- From: Gregory J. Rosmaita <oedipus@hicom.net>
- Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 16:10:14 +0100
- To: www-style@w3.org, wai-liaison@w3.org
- Cc: bert@w3.org, janina@rednote.net, cooper@w3.org, chris@w3.org
aloha! i am writing to you as an individual who just happens to be a member of the Protocols & Formats working group (http://www.w3.org/wai/pf) and who just happens to be blind. As part of my responsibilities for the PFWG, i have been attempting to assist in the effort to track, coordinate and facilitate reviews of all CSS modules as they are developed, so that any accessibility concerns and/or needs can be addressed during the developmental stage, and not merely through comments when a draft reaches Last Call or Candidate Recommendation status. Consult, for example: http://www.w3.org/wai/pf/wiki/CSS i have been using the "CSS Snapshot 2007" (http://www.w3.org/TR/css-beijing) since it was released, as a timeline/roadmap of CSS3 module development, but the last version of that document to be issued is datestamped 2008-05-16 and a lot of activity has transpired since that date. Is the Style Activity/CSS WG working on an update the CSS Snapshot document? Is there an editor's draft of the CSS Snapshot that presents an up-to-date summation of CSS3 module development, deployment and timeline? The reason behind this request is that -- as a blind user -- i cannot use the CSS Working Group/Style Activity's deliverables schedule page located at: http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/current-work there, color coding is used to indicate the development status of the Style Activity's individual drafts. While there is a legend for the color coding used in the chart: http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/current-work#legend this is the type of info that it is essential to convey to a non-visual or monochrome user explicitly by documenting the precise background and/or foreground values which are intended to reflect the current status of documents under development -- the legend simply shows the colors and their associations -- the actual colors (background, in particular) are NOT named and need to be discovered by querying the text in the legend for font/display properties, which is an UNDUE burden on any -- let alone the average -- user. The legend needs to contain the equivalent information in plain, human parseable language, NOT as the current legend does, by using examples of background colors, but by naming the background colors so that a user can query/command their assistive technology to read text (or process text) that match the specified combinations AND by binding them to their symbolic meaning using SemWeb techniques, such as, for example, RDFa. One must never forget that even when one separates style from structure, color coding is still a modality-specific means of communicating information, no matter how the color coding is achieved. thank you, gregory. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Accessibility, Internationalization, and Interoperability are not "features", "overlays" or "add-ons". Rather, they are core components of any architecture -- programmatic or otherwise. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Gregory J. Rosmaita, gregory@linux-foundation.org Vice-Chair, WebMaster & Listmaster, Open Accessibility Workgroup http://a11y.org/ http://a11y/specs -----------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Wednesday, 14 July 2010 15:11:17 UTC