Re: Thinking aloud...Definitions (pre-Guideline 1.1 summary)

At 18:08 20/04/2005, Wendy Chisholm wrote:
>(...)
>Draft definitions (not quite proposals):
>
>   * text - A sequence of characters. Characters are those included in
>     the Unicode character set. Refer to Characters (in Extensible
>     Markup Language (XML) 1.1) for more information about the accepted
>     character range.

During the conference call, Wendy clarified that any character set may be used
as long as all characters in the encoding can be mapped to Unicode characters.


>   * Unicode - Unicode is a universal character set that defines all
>     the characters needed for writing the majority of living languages
>     in use on computers. For more information refer to the Unicode
>     Consortium or to Tutorial: Character sets & encodings in XHTML,
>     HTML and CSS produced by the W3C Internationalization Working
>     Group.  [Additional clarification that gets a bit "success
>     criteria-ish": This does not mean that all documents should be
>     encoded in Unicode. It means that documents should only contain
>     characters defined by Unicode. Any encoding may be used for your
>     document as long as it is properly declared and is a subset of the
>     Unicode repertoire.]
>   * content -  Information that forms Web sites and Web applications:
>     the code and markup that define the structure, presentation, and
>     interaction, as well as text, images, and sounds that convey
>     information to the end-user.  based on definition in "Essential
>     Components of Web Accessibility"      <http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/components>
>   * functional - performing or able to perform an action in response
>     to user input. [based on Merriam Webster's Medical Dictionary entry]
>   * non-text content - content that is not represented by a Unicode
>     character or sequence of Unicode characters
>         o functional non-text content - content (information including
>           markup, code, images, etc) that is capable of performing an
>           action in response to user input and is not represented by a
>           Unicode character or sequence of Unicode characters.
>
>If these terms are defined in these ways (or something similar) then  
>non-text content includes:
>
>  1. "widgets" that are created by attaching an event handler to an image
>  2. groups of widgets that form a Web application or a flash application.
>
>For example, the flickr "organize" application (see attached screen shot, description below).  If the author chooses a baseline that does not rely on flash, he or she will need to provide a label for the flash object (e.g., "Organize photos") as well as provide a non-flash alternative that allows the user to browse all photos, browse by date, view sets of photos, create a new set, view groups, and search for photos by tags (i.e., all of the functionality available via the flash app).  If the author chooses a baseline that relies on flash, he or she will need to provide a label for the flash object (e.g., "Organize photos") as well as ensure that all of the internal flash objects are accessible. These include:  browse tab, search tab, timeline object, create new set button, etc. In other words, each of the internal objects should be labeled according to guideline 1.1 and are keyboard accessible according to guideline 2.1.  [tee-hee - recursion.] 
>If Guideline 1.1 Level 1 SC 1 were reworded, "For all non-text content that is functional, text alternatives identify the non-text content in such a way that the label may serve the same purpose as the non-text content.  If the non-text content is a collection of non-text content, each of the internal objects (or groups of objects) are also labeled (within reason)."  "within reason" is not testable, but I use it to clarify that if you have an SVG image that is a collection of arcs, you don't need to label every arc, only the whole. However, if you have a flash application you label the app as well as each widget within it. Perhaps a better clarification is to label all functional elements within a functional element (at least for this criterion and then deal with "convey information" in success criterion #2). While this wording is rough, I think this approach allows us to address  some of the issues we have with Guideline 4.2 and accessibility of web apps (versus user agents) and gives us the appropriate "wiggle room" for authors to choose different baselines and sets of techniques. 
>Thoughts?
>--wendy
>
>Description of the attached screen shot:
>A screen shot of flickr's "Organize" application in a Firefox window.  
>This description is only of the contents of the firefox viewport and not of the firefox UI.
> From top to bottom, left to right of the viewport:
>Photos: [link] Yours, [link] Upload, [link] Organize, [link] Your Contacts', [link] Everyone's
>Flickr logo
>The "organize" application has two frames each with 2 tabs across the top.  The left frame has Browse and Search tabs.  Browse is active, Search is inactive. The right frame has "Your sets" and "Your groups" tabs.  "Your sets" is active.
>Within the Search frame is a button, "Load all photos." Below that is an large area with the text, "If you'd like to load all your photos, you can do that with the link below. Or, you can load photos from a specific date range using the date selector widget even further below. Or, you can search for photos by clicking the "search" tab above."  followed by the link "Load all your photos."  Below that is the "date selector widget" which is a timeline that starts with 12/20/04 and goes to 4/19/05 in weekly increments.  There are yellow bars below some of the dates - a longer bar indicates a larger number of photos published on that day. Below that are 2 checkboxes: [unchecked] Use date taken instead of posted and [checked] Do the zoom thing on thumbnails.
>Within the "your sets" frame is the text "1 set [link] reorder them" and a thumbnail labeled "moc moc (6 photos)."  At the bottom of the frame is "1 set [link] reorder them" and a "create new set" button.
>
>-- 
>wendy a chisholm
>world wide web consortium
>web accessibility initiative
>http://www.w3.org/WAI/
>/--
>
>
>

Received on Friday, 22 April 2005 00:14:00 UTC