Re: Agenda October 9, 2015 SVG accessibility task force

Good points all, Charles,

One comment, which I meant to send based on your previous emails.  I think
you've misread the ARIA specs with respect to role="img".  Although they
mention that an image can be composed of many constituent parts in the DOM,
for accessibility purposes it is a single element (children are
presentational). In that way, it *is* very similar to our symbol role,
except that a symbol would not normally need a detailed description.

I have also considered the issue of marking simple charts up as tables.  A
year ago, that's what I would have recommended, but now I am not so sure.
It becomes a problem when you have sighted screen reader users (a group
which includes many with cognitive issues) who could be confused by the
disconnect between visual and spoken content.

That said, we should try to make the chart-specific markup compatible with
table markup, in such a way that table navigation patterns could be
re-purposed by AT.  It relates to the idea we discussed a few weeks back,
of having an over-arching framework to describe data structures, of which
tables and charts are two particular presentations.

ABR

On 9 October 2015 at 09:29, Chaals McCathie Nevile <chaals@yandex-team.ru>
wrote:

> Regrets.
>
> I have some concerns about the name and desc calculations, specifically
> that what we are doing is locking in the currently-implemented stuff, which
> is about the minimal useful thing, in a way that makes it very hard for
> people to actually do anything better. I am still thinking through it -
> working from a set of modifications to an algorithm is pretty nightmarish,
> so editorially I would request that the spec at least copy the relevant
> pieces from core mappings as an informative complete statement.
>
> Separately I have been working on examples, as per recent emails to the
> list. A couple of points:
>
> role="img" isn't implenented according to what the spec suggests, but
> rather according to the proposed role="symbol". Maybe we should recognise
> that and update accordingly in both the graphics stuff and core aria.
>
> Thinking about how to represent bar charts and the like, it strikes me
> that they are simple tables - even the ones that have distributions - a
> solid bar, and maybe a narrower bar covering the range of outlying values.
> This also applies to scatter plots. So it seems that the easy win is just
> to use aria table markup directly, instead of trying to invent new stuff.
> The trick Doug used of presenting legends with simple bar charts is worth
> promoting, especially if we enhance it somewhat with simple aria like using
> hidden on the axes' ticks. (Having the axis itself with a title for its
> range seems helpful as a summary.
>
> And I have been thinking about navigating trees and "graphs" - the linked
> nodes you get from e.g. RDF diagrams, flowcharts, schematic maps, circuit
> diagrams and so on. I have some ideas I want to work up. I'll start with
> the diagram [1] from the shadow DOM spec, because that gets published by
> W3C and the editors are taking in my improvements [2]. Walking the nodes
> works at least in Yandex/Voiceover and Firefox/Voiceover on Mac, but I
> think still crashes Safari/VO and Léonie reports little joy on Windows.
>
> The two initial strategies that seem promising are having the "edges" -
> the lines between things, as links, and offering a breadth-first walk of
> the nodes, at least for trees. The alternative is to make a node plus its
> outward links into a group, and use aria-flowto, as I tried to do in the
> chemistry example [3]. The problem is that the implementation of flowto
> seems to be pretty minimal, and it isn't communicated anywhere except
> through the accessibility API so you may need a screenreader running to
> make sense of the navigation.
>
> [1] http://svg-access-w3cg.github.io/use-case-examples/composed-tree.html
> [2]
> https://github.com/w3c/webcomponents/blob/60b7e479e86893af722c76bb26cfba6ba1341144/assets/images/composed-tree.svg
> [3] http://svg-access-w3cg.github.io/use-case-examples/chem-BV-ox.html
>
> cheers
>
> On Thu, 08 Oct 2015 14:41:40 +0200, Fred Esch <fesch@us.ibm.com> wrote:
>
> MEETING TIME - 10 AM US Eastern
> *Join WebEx meeting*
> <https://mit.webex.com/mit/j.php?MTID=m7fe38709ab1505408e44af52147625ca>
> Join WebEx meeting Meeting number: 645 955 799
> Meeting password: w3c
>
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>
>
> Agenda
> SVG Accessibility API Mappings
> <https://rawgit.com/w3c/aria/master/svg-aam/svg-aam.html>
>
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Fred Esch
> Accessibility Focal, Watson Solutions
> AARB Complex Visualization Working Group Chair
> W3C SVG Accessibility Task Force
> [image: IBM Watson]
> [image: Fred]
>
>
>
>
> --
> Charles McCathie Nevile - web standards - CTO Office, Yandex
> chaals@yandex-team.ru - - - Find more at http://yandex.com
>