- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 05:21:19 -0500 (EST)
- To: WAI GL <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Here are a bunch more minutes, thanks to Cynthia. Note that we had Mat Miirabella at the meeting, and Matt May on the phone, so it is not yet clear who is who... WCAG F2F Telstra, Melbourne Australia November 13 2001 Introductions: Gian Sampson-Wild, Stanley & Milford Emeline Haight, Dept of Ed Tasmania Rob Pedlow, Telstra Research Graham Oliver Liddy Nevile Andrew Arch Mat Mirabella, Telstra Research Wendy Chisholm, W3C Jason White, University of Melbourne Lisa Seeman, Cynthia C. Shelly, Microsoft Corporation Charles McCathieNevile On the Phone Jo Miller Gregg Vanderheiden Andy Snow-Weaver, IBM Loretta Guarino-Ried, Adobe Tim Lacy, Microsoft Corporation Matt May JW Email from Greg summarizing axes for summarizing checkpoints. What criteria will we use to decide what goes in the minimum set, and how the conformance will work. Can the user access the content Ability of user's technology What the author should be able to do in terms of selecting audience and prioritizing implementation Temporal dimension. Some requirements exist because of software limitations which will disappear over time, and new opportunities will come up over time. How can we formulate these into a coherent conformance scheme LN IMS takes an approach where you separate the user issues from the provider issues. They use a learner profile, and allow learner to add to the profile their accessibility needs. IMS is interested in how you link resources together to make a composite resource. Use a user profile of the user to automatically link the resources together. IMS is all about making standards to which members will comply - educational sector. IMS definition. Trying to create a world where you can plug a student in and have them do all there work and be evaluated. Or, allow teachers to construct customized educational tools. Consortium of commercial software companies working on voluntary standards for educational software Wendy: Conformance Introduction. We're trying to decide what kind of priority scheme we should use for WCAG 2.0. It's very different than WCAG 1.0. There is some contention about how uniformly we applied criteria in 1. Many people also thought it was too rigid Jason 2 ways we can approach discuss what are the axes try to apply the ones we have Liddy Perhaps Dublin core can be extended to include an accessibility element. Add accessibility metadata. Dublin Core has done a lot of thinking about how to represent accessibility in metadata. Lisa There's a practical consideration people have when trying to make conformance claims, where it should be doable. That goes against the grain for people like me who think it should be based on how hard it is for people to access. We should have a minimum set for retrofitting, and a different one for people who are building a new site. This might make a good compromise Andrew What level should we achieve? Levels don't necessarily map to what you're trying to do for your users. Priority 1, 2 and 3 are too course. Some way to mix and match according to their needs, according to what their audience is and what they're trying to achieve. Wendy We have consensus that we need to allow authors to make a more granular claim. But, there is some concern about people only doing a minimal set. Lisa If we label minimum set as retrofitting, Liddy This is the same argument Dublin Core has been having for 5 years. How do you get from the core set to a very granular thing for a special situation. We should learn from their work. Wendy How did they get there? Liddy Core must be doable, recognizable. Special domains have added extensions. Education wants to know about the audience for whom the resource is intended, but there are 2 audiences - students and a mediating teacher or some combination. Allows for refinements of extensions, for example adding controlled vocabulary. Dumb-down rule to allow refined set to be translated to core. There is a registry for cross-mapping. Wendy How would you apply Liddy Dublin core is about discovery. We could add a domain specific element recommended for use by everyone in Dublin core that would describe accessibility. Could use application profiles to look at [508 vs. WCAG vs. New Zealand, etc] Charles We have technical tools for linking different requirements. WCAG has a list of stuff that you can do and ways to decide if you have done it. In WCAG 1.0 we had must should may, which is well understood. One way to approach is to get rid of priority, and give information on which users are effective so that different organizations can make proper cost-benefit decisions. Liddy Could do that w/ Dublin core using application profiles. Andy On the call last Thursday, we talked about the pros and cons of having and not having priorities Wendy Was there consensus? Jason There was recognition that there were pros and cons both ways Andy Drawback of bare minimum - many orgs will do just that and no more. How can we express or present as Phase 1, so people will continue with the next phase. Kynn compared this to transitional and strict HTML standards. Jason Kynn also suggested that trans/strict analogy worked for tech change too. The requirements that will go away with tech innovation would go into transitional. Dimensions Possibility/impossibility for use W/ w/o tech What authors can do with their resources / needs What's available today, what can be done when there are new techs. The challenge is to examine how they interact and what kind of scheme we need Lisa Something I'm worried about. When speaking to corps about learning disabilities, people often complain against the policy of self-identifying. In the adult population, there