RE: CfC: Approve overview of testing in view of permissive CR exit criteria

> If there are no objections by Monday July 15, this resolution will carry.

I discussed the status of the TF's feedback on this CfC at the A11Y TF meeting last Thursday.  The minutes of this discussion are recorded at:
http://www.w3.org/2013/07/18-html-a11y-minutes.html#item03

The Chairs have agreed to give the HTML WG and explicitly the A11Y TF until Sep 1 to complete feedback on this CfC due to the summer holiday period and the overlap with the work on the related Canvas CfC.   The A11Y TF will use this time to clarify their feedback originally provided in:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-admin/2013Jul/0027.html 

The Chairs want to encourage all participants to provide their feedback as early as possible and want to discourage anyone batching up their responses and providing them at the last possible date.   Thus we want to encourage the A11Y TF to provide clarifications on their original feedback at the individual section level instead of in a single batch.

/paulc
HTML WG co-chair 

Paul Cotton, Microsoft Canada
17 Eleanor Drive, Ottawa, Ontario K2E 6A3
Tel: (425) 705-9596 Fax: (425) 936-7329


-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Cotton [mailto:Paul.Cotton@microsoft.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 16, 2013 3:00 PM
To: Mark Sadecki; Janina Sajka <janina@rednote.net> (janina@rednote.net); Charles McCathie Nevile; Steve Faulkner
Cc: public-html-admin@w3.org
Subject: RE: CfC: Approve overview of testing in view of permissive CR exit criteria

Thank you for forwarding the A11F TF input on this CfC.

The HTML WG Chairs do not believe that your input meets the bar described in the CfC:

> Objections of the form "features in 2.8.2.1 HTMLAllCollection are not 
> currently interoperable" MUST be accompanied  with specific evidence of non-interoperability, otherwise such objections will not be accepted by the Chairs.

The HTML WG Chairs believe that just saying "we believe they should be tested to verify that they work as expected across different platforms" or " there have not been any tests designed to verify this" is not "specific evidence" as requested in the CfC.

I would like to recommend that I attend the A11Y TF meeting this week to discuss this situation and to determine if the TF requires more time to provide more "specific evidence" for the areas of the HTML5 document that you identified as "non-interoperable".

/paulc
HTML WG co-chair

Paul Cotton, Microsoft Canada
17 Eleanor Drive, Ottawa, Ontario K2E 6A3
Tel: (425) 705-9596 Fax: (425) 936-7329

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Sadecki [mailto:mark@w3.org]
Sent: Monday, July 15, 2013 11:47 PM
To: public-html-admin@w3.org
Subject: Re: CfC: Approve overview of testing in view of permissive CR exit criteria

On 6/13/13 9:56 PM, Paul Cotton wrote:
>
> This is a Call for Consensus (CfC) to approve the parts of the 
> following document that indicate which parts of the HTML5 
> specification can be considered interoperable as per the permissive CR 
> exit criteria [1].  The items subject to this CfC are marked 
> "Considered interoperable" and color coded in green in the document:
>
> http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tests-cr-exit.html
>
> Silence will be taken to mean there is no objection, but positive 
> responses are encouraged. Objections should be made to specific 
> entries in the document.  Objections of the form "features in 2.8.2.1 
> HTMLAllCollection are not currently interoperable" MUST be accompanied 
> with specific evidence of non-interoperability, otherwise such 
> objections will not be accepted by the Chairs.
>
The HTML Accessibility Task Force (TF) has prepared the following response based on analysis [1] of items marked as "Interoperable" in the HTML WG document "Overview of testing in view of CR exit" [2] to the extent possible in the time allotted for review .  It is the Task Force's belief that the items below should not be considered "Interoperable", exempting them from the formal testing effort required for the HTML5 specification to exit Candidate Recommendation [3].  We ask that the status of sections outlined below be changed from "Interoperable" to "Requires Testing".

2.5.6 Colors
Color is a critical component of accessibility.  While the parsing of color strings may not be a specific concern for accessibility, there was much discussion about color and the long standing dissatisfaction the Task Force and the Protocols and Formats Working group have with the deprecation of System Colors (see bug 13639 [4]).

2.5.10 Media Queries
The TF anticipates Media Queries to be used for accessibility purposes.  
Since media queries are a feature new to HTML5, we believe they should be tested to verify that they work as expected across different platforms.

3.2.3.2 The title attribute
The title attribute, while widely implemented, is not implemented in a consistent or accessible manner.  The HTML spec acknowledges this in a Note [5] contained at the beginning of the section.  The TF believes this attribute requires interoperability testing.

