Re: DescribedAt for ARIA 1.1

Janina,

I would like to provide some more detail regarding the consensus discussion
on aria-describedat:

I thing that what was most important at the meeting was the understanding
that there needs to be a way to get access to a remote description. The
question was: "What is the vehicle?" What the group was concerned about was
extensibility in the future when we want to address choosing from multiple
remote addresses based on a user's needs. Some examples might be language
and education level. Providing the needs of the user could be done through
Indie UI User Context.

Although we understand that we need to address the here and now we also
need to consider the future and at least lay the ground work for it. What
we discussed on the call was access to a reference in a web page that:

- used one or more <link rel="..."> that pointed to different content
- a section of content that was annotated by future ARIA markup that
described the resource meta data reference to external content,
- or a div with a single URL that could be pulled in, or an IFrame with a
source location - something Apple had discussed in HTML working group
discussions for aria-describedby.

For each of these we would need to provide future processing rules and it
is a much longer discussion. We do know that the need to support
alternative content is something you will ultimately need to be able to do
and it has been something that has been discussed by the ePub community.

In the short term, we could have an aria-describedat that took an ID that
pointed to a location with a single URL or an ID with an IFrame that had a
src location. Later on we could expand on the processing rules of the
content at the target of the ID but focus on the immediate solution of
simply grabbing the URL. This would accommodate Apple's approach and allow
for greater flexibility in the future without overloading aria-describedby.

Although our editor is on leave for a month we all agreed to put a version
of ARIA in our mercurial database to start working on this with the intent
of addressing your issue in September. This would be the basis for ARIA
1.1.

Rich


Rich Schwerdtfeger



From:	Janina Sajka <janina@rednote.net>
To:	public-pfwg@w3.org,
Cc:	Richard Schwerdtfeger/Austin/IBM@IBMUS, George Kerscher
            <kerscher@montana.com>, Matt Garrish <matt.garrish@bell.net>,
            Markus Gylling <markus.gylling@gmail.com>
Date:	07/30/2013 02:08 PM
Subject:	DescribedAt for ARIA 1.1



Colleagues:

This email is intended to summarize various conversations regarding
ARIA-DescribedAt previously conducted by email but not always archived
at W3C. As the PFWG has commited to develop ARIA 1.1 in public view, I
am taking this opportunity to summarize the consensus that I believe is
emerging regarding ARIA-DescribedAt here for the publically viewable
record.

I am also requesting that continuing discussion of ARIA-DescribedAt
proceed on this public list. Individuals copied on this email should
Reply to All when responding, as posts to public-pfwg@w3.org are still
member restricted, even though the archive is publically viewable. We
can thus take care to forward all substantive responses through to the
list for those persons not subscribed to it.

The regularly scheduled ARIA Task Force teleconference on Monday 15 July
appears to have reached general  consensus for publishing a First Public
Working Draft (FPWD) specification for ARIA-DescribedAt in the September
timeframe. We have prioritized this timeframe and this particular ARIA
1.1 focus in order to support requirements from DAISY and IDPF for their
epub specification work in ISO.

While the 15 July ARIA teleconference revisited many now familiar
objections and concerns, we do seem to have agreed on an architectural
approach that appears to have satisfied participants for both short and
long term objectives. The (member confidential) teleconference minutes
are available at:

https://www.w3.org/2013/07/15-pf-minutes.html

The agreed approach would provide an ARIA-1.1 DescribedAt attribute
supporting a single URI and usable on multiple elements, much like
DAISY3's prodnote. We believe this meets DAISY's and IDPF's immediate
need.

We also agreed to continue DescribedAt development into the ARIA-2.0
timeframe in order to develop more advanced functionality that might
involve content negotiation based on metadata (e.g. Access for All). We
expect this would involve other W3C specifications, such as IndieUI.

So, simple URI support this September, and more advanced IDref-based
functionality emerging in ARIA 2.0.

I'll stop here and ask Rich to provide more technical detail by way of
summarizing technical discussion to date, and setting the context for
resolving any
remaining questions and concerns.

Janina

--

Janina Sajka,		 Phone:		 +1.443.300.2200
		 		 		 sip:janina@asterisk.rednote.net
		 		 Email:		 janina@rednote.net

Linux Foundation Fellow
Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup:		 http://a11y.org

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Chair,		 Protocols & Formats		 http://www.w3.org/wai/pf
		 Indie UI
http://www.w3.org/WAI/IndieUI/