RE: Extending DPub with new roles floating boxes and references?

Hi Silvio,

Thank you for contacting us.  Coincidentally, Ivan mentioned your work yesterday, and I had been planning to look into RASH. Many of us are at a conference together this week, so I have not yet had time to go through your documents in detail. I have glanced at some of your documentation briefly. I will look at it in more detail next week.

I would like to provide a little context:

ARIA is a language-agnostic specification. To quote from the spec, [1] “This specification provides an ontology of roles, states, and properties that define accessible user interface elements and can be used to improve the accessibility and interoperability of web content and applications.” That is to say, ARIA was written to convey accessibility information for any language. In the

The Digital Publishing Module of ARIA [2] is a module that extends ARIA to describe features and elements common to digital publishing. ARIA is a vocabulary that conveys accessibility information. While this vocabulary can be exploited for uses beyond accessibility, we are not interested in over-burdening this vocabulary. This is why there has been such extensive discussion in this group about whether the *ref terms currently in DPUB-ARIA should remain. We are looking into whether @rel is appropriate and whether an aria-subrole attribute should be explored.

It seems that there are a few issues that you would like to see expressed declaratively:

1.       Figure type.  If I am understanding correctly, you use the HTML figure element, which has a broad definition [3]. I believe you are interested in adding a role or type definition to clarify what the child(ren) or <figure> are? Is this perhaps something that can be calculated based on what the child elements are? For example, given <figure><img>, is it not obvious that the content is a picture?  What additional information is conveyed by the role or type attribute?



2.       Ref role.  Based on your note, I thought that you were request additional *ref roles. But, based on your documentation, it appears that there is just one “ref” role.  Would it be safe to say that your broad requirement for “ref” is that the link (<a> or <link>?) is that there is an indication that it is a reference to a specific object within the publication? Does this differentiate it from a link to a website? Does the ref type provide any information other than the fact that it’s pointing to a particular type of object?


I have also read your issue on Github (https://github.com/w3c/aria/issues/100). You mentioned that you plan to update RASH based on Digital Publishing WAI-ARIA Module 1.0. We are very excited to have early adopters. Please note that it is very much a work in progress, and, as you’ll note if you’ve been watching it on GitHub, there may be significant changes.

I look forward to discussing this further, but please forgive me if I am not too responsive until I return to the office next week.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-1.1/

[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/dpub-aria-1.0/

[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/html51/semantics.html#the-figure-element


Best,
Tzviya

Tzviya Siegman
Digital Book Standards & Capabilities Lead
Wiley
201-748-6884
tsiegman@wiley.com<mailto:tsiegman@wiley.com>

From: Silvio Peroni [mailto:silvio.peroni@unibo.it]
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2015 7:38 AM
To: Richard Schwerdtfeger
Cc: public-dpub-aria@w3.org
Subject: Re: Extending DPub with new roles floating boxes and references?

Hi Richard,

First of all, thanks for your answer. I’ve quickly read the documentation on Aria 1.1, and I’ve found a very interesting use of the “math” role, that is very related with the two possible options that we have in RASH for describing mathematical formulas (mentioned my previous email), i.e., one with the use of mathml, and the other with the use of an image. I think I’ll integrate the approach in the version of RASH.

However, I still believe that the roles “figure” and “table” you suggested are not enough for addressing the scenarios I was talking about. Such roles maps quite well (and according to the Aria spec too) with the related existing HTML tags, as indicated by the “Related Concepts” relation. Now, it is clear that they may express similar (not identical) meaning, since an element having role “figure” are not the same element expressed by using the tag “figure”. However, the definitions are pretty close, and, as far as I understood, basically allow one to express any kind of floating boxes, i.e., “A perceivable section of content that typically contains a graphical document, images, code snippets, or example text”. However, what we want to do in RASH is to have a mechanism to clearly identify all these possible options, i.e.:
- sections expressing a floating box that contains an image;
- sections expressing a floating box that contains a math formula;
- sections expressing a floating box that contains a table;
- sections expressing a floating box that contains a code listing.

We believe that this could not be done by simply looking at the content of such sections, rather it should be clearly defined by appropriate roles which specialise that sections. Now, we use the HTML element “figure” to identify these kinds of sections, but what we really would like to do is, thus, to have a clear mechanism (e.g., by means of roles) to say “look, this element ‘figure’ actually is a floating box for a table, called table box” or “a floating box for a pure graphical image, called figure box”, etc. That particular characterisation seems not possible by means of Aria and DPub.

I was wondering if that would be a possible extension to consider for future release of DPub, since those roles seem very specific to the publishing domain to me.

Thanks again for your help with this.
Have a nice day :-)

S.


Il giorno 26 ott 2015, alle ore 20:55, Richard Schwerdtfeger <schwer@us.ibm.com<mailto:schwer@us.ibm.com>> ha scritto:

Silvio,

Aria 1.1 has a new Figure role and a Table role: http://rawgit.com/w3c/aria/master/aria/aria.html#document_structure_roles


Captions are referenced via aria-describedby and this is how HTML 5 will map the underlying caption to the figure. You can also use aria-labelledby for labels on figures, etc.

