RE: Example of Good Summary???

Good point. As W3C material is originally published in English, and this is an attribute from a document with W3C recommendation this tool should work in English, too ..

I cannot believe that a relatively simple web based questionnaire form won't be able to address most issues with good summary text formulations.

The main issue is that the experts still debating about what at all should be in after all those years.

- Stefan

-----Original Message-----
From: wai-xtech-request@w3.org [mailto:wai-xtech-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Christophe Strobbe
Sent: Freitag, 11. September 2009 17:02
To: wai-xtech@w3.org
Subject: RE: Example of Good Summary???


At 09:37 11/09/2009, Schnabel, Stefan wrote:
>Imagine there will be a W3C "summary creator tool" on the web that 
>will ask you 10 questions about your table..
>
>You feed it with facts about structure etc. and it gives you the 
>grammatically and semantically correct text in full consensus to W3C 
>"summary text" definitions. THAT would be a Web 2.0 app!

In how many languages would it be available?
Language-related tools all too often are available only in or for the 
English language.

Best regards,

Christophe Strobbe


>And the advantage is there is only ONE reference to deal with to 
>write a good summary :)
>
>- Stefan
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: wai-xtech-request@w3.org [mailto:wai-xtech-request@w3.org] On 
>Behalf Of Jim Jewett
>Sent: Freitag, 11. September 2009 02:52
>To: HTML WG Public List
>Cc: W3C WAI-XTECH
>Subject: Example of Good Summary???
>
>[example of a supposedly good summary follows]
> >>   <table summary="This table presents traveling expenses. Rows contain
> >>   destinations, traveling dates, and grand total. Columns contain expense
> >>   category and total. The first column contains merged table cells.">
> >>   <!-- Remainder of table -->
>
>Tab Atkins wrote:
> > Looks like jgraham found the table in question, located in the 
> HTML4.01 spec:
> > http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/tables.html#h-11.4.2
>
> > Interestingly, this table is *completely* different from every table
> > that we tried to generate in IRC based on the summary.
>
>(It appears that the table was there to illustrate axis, rather than
>summary, but still...)
>
>I'll be less diplomatic, and say that that summary confused me -- and
>my confusion got worse when I tried to understand the table in terms
>of the summary.
>
>I think the summary would improved by describing columns first, and by
>using "or" rather than "and" on the row description.  With additional
>clarification, I came up with:
>
>     "This table presents traveling expenses. Data columns contain expense
>      category and total. The row headers are the city (in an otherwise  empty
>      row at the start of a row group), the date, or an indication that
>it is row of
>      totals."
>
>But as part of untangling it to get there, I tried to recreate the
>markup.  (The table is presented as an image, and it took me a while
>to notice that the markup appeared later.)  I think more time on
>getting the table format right, or at least using headers properly,
>should be more useful than a summary.
>
>Then I noticed that the summary used in the actual specification was
>much more clear (but less structural):
>
>  summary="This table summarizes travel expenses
>                    incurred during August trips to
>                    San Jose and Seattle"
>
>Then I double-checked the alt=
>"Image of a table listing travel expenses at two locations: San Jose
>and Seattle, by date, and category (meals, hotels, and transport),
>shown with subtitles"
>
>Barring the typo of "titles" for "totals", this seems to be a more
>structural @summary, rather than an @alt.
>
>Since I really would like better accessibility, I'll try to make my
>questions specific:
>
>(1)  Is there some reason to believe that the supposed good summary is
>actually better than the real summary, my rewording, or the existing
>alt?  For example,
>   (1a)  Did someone do actual user testing?
>   (1b)  Are there @summary conventions that AT users are familiar
>with?  (If so, are they documented somewhere?)
>   (1c)  Is listing row meanings and then column meanings as ingrained
>as which side of the road to drive on?
>
>(2)  In this particular case, would any of the four choices (existing
>summary, existing alt, summary from the wiki, my proposed rewording)
>be unacceptable?
>
>(3)  Now that we're all looking at the same table, is there an even
>better @summary?
>   (3a)  Is there one that could be produced from header values?
>   (3b)  Could it be produced from header values, if the table had
>better structure?  (It seemed to use <td> vs <th> largely for the
>visual effect of boldface type; I'm not sure how they bolded the
>800.27 in the image.)
>   (3c)  Given the table header algorithm, would it be OK to
>auto-generate that better summary, so that people could spend the time
>fixing their structure instead of patching around it with a
>hand-crafted summary that might not be maintained?
>
>-jJ

-- 
Christophe Strobbe
K.U.Leuven - Dept. of Electrical Engineering - SCD
Research Group on Document Architectures
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BELGIUM
tel: +32 16 32 85 51
http://www.docarch.be/
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Received on Friday, 11 September 2009 15:23:19 UTC