Chairs conclusions from today's telecon

I just want to highlight my current thinking on the table access issue.  These
thoughts are designed to stimulate discussion from which we can fine tune the
recommendations.  Please read and post your opinons and ideas.
Jon

Action Items and Conclusions from Wednesday, December 2nd telecon

Chair's Conclusions on today's discussion 

CSS for linearization:
Maybe some support in CSS2 for simple linearization. 

CSS is primarily designed to operate on a specifc element and there is not a
precidence to have a CSS spefication that would use other element information
in the rendering of the current element. Therefore having header information
inserted before a table cell data would be considered something that would
take
new thinking on the part of CSS working group. Although there is this exact
specification for Aural Style sheets, so the topic would not be new to the CSS
people.

DOM for Linearization
DOM has a strucutred view of the table and would allow third party assistive
technology to access the cell and header information. The UA would just
need to
support DOM and plateform conventions for external programatic access. This
would provide 3rd party assistive technologies the maximum flexibility to
integrate in keyboard access to not only tables but the rest of the
elements in
the document. The criticism of using only this approach is that all assistive
technology vendors would need to replicate the work of table access and if
linearization and navigation was built into the browser it would be available
to all assistive technology developers. I think the group lacks information on
how difficult this is for screen reader developers to implement (since many do
not know of the existence of the DOM) and how this approach effects emerging
XML applications. 

There are several options for the DOM approach:
1. Education of screen reader and other assistive technology developers about
DOM
2. Provide example code to do table navigation and manipulation 
3. It may provide a path to make XML applications accessible sooner, since XML
apps will probably rely on DOM. 

Keyboard Models for Table Navigation
Need to take a closer look at Scott Luebkings table keyboard navigation model
in context of embedded tables and overal keyboard navigation strategies. See
E-mail
message:http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ua/1998OctDec/0176.html 

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 Wednesday, 2 December 1998 17:45:07 UTC