We also have a math role: http://rawgit.com/w3c/aria/master/aria/aria.html#math


We don't have a formula role.

We are discussing how to deal with specialized links in Sapporo this week. I am not sure how soon that will be resolved. We don't have a role="ref"

Rich


Rich Schwerdtfeger

<graycol.gif>Silvio Peroni ---10/26/2015 12:18:57 PM---Hi all, I'm Silvio Peroni from University of Bologna, and I'm one of the contributors of RASH, the R

From: Silvio Peroni <silvio.peroni@unibo.it<mailto:silvio.peroni@unibo.it>>
To: <public-dpub-aria@w3.org<mailto:public-dpub-aria@w3.org>>
Date: 10/26/2015 12:18 PM
Subject: Extending DPub with new roles floating boxes and references?
________________________________



Hi all,

I'm Silvio Peroni from University of Bologna, and I'm one of the contributors of RASH, the Research Article in Simplified HTML format, available on github at http://github.com/essepuntato/rash, that has been already used in academic events (e.g., SAVE-SD 2015, http://cs.unibo.it/save-sd/2015/index.html).

The new version of RASH that will be released in the next 7 days, together with all its tools (visualisation, conversion, enhancement), will introduce some important features. The main one, in my opinion, is the fact that it is more HTML5-oriented and all the structural roles will be now provided by means of the attribute @role according to the value specified in:

[DPub] Digital Publishing WAI-ARIA Module 1.0 – W3C Editor's Draft. https://rawgit.com/w3c/aria/master/aria/dpub.html


I have few questions for you on this topic.


# Structural roles for floating boxes

In RASH there exist four different kinds of floating boxes (specified through the element "figure"), i.e.: figure box, table box, formula box, and listing box. As you can image, these are used to define referenceable boxes like it happens in other document-oriented languages such as LaTeX, ODT, etc.

In the version of RASH that will publish soon, these are specified by using the following roles (still by means of the attribute @role on "figure" elements): "picture", "table", "formula" and "listing", e.g.:

<figure id="figure_1" role="picture">
<p>
<img src="img/rash.png" alt="The RASH logo!"/>
</p>
<figcaption>Caption of the figure.</figcaption>
</figure>

There is the possibility of adding some particular and official role in [DPub] that enables one to handle these specific structures?

Note that the disambiguation based on the content of "figure" can not hold sometimes, if, for instance, I want to express similar boxes with different kinds of contents. In RASH, that is the case of formulas, that can be expressed by means of either MathML or images, i.e.:

<figure id="formula_1" role="formula">
<p>
<img src="img/formula.png" alt="[a + b]^260 + [a + b]_i"/>
</p>
</figure>

and

<figure id="formula_1" role="formula">
<p>
<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML">
<mrow>
<msup>
<mfenced open="[" close="]">
<mrow>
<mi>a</mi>
<mo>+</mo>
<mi>b</mi>
</mrow>
</mfenced>
<mn>260</mn>
</msup>
<mo>+</mo>
<msub>
<mfenced open="{" close="}">
<mrow>
<mi>a</mi>
<mo>+</mo>
<mi>b</mi>
</mrow>
</mfenced>
<mi>i</mi>
</msub>
</mrow>
</math>
</p>
</figure>


# References to document objects (e.g., sections)

While in [DPub] there are roles for referring to footnotes (doc-noteref) and bibliographic entries (doc-biblioref), I've not found any role for pointing to other meaningful document components, such as sections, figures, formulas, tables and listings. RASH is using the ad-hoc role "ref" specified on the element "a", as shown in the following excerpt:

<p>In <a href="#metadata" role="ref"></a> we explain how to specify the metadata of the article as appropriate elements within <code>head</code>, while the rest of the document mainly pertains elements within the element <code>body</code>.</p>

...

<section id="metadata">
<h1>Metadata</h1>
<p>...</p>
</section>

What such "a" element with "ref" role creates is a specific link/reference to an existing object (a section in this case) that will be then rendered as, for instance, "Section 2" in the browser.

This role seems to behave like the other references included in [DPub] (i.e., "doc-biblioref" and "doc-noteref"). What about adding a generic "ref" for dealing with references to other kinds of objects?

--------------

What do you think about these issues?

Have a nice day :-)

S.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Silvio Peroni, Ph.D.
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Bologna, Bologna (Italy)
Tel: +39 051 2094871
E-mail: silvio.peroni@unibo.it<mailto:silvio.peroni@unibo.it>
Web: http://www.essepuntato.it<http://www.essepuntato.it/>
Twitter: essepuntato




----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Silvio Peroni, Ph.D.
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Bologna, Bologna (Italy)
Tel: +39 051 2094871
E-mail: silvio.peroni@unibo.it<mailto:silvio.peroni@unibo.it>
Web: http://www.essepuntato.it

Twitter: essepuntato