Fw: Follow Up Call - HTML Canvas Accessibility

I wanted to log this. Thanks Maciej.

Rich Schwerdtfeger
Distinguished Engineer, SWG Accessibility Architect/Strategist
----- Forwarded by Richard Schwerdtfeger/Austin/IBM on 08/26/2009 04:18 PM 
-----

Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> 
08/22/2009 10:52 PM

To
James Craig <jcraig@apple.com>
cc
Sue E McNamara/Rochester/IBM@IBMUS, Cynthia Shelly 
<cyns@exchange.microsoft.com>, Steven Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com>, 
Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org>, David Bolter <david.bolter@gmail.com>, 
Richard Schwerdtfeger/Austin/IBM@IBMUS, Michael Cooper <cooper@w3.org>, 
David Singer <singer@apple.com>, Charles McCathieNevile <chaals@opera.com>
Subject
Re: Follow Up Call - HTML Canvas Accessibility







On Aug 21, 2009, at 5:05 PM, James Craig wrote:

> Hi Sue,
>
> Before you schedule another meeting, could you put together an 
> agenda of the topics that will be discussed in the meeting? Today's 
> meeting ended with action items that may take some time to complete. 
> We have clearly set ideas of how canvas can be made accessible, and 
> individuals are now working on it. My concern is that a 
> teleconference is a very inefficient venue for spec brainstorming.
>
> Given the actions that came out of today's meeting, I'm not sure a 
> follow-up is needed until the actions are complete.
>
> Actions from today:
>
> 1. Doug Schepers agreed to take a stab at a prototype of an 
> accessible canvas demo that was "faked" via a shadow tree that is an 
> offscreen or otherwise hidden sibling (rather than a descendant) of 
> the canvas element. Making the shadow tree a sibling will allow a 
> demo to work today without the need for browser updates. Siblings of 
> canvas will receive normal focus and key events; descendants will 
> not. Rich and I agreed to verify and help with the ARIA portions of 
> his demo once he has something to show.

While Doug works on the main prototype, I volunteer to make a demo of 
specifically a chart drawn using canvas, with accessibility provided 
by a table. I can commit to having it ready by Sept. 4, 2009. (The 
chart will be dynamically generated, so it will demonstrate whether 
dynamically generating a matching table is viable and sufficiently 
author-friendly.)

> 2. After it's determined that the prototype has merit, the browser 
> vendors will need to agree on a formal or informal set of changes 
> that need to be made to support a canvas shadow tree. This may be 
> accompanied by a prototyped release, but no vendor has formally 
> agreed to that yet. Once Doug gets to a stopping point, we can 
> probably decide follow-up steps on the public-canvas-api@w3.org list.

I believe prototyping in an open source browser engine (Gecko or 
WebKit) would be a good way to validate the implementation side, but I 
don't think it needs to block a full proposal.

> I think follow-up on the list is a good idea so other interested 
> parties aren't left out. I've added Maciej and Charles to the CC, 
> since both of them are involved in this discussion and were left off 
> the list.

Agreed. I'm going to subscribe to public-canvas-api, and let's have 
further discussion there.

Regards,
Maciej

>
> Thanks,
> James Craig
>
>
>
> On Aug 21, 2009, at 4:11 PM, David Singer wrote:
>
>> At 11:55  -0500 20/08/09, Sue E McNamara wrote:
>>> Rich has asked me to schedule a follow up call on HTML Canvas 
>>> Accessibility
>>> for next week.  Following are the available times listed in CDT:
>>
>> I'm assuming this is a follow-up to today's call, or is there 
>> another purpose?  These times are all way early for us on the left 
>> coast, and I know my colleagues who handle this are not early 
>> people...
>>
>>>
>>> Tuesday, 8/25
>>> 9:00 - 10:00 a.m. CDT
>>>
>>> Wednesday, 8/26
>>> 10:00 - 11:00 a.m. CDT
>>>
>>> Thursday, 8/27
>>> 9:00 - 11:00 a.m. CDT
>>> Friday, 8/28
>>> 10:00 - noon CDT
>>>
>