Web and Software:November 15

Miscellaneaous

• Appointment of scribe: Jim Allan and Drew LaHart both volunteered to take notes. Thanks Jim and Drew!
• Approval of minutes from November 6, 2006.
• Confirm that next meeting is November 22nd.
• No meeting December 27, 2006
• TEITAC meeting report

Review of action items from November 6th

1. COMPLETE Luke Kowalski will provide ISO 9241 Part 171 provisions that are comparable to Section 508 1194.21 provisions.
2. Judy Brewer to send requirements for W3C copyright notices.
3. Andi to check with Access Board staff to confirm that we can quote provisions in other standards.
4. COMPLETE: What are the access board's responsibilities of promulgating the standards? Have they ever adopted an international standard? If so, did it require additional work? Was there a regulatory assessment issue? Other roadblocks? At the TEITAC meeting, the Access Board said that they have adopted external standards in other areas. Adopting external standards have a cost associated with them is not an issue.
5. Unassigned: Need a presentation on where graphical applications are going.
6. Jim Allan to draft a proposal for a web provision on focus indicator
7. COMPLETE: Jim Thatcher to draft new wording for 21(g).
8. COMPLETE: (Thanks Drew!) Andi Snow-Weaver to draft a proposal for 21(j) using the WCAG 2.0 algorithmic approach.

Discussion of proposals

21(g)

• Discussion around Jim Thatcher's second proposal for 21(g)
  • Several suggested alternatives to "honor" - "inherit and apply", "utilize"
  • Not sure all can "inherit" - lots of questions from developers about how to do that
  • Department of Ed experience is that applications do a poor job of supporting this.
  • Eclipse applications do a very good job
  • Action: Shannon Rapuano to post informantion on the wiki on color inheritance in windows, including workspace
  • phrase "other individual display attributes when the availability of those selections are developed and documented according to industry standards." is still somewhat vague but is at least consistent with the current wording in 21(b). Perhaps the Access Board could develop supplementary material (like the guides to the standards) that could help explain what this means.
  • Conclusion: Replace "honor" with "utilize" in Jim's last proposal.
• Discussion around Jim Thatcher's proposal to also modify 21(b)
  • wording "other products". For developers, the OS is a known quantity but it's a tall order to to require that applications not interfere with any other product.
  • discussed removing "other products" so that the requirement is only to not interfere with the operating system accessibility features. Concern that there would be no requirement on OS to not interfere with assistive technology.
  • Decision is to leave "other products" in for now but to continue to discuss this issue. Suggestion that maybe we can quantify "other products" to a target user base?
  • Jim's proposal also combined the existing two sentences in 21(b) so that the requirement is the same for not interfering with accessibiliyt features of the operating system as it is for not interfering with other products.
  • suggestion to remove "that are identified as accessibility features" - should not interfere with any features of other products or OS. No agreement to do this as we are only concerned here with accessibility. There may be valid reasons such as security why software has to change something about another product or OS.
  • Note that AT often disrupts activated features of the OS that are often accessibility features.
  • concern that by combining the two sentences in 21(b), we have lost an important distinction. The current wording seems to allow for the OS manufacturer to define a way of doing this that is not "industry standard".
  • Conclusion: Leave 21(b) as is for now.

21(j)

• Gregg has created pages showing various contrast ratios with 3 types of color blindness and character stroke thickness. Also additional materials on viewing angle of the display that effect contrast.
• user may not know how to set colors
• discussion about what is the right contrast ratio to require. WCAG doing analysis of 5:1, 4:1, 3:1. Thinking about adding a Level 1 requirement of 3:1 and changing the current Level 2 requirement from 5:1 to 4:1.
• Definition of contrast (and formula to calculate it) depends on colorspace being used. WCAG using W3C SRGB color space
• discussion of colorspace, luminosity, contrast, devices, and content. What is good enough? How do you get it? Should we use luminence or contrast. Luminence is more robust for color vision problems.
• text contrast (text, background, highlighting) is different from charts, diagrams, etc.
• adding a default requirement is an addition to 508.
• Action: Sean Hayes to write a proposal for a default minimum contrast.
• disabled menu items are difficult for contrast, usually fails test
• not happy with current wording. difficult to test. lots of head scratching. if you allow color contrast. need to meet default contrast, or allow user to adjust to meet needs. if no means to adjust contrast, the application must provide default contrast.
• does grey out menu items pass contrast in high contrast mode?
• Action: Gregg to do some research with the low vision community to see what they want.
• high contrast mode may not affect everything in the OS
• proposal: use place holder of n:1 till we determine value of n.
• Bruce tested greyed out on yellow/black, greyout was green (with good contrast)
• hardware contrast change does not affect this provision. 21(j) is only concerned with software.
• if some software changes contrast for the application, the OS doesnot jump in to compensate.
• if fonts are small need higher contrast
• need some formula for contrast
• designer elements excluded - logo, user should not have ability to change color contrast of logo, images, etc. need to have wording that reflects this exclusion
• References to other standards
  • There is an ISO standard that recommends a minimum of 3:1 for text
  • ANSI standard recommends increasing the contrast for very small text
  • Note that the above are standards for "normal" vision
  • At 4:1 you can just barely get three levels of contrast
• No measurement is going to be perfect or work in all cases. Have to pick something that works reasonably well and then consider having a stronger advisory technique.
• Conclusion: go with proposed option 2, use n:1 as place holder. We may need something like: either meet the default minimum or provide a setting for the user to meet the default.

Begin discussion of Group B items

• 22(b) is the requirement for captions and audio descriptions (synchronized equivalents) for multimedia presentation. Agreed to let the Audio Video subcommittee handle this requirement as there is complete overlap with the provisions in that part of Section 508.

Summary of New Action Items

1. Shannon Rapuano to post informantion on the wiki on color inheritance in Windows, including the application workspace.
2. Sean Hayes to write a proposal for a default minimum contrast.
3. Gregg to do some research with the low vision community to see what they want with regard to color and contrast.

Attendees

1. Andi Snow-Weaver - IBM
2. Chuck Letourneau
3. Sean Hayes
4. Jim Allan, W3C-WAI
5. Bruce Bailey (Access Board)
6. Donald Evans (AOL LLC)
7. Andrew LaHart
8. Katie Haritos-Shea
9. Andrew Kirkpatrick (Adobe)
10. Andrew LaHart - IBM
11. Don (Phone not answering)
12. Mike Fratkin
13. Amy Chen (Oracle)
14. Jim Tobias
15. Ken Kipnes
16. Michele Budris (Sun Microsystems)
17. Terry Weaver (GSA)
18. Michael Cooper, W3C
19. Michael Burks ( Mike Burks)
20. Shannon Rapuano (IBM)
21. Kate Walser
22. Michael Cooper
23. Tom Brett - OPM
24. Jim Thatcher
25. Don Barrett
26. Dewi Gani (SAP)