Re: Does the APA WG look at CSS accessibility issues? If so, css-highlight-api is a good one to look at

Dear All:

Thanks to Mary Jo for drawing our attention to this issue in CSS.
Herewith a brief summary of the outcome from APA's discussion on this
topic during our regular weekly teleconference on Wednesday 17 November
...

https://www.w3.org/2021/11/17-apa-minutes.html#t07

* We have marked the relevant CSS spec as blocked against
* advancing to recommendation via the W3C Accessibility Dashboard:

https://w3c.github.io/horizontal-issue-tracker/?repo=w3c/a11y-review


1.) Janina will update the CSS issue to note why we've done this,
* and what we consider sufficient to remove the block.

2.) We regard this issue as an opportunity to provide a
* technological solution to the long standing WCAG guidance
* against relying on color alone to convey semantic information,
* i.e. SC 1.4.1:

 https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/use-of-color

3.) APA judged a future Personalization specification could provide
a mechanism to associate semantic CSS highlight coloring with a
specific, author supplied semantic labeling in support of the use case
Mary Jo referenced. The question was assigned to Personalization TF for
further development and report back to APA.

Best,

Janina

John Foliot writes:
> Hi All,
> 
> Yes. As a member of APA, I can confirm that we have (had?) specific CSS
> expertise in the group, as well as a relatively good rapport with the CSS
> WG. I'm not sure (and suspect no) whether this specific topic has come up
> (I don't recall hearing anything, but...)
> 
> I suspect adding this to our next agenda would be a Good Thing (TM).
> 
> JF
> 
> On Fri, Nov 12, 2021 at 12:01 PM David Fazio <dfazio@helixopp.com> wrote:
> 
> > This seems like a very good APA issue to me. Has particular COGA relevance
> > as well.
> >
> > This message was Sent from my iPhone. Please excuse any typographic
> > errors.
> >
> > On Nov 12, 2021, at 11:57 AM, David Fazio <dfazio@helixopp.com> wrote:
> >
> >  APA is currently right now. Not sure about this particular issue though
> >
> > This message was Sent from my iPhone. Please excuse any typographic
> > errors.
> >
> > On Nov 12, 2021, at 11:56 AM, Mary Jo Mueller <maryjom@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > During TPAC I attended a session on CSS accessibility topics to gather
> > information about current challenges where one of the issues struck a chord
> > with me.
> >
> > Has the APA WG been looking at CSS accessibility and is the group aware of
> > the conversation on the CSS highlight API? See *Issue 6498 on how the CSS
> > highlight API is exposed to the accessibility tree*
> > <https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/6498>(
> > https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/6498). I'm concerned that
> > they're only thinking about attaching color names to highlights or limited
> > meanings (find or spelling and grammar only), where there is the
> > opportunity to associate any meaningful name or label which the author
> > could define.
> >
> > An example: In data analysis, highlights are used to indicate any number
> > of things - errors, outliers, or like the example in my comment in the
> > issue: user sentiments. Highlights are also used in data analysis for
> > medical literature to highligh medical conditions or symptom keywords.
> >
> > I added a comment to that effect, but from rest of the conversation they
> > are assuming that "accessibility tools" as they call them are way more
> > sophisticated than they are. That using an accessibility tool like a screen
> > reader you can assign other text to the color name. I don't quite know how
> > that could be done, as screen readers simply parse and speak what they
> > discover in the DOM.
> >
> > I have to admit, I am a little out of my technology expertise with CSS. I
> > don't know how much CSS information is transposed into the DOM for a screen
> > reader to access but it seems that if it is possible, it is a good
> > opportunity to make a wide range of author-defined highlights accessible to
> > screen reader users.
> >
> > Do you know if there are accessibility experts in APA that have more CSS
> > knowledge who can chime in on the conversation?
> >
> > Best regards,
> >
> > Mary Jo
> > _____________________________________________
> > *Mary Jo Mueller*
> > Accessibility Standards Program Manager
> > IBM Accessibility
> >
> > "If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and
> > become more, you are a leader." *~John Quincy Adams*
> >
> >
> 
> -- 
> *John Foliot* |
> Senior Industry Specialist, Digital Accessibility |
> W3C Accessibility Standards Contributor |
> 
> "I made this so long because I did not have time to make it shorter." -
> Pascal "links go places, buttons do things"

-- 

Janina Sajka
https://linkedin.com/in/jsajka

Linux Foundation Fellow
Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup: http://a11y.org

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Co-Chair, Accessible Platform Architectures http://www.w3.org/wai/apa

Received on Thursday, 18 November 2021 09:08:04 UTC