RE: WAI-ARIA comments from EOWG

On:
* <a>ARIA Overview</a> should be <a>WAI-ARIA Overview</a>
I'm unclear if all instances of ARIA should be presented as "WAI-ARIA". My personal preference is to do "WAI-ARIA" on first use in a section and plain "ARIA" after that. I believe you're requesting that all instances be the long form, but I'm not clear. It's actually easier just to find-replace it all to long form than to decide when to do long and when to do short, but I don't know if that's best for readability.
In my humble opinion WAI-ARIA should not appear in other places of the spec than the title. Generally speaking WAI-ARIA is a synthetic term and I don't know historical reason for sticking WAI to ARIA, we don't call WAI-WCAG or WAI-ATAG. If there is a valid reason to have WAI-ARIA as opposed to ARIA, let it be only in the title.

Anna

________________________________
From: w3c-wai-eo-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-eo-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of ext Michael Cooper
Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2009 9:43 PM
To: Shawn Henry
Cc: public-pfwg-comments@w3.org; EOWG (E-mail)
Subject: Re: WAI-ARIA comments from EOWG

Thanks for these comments. Here is where we're at:

Shawn Henry wrote:

Dear PFWG,

EOWG recently discussed the WAI-ARIA documents and have the following comments. (These comments were generated by a subset of the EOWG and may not reflect consensus throughout the group.)

1.  All of the documents

* Make clear up front:
- what is in that specific document and who it is for
- that there are related documents designed for other audiences, &/or that are companions or dependencies of that doc
- they should first have read the introduction to WAI-ARIA and the related documents at http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria
I think you were reviewing the editor's draft, which doesn't have the public Status of this Document section that, I believe, addresses this. I also feel the introduction section of each document covers this. Are there further edits we should make in service of this? If so, please send specific wording suggestions.

Public drafts:

 *   http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-wai-aria-20090224/
 *   http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-wai-aria-practices-20090224/
 *   http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-wai-aria-implementation-20090224/

* For consistency with other WAI specs, consider the following titles/h1s:
- Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.0 [without 'Version']
I made this change.
- WAI-ARIA Primer for Accessible Rich Internet Applications 1.0
- WAI-ARIA Best Practices for Accessible Rich Internet Applications 1.0
- WAI-ARIA User Agent Implementation Guide for Accessible Rich Internet Applications 1.0
- WAI-ARIA Roadmap for Accessible Rich Internet Applications 1.0 [or no 1.0 needed?]
I think this is super-awkward. This is kind of like saying "WAI-ARIA Best Practices for WAI-ARIA". I also don't see that this change would make it more consistent with other WAI specs. The other editors agreed that we don't want to make these title changes.

* For documents that are informative (rather than normative standards/specs), make that clear.
This is addressed in the status of this document (again, an editors draft issue).

* <a>ARIA Overview</a> should be <a>WAI-ARIA Overview</a>
I'm unclear if all instances of ARIA should be presented as "WAI-ARIA". My personal preference is to do "WAI-ARIA" on first use in a section and plain "ARIA" after that. I believe you're requesting that all instances be the long form, but I'm not clear. It's actually easier just to find-replace it all to long form than to decide when to do long and when to do short, but I don't know if that's best for readability.

* Explain jargon like "user agent" on first use. Link terms to their definitions in the glossary. Make sure acronyms are written out in first use.
I did a massive linking of terms, and wrapping <abbr> around everything I could think of, which I hope addresses this request. I actually think I may have overdone it, but it was with the expectation that it's easier to pull back than to go through another pass to add. I welcome feedback about the appropriate amount of term links and <abbr> markup.

* Consider using the CSS as is in /TR/WCAG/, especially for the links to the definitions
We will take a look at this with a goal to adopting some of the styles from WCAG 2.0.

* add [contents] link at the top, e.g., like /TR/WCAG/
This is done.

* include link to public comments list in the Status section (or wherever else appropriate)
Standard for public status; editorial draft issue again.

2. WAI-ARIA 1.0 Editor's Draft <http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria/><http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria/>

* In "This section is informative" link "informative" to definition and un-italicize.
Done. I linked normative and informative to a glossary entry. I used a "termref" class which is styled to look how older WCAG drafts did it. The style for that class may be updated in addressing the above CSS request.

* Change "Semantics are knowledge of" to "Semantics is the knowledge of..."
Done

3. WAI-ARIA Best Practices <http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria-practices/ /><http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria-practices//>

"Writing rich internet applications is much more difficult than righting in HTML. It is even more work to ensure your application runs in multiple browsers and support WAI-ARIA."
is pretty strong. Please reconsider wording. This could be taken out of context and used to say that the main point is that ARIA is really hard, instead of how awesome it is to the user.
I'll happily take wording suggestions. I did nothing yet.

Note that some EOWG participants were somewhat uncomfortable telling people so strongly to use toolkits. (more on this is in a separate email)
We have agreed that we will make this change, but I can't promise when it will show up in a draft.

(also typo "righting" and "support")
done

###

Regards,
~Shawn for EOWG <http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/><http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/>


------------------
Shawn Lawton Henry
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
e-mail: shawn@w3.org<mailto:shawn@w3.org>
phone: +1.617.395.7664
about: http://www.w3.org/People/Shawn/



--

Michael Cooper
Web Accessibility Specialist
World Wide Web Consortium, Web Accessibility Initiative
E-mail cooper@w3.org<mailto:cooper@w3.org>
Information Page<http://www.w3.org/People/cooper/>