Minutes of UA Teleconference of 5 June 2008

The minutes are at:
http://www.w3.org/2008/06/05-ua-minutes.html

Action Items:
ACTION: Jan will write it up and email Jeanne who will put it in a 
survey and send it out.
ACTION: Jeanne will turn Jan's write up on printing and make it a survey 
and send it out.
ACTION: JR to Try to formulate the UAWG position out of this discussionW3C
UAWG telecon
05 Jun 2008

Agenda

See also: IRC log
Attendees

Present
    AllanJ, jeanne, Jan, KFord
Regrets
    Dean Hudson
Chair
    Jim Allan
Scribe
    jeanne

Contents

    * Topics
         1. Game Controllers accessibility
         2. Summer Schedule
         3. UAAG and the Alt Attribute
         4. Techniques
    * Summary of Action Items

<AllanJ> http://www.zacbrowser.com/

zacbrowser for cognitive disabilities
Game Controller Accessibility

<scribe> scribe: jeanne

Pre-meeting discussion of Nintendo Wii and Xbox as user agents.

KF: How do we increase participation - a Call for Participation?

JR: It's part of rechartering.

KF: will talk to people in XBox team to see if they are interested in 
participating.

Veteran's Administration would be interested in accessible game boxes.

JS: We need cell phone contributers.

JA: Talk to Google mobile applications. They are accessible.
Summer Schedule

July 4th is a Thursday.

KF: Will be around most of the summer

JA will be out June 19, 26 and 4.

JS will be out July 31 to Aug 7.

JR has nothing planned yet.

<KFord> As an fyi here's the link for are talk about IE8 beta 2. 
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/06/03/ie8-beta-2-coming-in-august.aspx
UAAG and the Alt Attribute

JA: Found all the parts of UAAG that mention the @alt.
... there should be no ambiguity in what is the correct alternative 
content to present to the user.

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ua/2008AprJun/0126.html

JR: the meaning of alt="" is overloaded, but perhaps UAAG should take a 
stand that is should be required.

KF: It's fine to deal with the overload, but we have to take a position 
that there must be alternative text and it is mandatory.
... otherwise it will go away.

JA: Xtech and HTML5 have 2 thousand messages on this topic.
... use cases and edge cases on both sides.

<Jan> 2.7 in UAAG 1.0: Allow configuration to generate repair text when 
the user agent recognizes that the author has not provided conditional 
content required by the format specification.

JR: UAAG 1.0 uses @alt in repair (see above)
... uses that as a trigger for repair text, like use the name of the image.

JA: We were documenting current practice. We have similar guideline in 
UAAG 2.

JR: There could be no repair if every site that currently ignores @alt 
put it in as alt="".

<KFord> Off topic, how to get get the spelling error in accessibility 
under the wai list corrected in http://www.w3.org/Mail/Lists

<AllanJ> in UAAG 20 - 3.5.1 Repair Missing Alternatives: The user has 
the option of receiving generated repair text when the user agent 
recognizes that the author has not provided alternative content required 
by the technology specification (e.g., short text alternative for an 
image).@@2.7 in UAAG10@@

JR: Should alt="" be decorative image or should it be "I don't care 
about accessibility"?
... I think it should be alt="" for the people who don't care about 
accessibility and have a different delimiter for a decorative image.
... We want to make sure that there is a difference between decorative, 
or alternative content missing.

JS: because that would trigger the repair function.

JR: we need to present that fork to the user agent developers.

JA: there needs to be an unambiguous relationship between the 
alternative content and the image
... and there needs to be an unambiguous relationship between the 
decorative and the needing repair.

JR: Browser developers need a clear distinction between where there is 
no information value of the image, and when the information value of the 
image is unclear.
... There is no alternate content for a sound.
... If there were, it would want to have alternative content.

JA: Our job is to display alternative content, whatever the language 
says it is, and if it isn't. we would have to generate repair.

JR: People will complain that we forcing a change to the status quo. 
They will have to repair their sites to conform.
... but the developer who doesn't care about accessibility will just put 
alt="" to pass validation.

JA: for a while, we were training developers to put summary="" on layout 
tables.

JR: It was a bad idea in the beginning to use alt="", because it doesn't 
mean "decorative image".

JA: May need a whole new attribute set. There is also the idea that all 
content should be within elements, not in attributes.

JR: Should we have a "defending the status quo" position for the browsers?

KF and JA: No.

JA: if something is identified as alternative text is should be 
presented to the user without requiring the user discover it.
... and if it is missing, it should trigger a repair condition.

JR: And if it is missing?

JA: then it should trigger repair, the way browsers do repair for all 
kinds of conditions for sloppy developers.

<Jan> ACTION: JR to Try to formulate the UAWG position out of this 
discussion [recorded in 
http://www.w3.org/2008/06/05-ua-minutes.html#action01]

<scribe> ACTION: Jan will write it up and email Jeanne who will put it 
in a survey and send it out. [recorded in 
http://www.w3.org/2008/06/05-ua-minutes.html#action02]

<scribe> ACTION: Jeanne will turn Jan's write up on printing and make it 
a survey and send it out. [recorded in 
http://www.w3.org/2008/06/05-ua-minutes.html#action03]
Techniques

JA: JS said that we have a Techniques document due in December
... We have open issues and JR has made it into a wiki page.
Summary of Action Items
[NEW] ACTION: Jan will write it up and email Jeanne who will put it in a 
survey and send it out. [recorded in 
http://www.w3.org/2008/06/05-ua-minutes.html#action02]
[NEW] ACTION: Jeanne will turn Jan's write up on printing and make it a 
survey and send it out. [recorded in 
http://www.w3.org/2008/06/05-ua-minutes.html#action03]
[NEW] ACTION: JR to Try to formulate the UAWG position out of this 
discussion [recorded in 
http://www.w3.org/2008/06/05-ua-minutes.html#action01]
 
[End of minutes]



The text of the minutes follow:

Received on Thursday, 5 June 2008 21:05:35 UTC