Web and Software:content

General Issues

• E-mail is becoming more and more of a vehicle in which information is gathered and disseminated.
  • Forms and data - either as an attachment or embedded in the e-mail.
  • Attachments: Word, PDF, TIFF, JPG, and GIF files.
  • Quoting original content when replying to an e-mail.
  • e-mail rendering by User Agents: If you send an accessible XHTML e-mail, it may get converted by the e-mail program. So even if you send an accessible e-mail, you can't guarantee that it will remain so.
  • Possible solution for e-mail attachments: Follow the accessibility guidelines offered by the company that owns the document format (eg: Microsoft Word, Excel, Adobe PDF, etc.). For images, like JPG, TIFF, GIF, where there is no possibility to define an "alt" attribute, the user should add a textual description for the image attachments inside the body of message.
• TIFF and PDF documents on the Web
• Row and column headers in content
• Navigation of content - issue of author providing structure in the content and application providing a means to navigate the structure. Maybe UAAG can provide some guidance here.
• Logical reading order
• Ensuring that internal linking is keyboard accessible.
• Diagrams, maps, org-charts, flow-charts: what standards do these need to meet. Saying that a text alternative is required is not sufficiently clear for most people to acttually produce useful alternatives.
  • For example, flow-charts can be produced as a set of elements with defined relationships, and all that data can be input into a application, and the application can "render" the visual output, but most often this isn't how it is accomplished. Most often graphical drawing tools do the job. What is applicable in such cases--the tools used often may not have the capacity to manipulate the information on the element and relationship basis, or "render" the information in an alternate fashion.
• What capacities define a format that can meet the technical and functional standards?
  • To have accessible content, the format must provide the capacities to mark up the information to be interpreted by AT or user-agent to AT, and the authoring tools must provide the creator/authors a way to do the mark up effectively, and going out further, to also "check" their work quickly to see if the mark up indeed does meet the standards.
• Discussed at the January 24, 2007 meeting