Re: agenda+ new definition of Programmatically Available

It's fine as far as it goes, but I'm concerned that it provides too much leeway for a manufacturer to claim that information is "programmatically available" because one screen reader successfully extracts the information from a screen shot.

In my opnion, something is truly programmatically determinable only if the entity presenting the information does so in a way that is explicit and unambiguous, in a way that can be understood without reverse-engineering or complex (and thus potentially fallible) heuristics, and only relying on methods that are published, and officially supported by the developers of the software being evaluated.

Screen scraping (attempting to understand meaning and relationships between things on the screen strictly by analyzing their visual presentation) and optical character or speech recognition are all inherently unreliable, and therefore the results would not be content considered programmatically available/determinable, even if some products manage to do a good job of it.

Our definition of "recognized" already handles this correctly, so the definition for "programmatically available" and "available programmatically" should as well.

     Thanks,
     Greg

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: agenda+ new definition of Programmatically Available
From: Richards, Jan <jrichards@ocadu.ca>
To: UAWG <w3c-wai-ua@w3.org>
Date: 6/21/2013 10:28 AM
> Thanks Jeanne,
>
> It may be worth mentioning that your proposal removes the ATAG2 definition (http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/ATAG20/#def-Programmatically-Determined) also covers a second sense of the term: "Processing content: Whether the authoring tool is able to extract information from the web content (e.g., to extract the language of content from the markup)."
>
> In UAAG2 that second sense is handled by a completely different term: "recognize":
> http://www.w3.org/WAI/UA/UAAG20/#def-recognize
>
> Cheers,
> Jan
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Jeanne Spellman [mailto:jeanne@w3.org]
>> Sent: June-21-13 2:15 PM
>> To: UAWG
>> Subject: agenda+ new definition of Programmatically Available
>>
>> This came up in Kim's and my review of Eric's editorial comments - we don't
>> have a definition for programmatically available. ATAG has a definition for
>> programmatically determined. We modified that one, here it is:
>>
>> programmatically available
>>
>> Information that is encoded in a way that allows different software, including
>> assistive technologies, to extract and present the information in different
>> modalities. This means making use of platform accessibility services, APIs,
>> and, in some cases, document object models (DOM). For web-based user
>> interfaces, this means ensuring that the user agent can pass on the
>> information (e.g., through the use of ARIA).
>>