OASIS ODF Accessibility SC meeting minutes for 15Dec08

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

Dear accessibility SC,

Attached below are minutes from our call earlier today.  Pete ran the meeting, and I took the minutes.

At the end of the meeting, we discussed when we might meet next.  Pete, Janina, Malte, Hiro, and Tatsuya are all available to meet on Monday 12 Jan 09.  I won't be available until two weeks after that.

Regards,

Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect & Principal Engineer,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Attendees

Malte
Pete
Janina
Peter
Hiro
Tatsuya

Agenda

1. Approval of minutes from 1Dec08 meeting http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/office-accessibility/email/archives/200812/msg00002.htmll

 - approved by unanimous consent

2. Radio Button Groups Malte, Pete

Rich's proposal to TC: http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/office-accessibility/email/archives/200811/msg00017.html

Bottom line is ODF overloads form:name to address radio groups. form labels can label individual controls and not groups creating problems. The TC has indicated in their specification that for form:name duplicates form:id essentially creating two unique names and suggested that form:name can be removed.

- discussion about what Rich's latest proposal was... <between Malte & Pete>
- Malte is not convinced yet that it is necessary and is concerned about breaking backward compatibility
-> Without Rich here to discuss Malte's concerns, we cannot close on this topic in the SC.

3. Review Intra-document link proposal from Hiro (attached)

- Malte has a reply to Hiro (in e-mail): feels the issue isn't with ODF itself, but with how OpenOffice.org creates
- Hiro: core issues are interoperability (there is a Japanese ODF editor that has trouble with OOo generated TOC and Outline; wants to ensure uniqueness of these tags; and to be in line with the ODF TC that is moving to use more xml-id generally
- Hiro: Metadata SC decided to use xml-id for this (see 2.1 in Hiro's document)
- Malte: feels it isn't necessary to introduce a new kind of link, but as we already use xml-id elsewhere so from that point of view Malte doesn't have any objection.  The fundamental issue is that OOo should change.
=> Suggestion: that Hiro's proposal be folded into the xml-id odf-fragment proposal going to the TC.  Hiro will take this action!

4. Review ODF 1.2 requirements document from Rich (attached). This is an early draft

Rich's post: http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/office-accessibility/email/archives/200812/msg00015.html

- Insufficient review by attendees; skipped for now

5. Does group agree we should recommend the use of some ARIA concepts (role, live region) properties in the BPG for document components bound to back-end data?

There seemed to be group consensus that we should not add anything to the ODF 1.2 specification at this time. I would like to make this a resolution.

We verified that the live region capability is supported in the ATK/ATSPI and IA2 specifications. This is a WAI-ARIA concept.

- Discussion about whether we should add some sort of politeness level metadata to those places in ODF where content can be updating from an external source.  Feeling is that live regions are an edge case generally in ODF (vs. in a Web 2.0 app), and authors of documents are far less knowledgable/sophisticated as compared to Web app developers, so adding this metadata at this time doesn't make sense. 
- What we do need in the ODF Guidelines is a note that ODF applications need to convey existance of live regions to AT via platform a11y APIs

6. Accessibility Guidelines Actions and Issues

4.1 Issues to Discuss

- Malte: Provide input on charts backed by disjoint cells:

How does (or how will) OpenOffice provide access to charts backed by disjoint cell ranges either in a single or multiple tables? If this case be done today, what are the examples?
http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/office/email/archives/200808/msg00054.html
http://mediacast.sun.com/share/korn/chart-accessibility-challenge.ogg
http://mediacast.sun.com/share/korn/chart-in-writer.behavior.ogg

- No formal proposal at this time; an earlier idea of creating a spreadsheet/table on the fly was rejected by the OOo engineering team
- Peter: to send Malte examples illustrating the challenges a blind person faces in understanding a chart [done], and with Malte discuss this issue with appropriate OOo engineer(s).

- Hiros suggestions for BPG: http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/office-accessibility/email/archives/200811/msg00006.html

- Ran out of time; this is a topic for the next meeting, and as far through the agenda as we were able to go.

4.2 Editorial Action Items

- Peter to provide an updated Accessibility Guidelines to our document library so that we can update it.
- Peter to remove Appendix E.3 Tables/Presentations
- Rich Provide a section on PDF conversion related to supporting repeating table headers in PDF
- Peter Korn and Pete Brunet to specify the text of how table row and column information are mapped in ATK and IA2
Pete's response: http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/office-accessibility/email/archives/200811/msg00020.html
- Peter Korn to consider/Update our guidelines to cover Apple API.

ODF 1.2 Accessibility Requirements Draft: http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/office-accessibility/email/archives/200812/msg00015.html
Latest ODF Specifications: http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/office/documents.php