DPub accessibility planning

Hello everyone! We would like to get people started on the DPub 
accessibility work. While we know that people's schedules are likely to be 
complicated for the next three weeks, and we don't expect much 
comprehensive work will happen in that time, it would be great if people 
could look over this email and the linked spreadsheets, and have an email 
conversation over the course of the next few days, if possible, so we can 
be ready to hit the ground running in the new year. We would love to hear 
from the team members over the coming week so that we can resolve 
questions, concerns, and get started assigning work to ourselves.

Charles and I determined that both the W3C and Github wikis provide 
spreadsheet tools which are not that intuitive or practical. We are using 
our Github wiki to organize and link to a series of Google Sheets in which 
the team should work. Google Sheets have had some pretty major strides in 
accessibility over the last few years, but if they provide accessibility 
roadblocks for anyone, please talk to us, and we can try to come up with 
an alternative.

https://github.com/w3c/dpub-accessibility/wiki

Here is an outline of our goals and the process we are going to be using:

Goals and Products:

1. We are going to be looking at WCAG, ATAG, and UAAG to see where they 
have particular relevance that is unique to digital publishing.

2. The products from our efforts will be:

2a. A generalized Note about accessibility, W3C standards, and digital 
publishing, which links to all of the appropriate guidelines and standards, and 
explains things as much as possible, which all of the appropriate digital 
publishing consortium groups can link to.

2b. Digital publishing specific examples, where we think they are 
appropriate/necessary, for the "examples" documents of those three guidelines, 
to propose to the maintainers of those three sets of guidelines.

2c. If we feel that any of the existing techniques or guidelines 
need to be modified to account for digital publishing-specific needs, then we 
will open up communication with the appropriate teams about that process.

Hopefully we will not be proposing any changes to the guidelines 
themselves, but techniques and examples are easier to modify and expand 
upon.

Our Process

1. Look at the list of spreadsheets Charles has created

https://github.com/w3c/dpub-accessibility/wiki

2. Going over those spreadsheets, everybody takes a certain number of 
spreadsheet rows as their homework, assigned to them. We are not aiming for 
equivalents in number of rows; realistically, a lot of the rows will be 15 
seconds-a-pop, "nope, not relevant to digital publishing."

3. Everybody go through their assignments and try to deal with the trivial 
non-our-concern issues first. Mark them accordingly.

4.Reapportion the remaining work, if necessary.

5. Now comes the real meat of our process. Determine whether what we are 
doing is adding to our own "note", submitting a new example to the guideline 
maintainers, or discussing whether an existing technique/guideline needs to be 
amended/added to. Update our spreadsheets verbosely, linking to references 
where ever it will be helpful.

6. Weekly, the team will have email meetings in which we discuss all of 
the issues raised in step 5. If we feel we need to have voice meetings, we 
will find a way to schedule them.

7. When we have completed that work, Charles, Deborah, and hopefully some 
more volunteers from the team, as well as some W3C process experts, will create the 
actual documents and communications.

So that summarizes our Goals, Products, and Process. Could people who will 
be contributing to the work provide feedback and/or questions about these 
steps? Also, begin thinking about what assignments you would like to 
claim. Please update the spreadsheets to claim specific assignments! The 
people who get in  first get the choicest work. :-)

Take care,

Deborah Kaplan

Received on Wednesday, 17 December 2014 16:46:30 UTC