Minutes from UA Telecon on Wednesday, November 11th

Chair: Jon Gunderson 
Date: Wednesday, November 11th
Time: 12:00 noon to1:00 pm Eastern Standard Time 
Call-in: (+1) 617/258-7910

Agenda
1. Discussion of how to resolve issues related to determining which techniques
will be need to directly implmented by user agents 
2. Continue to discuss rating of techniques for table linearization and
complex
key navigation ( i.e tables ) 

Attendance
Chair: Jon Gunderson 
Scribe: Ian Jacobs 
Charle McCathieNevile 
Markku Hakkinen 
Al Gilman 
Jim Allan 
Scott Luebking 
Kathy Hewitt 
Regrets 
Kitch Barnicle 
Charles Oppermann 

Announcements   
Draft of UA Guidelines to go to to public TR page tonight 
Face-to-face meeting will be held in Cambridge 11/12 December. Details to
follow 

Action Items and Conclusions
AG: Will review section on 'point of regard' in guidelines document.
MH: Post these ideas to WG mailing list. 
IJ: Send changes to document since last WG draft to mailing list. 
Issues that need to be considered in developing a consensus:  
Complexity/cost of implementation 
Number of people who will benefit from the technique 
Importance of technique for accessibility 
Importance of technique for consistency across 3rd party assistive
technologies


Minutes
SL: Send thoughts/experiments on navigation and rendering to WG mailing list. 
How do we reach consensus about which techniques must be implemented
natively? 
JG: Two sticky issues: table rendering and table navigation. Also adding a
layer of keyboard support that may not be in current plans of major browser
vendors. 
JG: Currently two-tiered mechanism:  
Priorities with respect to the user 
Native/Assistive support 
SL: I kind of see them as combined. Some more tightly combined than others.
Helpful to user to not have to relearn mechanisms each time they change
systems. Learning curve much higher since you must learn new tools and
relationship of access technologies to those tools 
KH: Saying rendering should be same across all user agents (for consistency),
but doesn't this take away added value of assistive technologies? 
SL: Burden should be shared by asst. technologies and major user agents.
Possible criteria for choosing: - Complexity - Cost - Size of community that
benefits times the importance of feature - Can this help reduce learning
curve 
AG: Different interfaces should be supported. Need to deliver functionality at
object model interface and the video bits interface. I don't think the right
approach is to weigh functionality. Instead, look at how well do interfaces
work. Assign priorities there. 
AG: UA Guidelines are asking for ambitious things today. I think implementing
natively and delivering to the video buffer imply two different technical
problems. We're muddying the water if we don't consider this. Some redundancy
across both interfaces necessary. 
IJ: Summarizing 
Al: The native-assistive interface is not sufficient. Need to break down into
more interfaces to make selection process easier. API interface, but also
video
bit interface. 
JG: I'd rather not take a brand new approach to establishing priorities/split.
/* Scribe note: See Daniel Dardailler's attempt at drawing the line: 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ua/1998OctDec/0069.html /* 
CMN: I don't like including cost in the criteria. 
SL: I just think the WG must keep costs in mind. 
IJ: I propose bypassing the "criteria" and composing a list, sorting them by
difficulty (based on DD's email) and trying to get consensus from the list. 
JG: One problem may be that the techniques are not specific enough. 
SL: With clever table rendering, there are ways to bypass some of the
navigation issues. 
Action SL: Send thoughts/experiments on navigation and rendering to WG mailing
list. 
MH: We'll be taking some information about navigationing documents into user
keyboard commands style sheets. 
Action MH: Post these ideas to WG mailing list.
AG: High priority: User should be able to focus on any element in an HTML
document. 
/* Note, not the same as point of regard */ 
Slightly less high: Navigation Slightly less high: Presentation 
IJ: Check out the techniques document TOC and try to apply Al's divisions to
different subsections. 
SL: Table navigation and access tightly related. 
JG: Concern about building whole new models into the guidelines, asked AG to
send a proposed revision to the guidelines of his idea
SL: Asked for feedback on frames navigation e-mail.
JG, MN: Same concept as LYNX for handling frames 
JG: Asked SL to repost message

Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., ATP
Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology
Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services
University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
1207 S. Oak Street
Champaign, IL 61820

Voice: 217-244-5870
Fax: 217-333-0248
E-mail: jongund@uiuc.edu
WWW:	http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jongund
	http://www.als.uiuc.edu/InfoTechAccess

Received on Thursday, 12 November 1998 13:10:06 UTC