Meeting minutes
Avneesh Singh: Background FixedLayout milestone. How to bridge both TF's this Document for challenges and solutions is ready.
… merge the TFs so we can work on these issues together.
What are short term goals for FXL accessibility which can have high impact?
[Introductions]
Avneesh Singh: short-term what is highest impact activity to improve lives with disabilities with Fixed layouts
Wendy Reid: 2 docs, "Recommendations" and the other is a Techniques which is incomplete. question: how do we do this...
… can be easy but others very difficult. Complex fixed layout, types of fixed layout content, some is relatively simple and can be made accessible, but the more complex it is the harder to make accessible.
… Like Manga, Comics, really illustrated text books what does a11y mean?
… we don't know, speech bubble detection, etc. Content that transforms reflow/fixed systems that can do this for you potentially.
… parralization of content, different languages, navigation etc.
… we are on the bleeding edge is some cases.
Avneesh Singh: Some things are promising but others require incubation. some can be handled in short term. impact on end users. divide 2 buckets. low hanging fruits in 1-2 years and other >2 years provide more better solutions.
… what are our ideas for short term?
George Kerscher: 2 documents one that finished is a WG Note. Is that APA had comments / questions on?
Wendy Reid: Yes and we addressed those. and APA has signed off on.
<Wendy Reid> https://
George Kerscher: techniques is still in draft....ok
<Wendy Reid> https://
Ken Jones: short term: 2 top, image description, for larger images describe parts, regions etc. is possible.
… reading order is harder, but necessary to understand the content. different tools to apply reading order but without text in correct order is as important as the text from image descriptions.
Avneesh Singh: reading order text on screen and there are workarounds and there is text behind the scene that is in the order but maybe not match exactly in the visible text. do we need to worry about the wcag issue where these should match?
Ken Jones: for fixed layout you can have 50 items on one spread and its that order which might be scatterd around the page. that is the challenge.
Wendy Reid: Visual vs. logical reading order
… in note we say to follow the WCAG definition.
Laura Ciporen: flow chart or you are able to describe parts of a complex image, it may go in a order but not be visually in the same order, so how to indicate paths of reading order that is something that is very important.
… visually you can choose which way to go.
Ken Jones: its a design and editorial decision. some publishers do this on purpose and then someone needs to decide.
Avneesh Singh: serial reading order may be different than visual perception.
Dale Rogers: author I can choose which order to read, but the audience might not interpret the page in the same way. Equity vs. Equality.
… different media, printed page, animation, then audio file, / ALS, to make content more accessible.
… publisher point of view, they are not sure if you can put all of that into an inexpensive EPUB. I would like to hear what is accessible and what legal requirements do we need to have EU / Title II requirements what are the must haves.
Charles LaPierre: For image descriptions, we may need to define what is the text on the screen vs what is a description of the interactions, the background, what is happening
… for SR users vs someone using TTS when sighted, they have different needs
… may want descriptions being spoken, may not
… personalization
… if the text is not live, part of the image, how do you differentiate them
<Gregorio Pellegrino> https://
Gregorio Pellegrino: having an accessible fixed layout we have epub 1.1 and WCAG 2.2 and the mapping and the EU requirements
we have ARIA and EPUB 3.3, maybe what is missing is to have best practice on how to comply with specific WCAG requirements from a fixed layout point of view.
… we don't have to define new things for low hanging fruit just how to use these technologies.
<Laura Ciporen> I have to drop for another meeting. Thank you all. Meet you again next time! But just in response to the comment about the philosophical question of what is accessible: letting people navigate in multiple ways through a layout that is non-linear feels very important. And I also like Charles’s point about differentiating between what is text that
<Laura Ciporen> is on the screen vs. what is an explanation of what is on the screen; which not only applies to images but also to video and complex interactives and even just the layout of a fixed layout bit of content.
Wendy Reid: next thing to do to have most impact is to finish the Techniques, but we were going very broad. Here are some essential fixed layout practices, putting alt text, context order is clear.
Reading order of the pages do not have content across spreads, if you have a 2 page spread where you must bounce between both pages so notes to say "don't do this".
… here is the basics and in the background we can work on the more complex images, sound effects vs real text in comics for example.
… some of these may not even exist in WCAG.
Avneesh Singh: question what are the main topics we should handle first, logical reading order, alt text, etc.
Simon Mellins: legislation does not give technical requirements. this is slightly difficult to achieve.
