our various guides address and filter the workload
to their knowledge and need level. The smaller and more trained the group, the
greater burden we can impose. It's also ATAG's purpose to get web authoring
tools to assist content developers. We, on the other hand, need to do most of
the work in our a11y tool, and less in what we ask them to take on via
guidelines. There has been good research on this at IBM. 

Rich: There's really no other work in our area for us to compare. We could put
ATAG, etc., into an Appendix, and we should consider that.

Consensus reached not to follow ATAG.

5. Request for new reviewer of ODF 1.2 Draft 6
http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/office/download.php/25268/OpenDocument-v1.2-draft6.odt

Rich: Who can review?

ACTION: Hiro to review late in October. whatever is current version then.

ACTION: Rich to contact Robert Weir re status and release timeline.

Hiro: We should set some goal for ODF 1.2. We have yet to focus on multimedia,
for instance. Since mm not yet established in the industry we should think how
to cover a11y in multimedia and in spread sheets. Sometimes people zoom out to
see the overall structure in a spread sheet and then zoom into the part they
want to focus on.

Peter: We have the ability to use relations to note, though we might encode the ability to track headers better in ODF.

Hiro: We can add heading navigation ...

Peter: Yes, if user agent supports

Hiro: But there's no best practice in industry for this yet.

6. Animations - We should discuss animation accessibility soon in our SC -
perhaps at our next meeting. Questions we should explore include ways to tag
the animation with ALT text descriptions, suggested UI for authors todo this,
guidelines for when animations should be so tagged (does every animation need
a description? Is there a way to indicate 'non-informational/decorative
animations' as such, so the user knows they exist and knows they needn't care
about them?
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office-accessibility/200709/msg00014.html

Laid over this item until we have Dave Pawson on our call.

Next meeting will be October 11.

Group takes up Item 3.g from above ...
Change markup.

Laid over for further consideration.

-- 

Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.202.595.7777;	sip:janina@a11y.org
Partner, Capital Accessibility LLC	http://CapitalAccessibility.Com

Marketing the Owasys 22C talking screenless cell phone in the U.S. and Canada
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Chair, Open Accessibility	janina@a11y.org	
Linux Foundation		http://a11y.org