are people who don't know. Liddy IMS profile is based on what you need not what you have Lisa For cognitive disabilities that won't work, because you have a lot of denial. The opposite of self-identification is for someone else to identify you, and I don't trust others to do so. I'm hesitant to let authors identify their user's needs. At the same time, I think Charles point is important, that each and every checkpoint is essential to some user group. Single A is only about physical barriers, comprehension moves to double A. If the data is not comprehensible, has accessibility been achieved? Taking a solution that is almost asking people to miss use it for the same groups is not a solutions. Similar issues with Phase 1, Phase 2. A lot of things that are in AA, are things that can only happen in phase 1 development - can't be added later. A better representation might be who does it and at one point in the process (general architecture, updating, etc). Charles Language for motivation is useless by the time it gets translated. We aren't requiring conformance, we are explaining what is required to ensure accessibility. Pro dropping priorities: we can do the work that we need before we can make sensible distinctions Con: ATAG will be a nightmare. There will be a big list of things to do. I think we need to do more work on techniques and how to make this happen, and less on conformance schemes. Graham Small places are looking for guidance and leadership from the guidelines, so having a conformance scheme is important - there aren't enough people for them to be able to split out the requirements. Gian Having a retrofitting thing that seems easier will be bad, because that is what people will do instead. Splitting things by disability is tricky. It is important to justify that a requirement is important for somebody, but we should not incorporate that in a way that encourages people to try and match their target audience. Splitting conformance. There are 3 types of site that attempt accessibility - general public sites, (should aim for AA), disability service orgs - they are going to go as far as they can, and there are sites with targeted audiences - they assume that there are no people with disabilities in that audience. Question: I am a bit hazy on how the technical environment fits into the group. Why do we assume that people don't have JavaScript - because of their systems? Economics? ... Gregg People look at the guidelines and say "where do we start?". Maybe there is something other than "importance to people" as a way of prioritizing. If we have the full set and let people pick where to start, people risk starting at a point that is not useful - doing a lot of work that relies on things they haven't done yet. There are things that are critical, the minimum set. I think we need to have some type of prioritization. Loretta Charles' proposal appealed to me, but what would it mean to claim conformance. In addition we discussed whether conformance could be related to disabilities - I thought Charles Conformance would be doing the lot. Rare and highly valued, but we would have to make it clear that specifying what has been done is really important in the real world. It should be impossible to claim conformance based on helping one group or other of people with disabilities Jason We need to have information for our "checkpoints" - who benefits, what the technical requirements are, how to do it, ... We haven't got an agreed set of this information, but these are consistent themes. We should have a task to work out what we need from this information. There are possible dependencies among checkpoints - these should be identified. Maybe we should go through the checkpoints, categorize them so the extra info is in the document. Then we can go and consider conformance again. Cynthia This group can define what things can be done to help people - that's what we are really good at. The next thing is to help figure out where to start. There are loots of different audiences. If we give implementers the things they need to implement without worrying about which is more important, then people can find it and use it. Then we can give policy makers the information they need to make a policy. They do that anyway - we otherwise make it hard for them to relate what we are doing to what they are doing. And then we need to make things discoverable - EARL, DC, or some other metadata-based system so people can find it. If we do those, we will do a lot of good. If we try to write regulations, we will help fewer people - if there is what my boss wrote and what W3C wrote, I am going 5to follow my boss. Lisa I like the way we are going. I disagreed with the premise that Charles made, that our job is just to give information. Perhaps our job is to do what we can do to make the web accessible. Looking at the situation in New Zealand is very important - I don't think everybody is going to make up their own policies - that only applies to big countries and big companies. I wanted to suggest we have the complete requirements, add a level of burden in different situations - when you are creating something, when you are fixing. Also, demonstrate the spread effect - the dependencies. Then we should look at ways of implementing accessibility policies. Liddy: IMS are not here because they are meeting tomorrow morning (days are different on different continents). Break - 15 minutes. Q == Andrew, Matt, Charles, Graham, Liddy. -- Charles McCathieNevile http://www.w3.org/People/Charles phone: +61 409 134 136 W3C Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI fax: +1 617 258 5999 Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia (or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)
Received on Wednesday, 21 November 2001 05:21:19 UTC