Avneesh Singh: make it clear when writing the best practices that this is not guaranty compliance with EAA for example.
Ken Jones: semantic tags for headings, lists etc. they are useful/supported fundamental to put structure, page lists and landmarks.
… publishers using leading software can't do it currently and a lot of manual effort is still needed.
Avneesh Singh: best practices is the way to do this as its not a recommendation / standards. tools may not follow now but in 2-3 years they will start.
… market forces does work. slowly these will come.
George Kerscher: when we have Best practices / techniques then we can look at authoring tools and provide a path for those tools to use the techniques to comply.
… I am interested in Reading order with Screen Reader or Read Aloud. We can't get the screen reader to make it accessible but Read Aloud will present it in the correct reading Order. I would accept that. But what about low-vision. the Req. in WCAG is that you dont pan from left/right in order to read the content and why reflow is so good. But is the giant barrier for LV folks?
… lots now use 3X reading glasses. is that idea of panning an accessible workaround.
Avneesh Singh: that is a AA req.
Gregorio Pellegrino: about authoring tools, w3c we don't mention authoring tools and all these best practices etc. don't mention these tools. techniques we tell how to make it by code and the community knew it wasn't possible with certain tools and they eventually will fix these issues.
Charles LaPierre: For the LV piece George mentioned, there are exceptions right now like complex tables that require vertical and horizontal scrolling, because it's not possible to reflow without breaking
Dale Rogers: we always req. high contrast so anyone looking at our work could see the differences but dep. on the art work you may not want high contrast because thats part of the story.
… there is a technical thing and a story telling which can be in conflict.
https://
Wendy Reid: I would encourage everyone to review this tech. document.
… content a11y programmatic techniques (RO, images, Navigation, tables, interactivity) and Content Accessibility Visual: Color contrast, textual hierarchy font selection etc. and a section on A11y Metadata. Please read and flag issues using Github issues. and flag anything too complex to include in a basic best practices doc.
Avneesh Singh: thats everyone's homework. Anyone want to take on a specific section?
Ken Jones: when Gorge mentioned Read Aloud / Screen readers and perhaps Media overlays would have a different order?
George Kerscher: PAAG call and Affinity was using Read Aloud reading a comic which was great. If I could get that same results with my Screen Reader, but what I got was pretty good but if Read Aloud and is following the same path as a Screen Reader that is fine.
Avneesh Singh: Screen Reader used with folks with visual disability, and Read Aloud used by a different user group, dyslexic user may not want to hear the image descriptions.
George Kerscher: should be an option to turn on/off the alt text.
Ken Jones: order of text? same?
Wendy Reid: a screen reader and TTS tools should parse the text the same but with a Screen reader has a lot more control, navigation tools etc. but most TTS don't give you any control just block level, no idea its a heading etc.
Ken Jones: it is possible to not follow the DOM order depending on how the SMIL files are sequence.
Simon Mellins: TTS in a reading system (RS) or MO are not specifically disability features. you might not be able to switch on the voices inbuilt audio voices for example.
Longer term plan for improving FXL accessibility.
Avneesh Singh: dream for the A11y of Fixed Layout what are the most promising with recent discussions?
Gregorio Pellegrino: sync reflowable / FL some publishers in Europe are starting to do this. user can see side by side.
… without any standardization so each publisher does it differently.
… RS looking at a FL and turn it into a Reflowable document if its structured very well.
… it should be relatively easy to do this. a lot of RS can't do this because how they do FXL completely separate than Reflow. We need to define the expectations.
<Ken Jones> George the read aloud story extract (Harry Potter) you heard was Azure TTS in Colibrio Reader from an InDesign with region descriptions and reading order added and exported to FXL EPUB with CircularFLO
Gregorio Pellegrino: most promising parallelized content. If we can combine it and navigate through it would be huge.
Dale Rogers: I have the first chapter the comic, the next poem is in Reflow. its a reinterpretation of the content. I am experimenting with AI. if it could take and EPUB and could do that interpretation for us.
… wondering if the future might be AI to help us here.
Avneesh Singh: You can do this to some degree with giving Gemini or chatGPT the EPUB then ask questions. But, EPUB is a business format, and market forces will decide its future.
Explainer document for establishing the need for semantics for extended descriptions
Avneesh Singh: we have this explainer we are working on.
<Avneesh Singh> w3c/
Avneesh Singh: once this gets to first working draft we will ask for feedback