Web and Software:January 24

Miscellaneous

• Minutes from January 17, 2007 approved.
• February TEITAC Meeting:
  • Subcommittee face to face meeting is currently scheduled for 2:30 - 4 PM on Tuesday, February 6th on the draft TEITAC agenda. No one indicated plans to attend in person.
  • Draft subcommittee report - please review so we can approve at next week's meeting
    • What other significant issues or progress should we include in this interim report?
• Deliverables
  • Software is up to date with where we are on each provision. Can start reviewing now or wait until we are closed on the API proposal.
  • Others are still in progress

Review of action items from January 17th

1. IN PROCESS: Judy Brewer to send requirements for W3C copyright notices. WCAG working group is documenting how to reference WCAG standards. Judy will have something for us in two weeks (January 31st).
2. Rich Schwerdtfeger to give a presentation in mid-February on the future of Web and Software applications. Curtis to check with Jim Thatcher about providing a presentation on where graphical applications are going.
3. ONGOING: Gregg Vanderheiden to do some research with the low vision community to see what they want with regard to color and contrast. Gregg is working with Lighthouse exploring the contrast issue. Developing and refining method of defining minimum contrast between text and background. Doing this for WCAG work and will share back with this group. Will post to this group when ready.
4. IN PROCESS: Gregg Vanderheiden, Curtis Chong, Sean Hayes, Don Barrett, Earl Johnson to continue to refine the proposal. Need to determine what it is reasonable to ask someone to do and then work on the wording for it.
   • Working on better wording for "time dependent analog input".

General Issues

• Speech Interfaces and Equivalent Facilitation
  • With regard to the idea of proposing standards for equivalent facilitation, this is very hard to do because it may depend on the context. That is, each agency has to assess within the context of how their users will use the product.
  • Refer to the Subpart A subcommittee

Off topic discussion

• We have a standard that says don't override the user's "display" settings but there is nothing about not overriding the speech settings.
• If more applications begin to support speech, there need to be system settings for voice, rate of speech, etc. And applications should not override these.
• No action proposed at this time because operating systems don't provide text to speech services out of the box like they do display output.

Content

• We know we can make text accessible but even that has problems. For example, a multi-column document in text only that uses tab stops to define the columns won't make sense when a screen reader reads it line by line.
• Hard to know what is reasonable to ask for but, at a minimum, when there is an embedded object in a document, the very minimum that is needed is a way of labeling it so you know it's there and what it is.
• Most would not argue that 100% of e-mail attachments have to be accessible 100% of the time. Beyond the label, the amount of information you need is dependent on how it is going to be used. For a programmer, all of the detail in a flowchart is necessary.
• Announcements are another big problem - government agencies sending out announcements that are not accessible.
• Maybe we need a separate set of standards for content.
• Access Board position is that 508 does not cover information and data and therefore not content.
• But this should be challenged because it covers Web "content" and multimedia which is also "content".
• It is not practical for every government employee to have to be trained in creating conforming content.
• Tools can't do the whole job. For example, writing good text alternatives is a skill that takes a long time to develop. And tools can't do that for you.
• But tools could do more to help with the creation of accessible content. For example, they could prompt for a text alternative when a user embeds a non-text object in a docuement.
• Can we also define a standard that requires authors to use a tool to its fullest extent? Then as the tools get better, we can have better and better content.
• Action: Katie Haritos-Shea to develop a proposal for authoring tools requirements and a set of Q&As based on the W3C Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines.

Summary of New Action Items

• Katie Haritos-Shea to develop a proposal for authoring tools requirements and a set of Q&As based on the W3C Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines.

Attendees

1. Blene Bekure (LMIT)
2. Andi Snow-Weaver - IBM
3. Tom Brett
4. Sean Hayes (Microsoft)
5. Nick Truesdell (IRS)
6. Katie Haritos-Shea
7. Ken Kipnes (Oracle)
8. Mike Fratkin (SSA)
9. Shannon Rapuano - IBM
10. Luke Kowalski (Oracle)
11. Amy Chen (Oracle)
12. Alex Li (SAP)
13. David Oyola
14. Andrew Kirkpatrick (Adobe)
15. David Oyola (Ricoh Corporation)
16. Laura Ruby
17. Drew LaHart - IBM
18. Don Barrett
19. Jessica Brodey - ATIA
20. Terry Weaver - GSA
21. Curtis Chong
22. Judy Brewer (W3C/WAI)
23. Rex Lint - ITAA