[techs] Summary/Minutes of July 16 Techniques Call

PRESENT

Matt May
Chris Ridpath
Lisa Seeman
Ben Caldwell
Roberto Scano
Roberto Ellero
Michela Cappelli
Michael Cooper

ACTION ITEMS

@@ Wendy and Michael to work on specifics for face to face meetings.
@@ Lisa to work on rewriting technique for use of <title>
@@ Ben to look at history of technique for <address> to find out if there is
a reason to keep it.
@@ Lisa to raise meta refresh issue with PF - can future specifications
include an accessible means of including refresh?
@@ Lisa to draft a technique about validation to a spec

DISCUSSION:

A short timeline for getting WCAG 2.0 to candidate recommendation means that
a lot of effort needs to be put into techniques work in the near future. We
discussed the need for scheduling a techniques face to face ASAP. (No
specific dates or locations have been proposed yet.) We also decided that we
should hold some extended teleconference calls, the first of which will be
next week, Wednesday, 23 July from 14:00 to 17:00 UTC (16:00 to 19:00
Central Europe/10:00 to 1:00 U.S. Eastern/7:00 to 10:00 U.S. Pacific).

A new HTML Techniques draft [1] was released last week and the techniques
group hopes to release additional techniques drafts in the coming weeks. The
remainder of the meeting focused on the latest draft and a summary of that
discussion is included below.


Technique: Use the TITLE element to describe the document.

Editorial note suggests "label" instead of "describe"

Summarize? Title should describe purpose of document and be distinct from
other pages.

Checkpoint 3.3 mentions the accuracy and uniqueness of page titles. 

Associate with 3.3 instead of 1.3?

Action: Lisa to take a stab at rewriting this one

Second editorial note under technique for title suggests that we delete the
example of "title on link." This editorial note seems to be in the wrong
place.

Technique: The ADDRESS element

address element should be reqd. because there needs to be a point of contact
for who to contact if there is a problem.

if inaccessible, it's unlikely that someone would have done this, but might
be helpful 

what is accessibility benefit of using <address>?

propose that description for this one says, if you publish the author
information, then you should use <address>

Action: Ben investigate history of this technique and to see if we're
missing something.

Technique: The meta element (missing checkpoint reference) - should be
associated with checkpoint 2.2

Discussion on meta refresh - what does "avoid" mean in this case?

A technique for doing this in an accessible way is needed in server-side or
scripting techniques. 

There are some examples where refresh can be used to make use of a site more
efficient. If an alternative version (without refresh) is available, it can
still be accessible. 

Change avoid to "do not use" and point to other techniques (to be
developed)?

problem here is with the protocol - HTML does not have an accessible
mechanism for this.

Action: Lisa to raise this with PF

!Doctype statement technique should be associated with technique 4.1
(use-spec)

some validation tools are only looking for doctype tags, but they don't
actually check validity

we should have a technique with a checklist item that says you've validated
to a spec

Action Lisa to write up a technique about validation

W3C Validator only goes back to HTML 4.01.

Technique: The LINK element and alternative documents

add a note under link element for text-only version about the importance of
generating alternate versions from the same source, keeping them up to date,
etc. 

the href in this example should have a ".html" on it. 

Should cross-reference server-side techniques or other references about how
to do this.

Technique: Section Headings

Want a margin defined at 5%? How about 15px? (ednote)

feeling about margins and paddings is that any unit is OK as long as there
is enough contrast/space. 

Issue of relative units needs to be addressed someplace (CSS Techniques??).

Proposal: split the following checklist item into two 

(current checklist item) Use HTML header elements H1 through H6, in order,
to define the structure of the document.

(proposed revisions)

Use HTML header elements H1 through H6, in that order.
--and--
Use HTML header elements to define the structure of the document.

suggestion: instead of "Use CSS, not HTML header elements, to create font
effects."
Change to:
Do not use HTML header elements to create font effects that are not a part
of the structure of the document. (problem is that the current wording
implies that you can't use HTML header tags)


[1] http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/WD-HTMLTECH-20030711.html 

--
Ben Caldwell | caldwell@trace.wisc.edu
Trace Research and Development Center (http://trace.wisc.edu)

Received on Thursday, 17 July 2003 11:19:33 UTC