UAAG Minutes for 11/11 teleconference

UAAG Conference Call, 11/11/04, 2PM EST

Present:

Jon Gunderson - JG
Peter Korn - PK
Aaron Leventhal -- AL
Susan Crayne -- SC

JG - give feedback to timed text people on whether the xml will support
accessibility
JG - working on test suites - link in minutes
JG - www.w3.org/wai/ua has IRC information
JG -- Is new format for test suites useful?
JG -- Didn't get CVS info for Mozilla?
AL - We're a little behind
JG - Peter, have you updated your internal document for keyboard access?
PK - The new document should be available mid to late next week.  Getting
all patches slowly into the latest Mozilla, because we are on an older
branch (1.7). Trying to be as involving of the community as possible -
posting every 2 weeks builds, source, and bug list.  We have an updated
keyboard spec - had to wait for Beijing's vacation and my trip - takes into
account well over 1000 messages generated.  Cut back spec to cover only the
core functions.  We like the idea of implementing a lot of this in
JavaScript.  All of the higher level navigation, especially item
navigation, is probably most logically done in JavaScript.  We've decided
not to address item navigation in this proposal.  We have internal product
deadlines that we have to meet.  We believe that the core functions meet
the letter of 119421A.
AL - Could I put some comments on the draft?
PK - Very little is different, other than that we've dropped the table and
item stuff.
AL - Can you send me an email with the new document?
PK - I need to check before I do that.
AL - About the other fixes on the 1.7 Sun branch, I am ready to help port
those fixes.  I can give a lot of time to this. How should we approach
this?
PK - Two ways to do this.  We have full source tarball every 2 weeks.  1 -
do diff from that to 2.0.  2.  It would be cleaner for us to give Aaron a
patch at a time.
AL - We are working on seven patches from Sun.  We need to increase
collaboration and communication.
JG - We have a phone call coming up Monday night with Beijing, 8 PM
Eastern.
PK - Aaron can you come?
AL - Yes
JG - We haven't had a face-to-face meeting in a while.  Last few days in
Feb., 1st few days in March at W3C conference in Boston would be possible.
Would Sun be interested in participating?
PK - They might be very comfortable with that.
JG - ATAI conference in January?  We'd have opportunities to meet with
other working groups. Which ones?
PK - ATAG group.  Mozilla is also a composer.
AL - New composer in Mozilla is really a separate app, NVU version .5. When
you try to build an editor on top of HTML you get problems from cutting and
pasting HTML tags but those are being worked on.  We are kind of giving up
on the Mozilla suite and going towards Firefox.
AL - Firefox has a completely different front end - using same back end.
XUL toolkit has been forked.  On a dialog-by-dialog basis, there are
differences.  Started with a small core group of developers with a vision,
but they didn't know much about accessibility.  People used XUL vbox and
hbox - we don't know what that is.  They invented some new things without
looking at the accessibility.
JG - Mozilla accessibility extension now supports Firefox.
AL - Seamonkey downloads are now very low.
PK - In Sun's work on keyboard navigation, they noticed that you can have
fixed floating widgets.
JG - You can't depend on things being at a certain pixel for them to be
accessible.
PK - For tab or caret order - caret order also applies.
JG - If the caret is following a visual model that's much different than if
it's following a document model.
AL - You need to be able to scroll stuff with a keyboard.  How do you tab
into this to scroll it.  I made everything that has scrollbars part of the
tab order.
JG - Want to get more feedback on the test suites.
PK - This is a very useful thing to have.  We need to get feedback from
Jessie Li.  jessieli@sun.com.  She is responsible for testing caret
navigation within Sun.  Looking at it

on line, the document looks excellent.  Without verifying everything it
looks to be wonderfully comprehensive.  My feedback is:  yes, keep doing
it; it is wonderful.
JG - I'm using CSS.
PK - The idea is to do a linearization like Lynx.
JG - Document order navigation.
PK - Visual document order.  It is unusual for someone following the
document order to make a web page that doesn't make sense.  You need to be
able to get everywhere from the keyboard.  Ideally, this would mean that in
any given region, left and right arrow will be visually appropriate.  When
jumping columns and tables there will be discontinuities.  I really should
say we will hit every character in the frame. Unresolved issue:  how to
deal with fixed floating widgets.
AL - There's a lot more that would cause a problem besides fixed floating
widgets.
PK --  This is why we are publishing this code every two weeks.
JG - How long does it take to build?
PK - I haven't tried it.
AL - I'd like to bring up a plugin accessibility plan
JG - To move away from XEmbed?
AL - Extension of current plugin API
JG - Microsoft doesn't want to participate?
AL - Microsoft has ActiveX - they have their own solution.
AL - Some stuff will be fixed by Firefox.  Problems are at
mozilla.org/access/plugins.  This stuff is a core fix (affects Mozilla
also).  You need to be a member of the plugins group to get the technical
details.
AL - Do you know about any plans for plugins?
PK - We want to wire up ATK and all the rest for plugins - a big and tricky
job
AL - Some of the big plugin vendors are having trouble getting funding to
support Mozilla accessibility on Windows, let alone on Linux.  The plugin
and the browser need to be able to talk to each other.
JG - This is a long standing accessibility issue.  It's good that you are
making some progress.
AL - Some scriptability is being added to it so plugins can interact with a
page.  No one has been assigned to doing what I've written up, but I
thought it was good to write down a plan.  There's no idea how fast we will
move along.
JG - We're 50 minutes into the call and haven't gotten to items 2 or 3 or 4
yet.  I talked to Susan about Timed Text.  Issue with multimedia - there is
SMIL which talks about synchronization.  A key factor is captioning.
Different languages for different players. Proposed that W3C proposed a
standardized text format.  Real Media and Quicktime people were part of the
committee.  What does this have to do with a User Agent?  Author has their
preference, but user should be able to override that styling. This is an
opportunity to look at the specification - it seems to support inline
styling as opposed to CSS styling (an author-centric view) - provide
comments saying that these are going to be problems.
JG - There need to be APIS
PK - There is an awful lot of momentum for the current players.
JG - There seems to be a demand for Timed Text especially for captioning.
Makes it easier for authors to create timed text once and use it for other
players.  There are people from Real and QuickTime that are on the working
group.
JG - We funnel our comments through Al Gilman - chair of Protocols and
Formats working group. Next Thursday we could have a more detailed
discussion of our comments.  It's a way that UAAG can teach people about
UAAG even if it doesn't appear in the document.  The other document I'm
going to talk to Pearson about is the SVG document.  There used to be an
accessibility section but they took that out.



Susan

Received on Thursday, 11 November 2004 21:47:48 UTC