3.2.3.3 The lang and xml:lang attributes Screen readers can use the lang attribute to perform language switching, allowing speech in the natural language specified.  Since this attribute can be used on any element, the TF believes testing is required to insure its value is available to user agents in all contexts.

3.2.5.2 Transparent content models
The "transparency" of an element depends on its context or usage. Most fallback content can be considered "transparent" as it inherits the context of its parent element.  The "re-mapping" of an element's content model must be properly conveyed in the DOM to insure that Assistive Technology (AT) can properly modify the element's behavior and provide the appropriate access to it.  As far as we are aware, there have not been any tests designed to verify this.

3.2.7.3 Strong Native Semantics
and
3.2.7.4 Implicit ARIA Semantics
The TF believes at least some of the implementation requirements in these sections are either not interoperably implemented or require testing to demonstrate that they are.  For example:
* The h1-h6 elements are defined as requiring to have the aria- level property set to the element's outline depth [6].  The TF is unaware of appropriate implementation of this in any browser.
* The dialog element requires mapping to a dialog role [7]. The TF is unaware of appropriate implementation of this in any browser.
* The img element whose alt attribute's value is empty should have a default role=presentation [8] (removing it from the accessibility tree). 
The TF is unaware of appropriate implementation of this in any browser.
*NOTE: the current state of these sections has already been changed to "Needs testing" by the document's editor (Robin Berjon) based on discussions with Mark Sadecki on behalf of the TF*

4.8.14.2 Processing model
The TF has an issue with the spec text that makes an exception for how `<object>` elements are to be processed by user agents which do not support images [9].  The TF would like to see this issue resolved and the behavior tested in user agents as it affects the accessibility of imagemaps contained in `<object>` elements.

4.9.1.1 Techniques for describing tables The TF identified poor support for the techniques described in this section [10] by Assistive Technology.

4.9.2 The caption element
The TF expressed concern about the removal of the summary attribute and its replacement, the caption element.  Implementations of the caption element are buggy (i.e. some mobile browsers will cut off captions that are longer than the width of the containing table.) We believe this new element requires testing.

4.10.8 The button element
The TF believes that while the button element has existed for quite some time and is widely considered to be interoperable, there are many new attributes available on this element that may have an impact on accessibility (autofocus, formnovalidate, etc.) and have not yet been individually tested.
*NOTE: the current state of this section has already been changed to "Needs testing" by the document's editor (Robin Berjon) based on discussions with Mark Sadecki*

4.12 Links
Given that links are a critical component of the web and that the ability to navigate to them with the keyboard in all appropriate contexts is critical to users of AT (i.e. when they are used in fallback
content) the TF believes that the keyboard accessibility of links be tested, especially when used in the context of fallback content.

4.12.5 Link types
While link types have been considered widely interoperable, HTML5 now supports the the use of of link type on the `<a>` and `<area>` elements in addition to the `<link>` element. The TF believes testing is required to determine interoperability of this new feature of HTML5.

4.13.3 Tag clouds
The TF believes that testing is required of the example given to markup a tag cloud. The TF does not believe the `font-size` property is interoperable [11].  This is supported by the variety of "CSS Reset" 
methods available to developers [12], particularly if used in conjunction with a user override of min-font-size.

Kind Regards,

Mark Sadecki
On behalf of the HTML Accessibility Task Force

[1] http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/HTML/wiki/Results_of_Spec_Review
[2] http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tests-cr-exit.html
[3]
http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/public-permissive-exit-criteria.html
[4] https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13639
[5] http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/dom.html#the-title-attribute
[6] http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/sections.html#outline-depth
[7]
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/interactive-elements.html#the-dialog-element
[8]
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/embedded-content-0.html#the-img-element
[9] https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13451
[10] http://www.davidmacd.com/test/details.html
[11]
http://css-tricks.com/font-rendering-differences-firefox-vs-ie-vs-safari/
[12] http://www.cssreset.com/
>
> If there are no objections by Monday July 15, this resolution will carry.
>
> /paulc
>
> HTML WG co-chair
>
> [1]
> http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/public-permissive-exit-criteri
> a.html
>
>
> Paul Cotton, Microsoft Canada
>
> 17 Eleanor Drive, Ottawa, Ontario K2E 6A3
>
> Tel: (425) 705-9596 Fax: (425) 936-7329
>


-- 

Mark Sadecki
Web Accessibility Engineer
World Wide Web Consortium, Web Accessibility Initiative
Telephone: +1.617.715.4017
Email: mark@w3.org
Web: http://w3.org/People/mark

Received on Tuesday, 23 July 2013 02:50:06 UTC