Meeting minutes
<George Kerscher> present
Name of the epub-a11y explainer document
<Wendy Reid Reid> w3c/
Wendy Reid: We bikeshedded a bit on the explainer document for accessibility
… we have landed on a proposed name
<Wendy Reid Reid> https://
<Wendy Reid Reid> new shortname: epub-a11y-explain-12
Brady Duga: will we be able to change this later?
Wendy Reid: it will change the shortname slightly
… is there any opposition to this title suggestion?
Wendy Reid Reid: I don't hear any opposition, so we will go with the proposed title
Organizing A11y Documents
<Wendy Reid Reid> https://
Wendy Reid Reid: we wanted to talk about organizing the many documents about a11y that live in different repositories. In various states of publishing. Alot of them are quite important and are often referenced
… it might be worth moving these to the working group and publishing them more formally
… also having them in one place makes establishing the relationships between them clearer. And we should make a link tree to make these easier to navigate and understand the relationship among the documents. We wanted to get other people's feedback as well
George Kerscher: I am doing a presentation on Friday for people getting into digital publishing. I pulled together all the links of resources that I'm presenting. It took me quite a while to get all the ones I wanted. It would be a lot easier if these are collected in an easy to find place. Some are cg, some are working group. I'm wondering if a link in
… our community group folder to a summary of the documents would make it easy so we can reference and maintain just one file
Wendy Reid Reid: this came up last week, one of the things WCAG has that is powerful is a way? website. We may not need to go that far, but it is convenient to have everything in one place. You have to dig to find information on our documents. There are a lot of links to superceeded documents
… if someone is working at a publisher and they want to make accessible documents there is not guide to our documents. Or status tracker for the state of our documents
Gautier Chomel: I was searching open issues, mostly about policies related to accessibility and there is the same issue. We should reactivate what was on the documentation task force, and the education literacy group working on documentation. We may want to discuss if this list should be a web page or something else. Do we want this to be part of
… wider documentation? We should have a small group working on documentation. This is not exclusive to the accessiblilty work.
Wendy Reid Reid: it is definitely not just the a11y documents. We had someone ping us recently about satellite specifications. We moved them specifically years ago, and someone called us out about whether a satellite specification was still being worked on, and it was not.
… we don't have good guidance for when people stumble across these
Dale Rogers: should we specify who these documents are intended for? Some of our documents are intended for very technical people and they are not helpful for people just making a book. I like the idea of an explainer or primer or 101 as a place to start
Gautier Chomel: we have documentation about a11y that is maintained by Matt at Daisy. It is useful, and a good entry point and lists everything you need. I don't know about a knowledge base about all of epub.
wendreid: the original documentation task force, we got an offer from MOZILLA MDN to publish it. It didn't work out, because this is a lot of work. If you know MDM it starts at a high level and then drills down. Each EPUB type value might have its own page for instance. So the work never materialized
Wendy Reid Reid: in the end we would have had to most of the writing, they would have helped us with the formatting
Gautier Chomel: I'm not so worried about writing but more about maintaining
Laurent Le Meur: We have too many entry points. When you search on the web you end up with 2 and 3 pages for the wg and the cg. Entry pages for each group. A new comer cannot find anything. First we should clean up the entry pages.
… and direct people to something interesting, like a primary page, then we can put the primary documents into it.
Avneesh Singh: the DAISY knowledge base provdes structured guidance in a very specific way, coupled with tools DAISY created. There is a link form any errors to the knowledge base which has links to other documents. This is used by many people in the publishing industry, and we are happy to maintain it
… there is already a structure to collect the number of documents that a CG has created. If there is already a page where all the documents are already listed, would it duplicate work to make another document with such a listing?
<Laurent Le Meur> seems to be the page https://
<Laurent Le Meur> but there is also https://
Avneesh Singh: the community group documents are already getting restructured. Having an entry point withing the W3C is better than having a document within the repository
<Hadrien Gardeur> I agree with Laurent that CGs are even more confusing than WGs (which are already confusing on their own)
<Hadrien Gardeur> with Task Forces there's also another potentiel level of confusion
Gautier Chomel: we have a problem with different entry points and not leveraging the W3C process. I guess there is a way to update some of those pages, but we are quite restricted, it is an adventure to find out how to do this. That's why we end up with the github pages. We need to speak to Ivan and the W3C to understand the process
<Laurent Le Meur> CSS Maybe this ?
Wendy Reid Reid: a lot of groups withing W3C that publish their own home pages, like CSS has its own website on the W3C domain.
<Wendy Reid Reid> w3c/
Wendy Reid Reid: what Laurent Le Meur raised is interesting. We have talked about our SEO. The first result is a repository that we do not touch. Last updated in 2023. One problem is since the W3C redesign we can no longer easily update our own home pages
<Gautier Chomel> https://
Wendy Reid Reid: this used to be our home page, but the URL on W3C is now different. Hilariously the github version is the first to come up in search
… it would be interesting to research our own SEO and where our documentation is appearing. Are those the best places for people to land?
Susan Neuhaus: I have two jobs, one of them is SEO, unless you're searching in incognito so that might be why GH is coming up first
… tools that take the personal out
… would be happy to help try those out
… when I try, I get the IDPF documents
Avneesh Singh: This is something to raise with the W3C communications team. We should approach them with 1 or 2 proposals.
Wendy Reid Reid: …the page could use a refresh, and a more up to date presentation
Avneesh Singh: there are many other voices raising this concern also
Dale Rogers: when I search I find nothing from the WG at all. We can build it, but will they find us? Is there anyway we can train the algorithm to find us in this kind of searches?
George Kerscher: I heard that there is going to be more restrictions to W3C pages, specs will stay free and visible?
Wendy Reid Reid: the restrictions don't let you freely maintain your own page on the website
George Kerscher: I support what Avneesh Singh said about the communications group. A newcomer to this really needs their hands held. Some of the information out there talking about a11y can be really horrible.
Wendy Reid Reid: we've had discussions about making W3c more newcomer friendly. I think we can do more in our own space?
… there is agreement about needing a better entry point, we should do some research and identify the common entry points and make them as informative as possible. We can change things like our repo pages and landing pages
Avneesh Singh: If the communication team agrees the /publishing page should have more eplainers and links. That should be come the primary entry for all publishing enquiries
Gautier Chomel: Looking at the publishing web page, we have active groups and social web. I don't know how we modify this. We should first ask if we can use this page as a subgroup.
Wendy Reid Reid: If we go to comms with a proposal and the written copy I think they would be open to changing. I am too suprised to see social web listed on the publishing page. I like the idea of a subgroup to work on this. I know lots of people are on vacation and we are in CR so things are relatively quiet.
<Shinya Takami> +1 for contact to RS
Wendy Reid Reid: we will be sending out information for testing. If you know reading system people who might be good for testing please pass on their contact information
Wendy Reid Reid: but this might be a good side project for the summer
<Susan Neuhaus> +1 to working on SEO research over the summer
<Charles LaPierre> +1
AOB?
Wendy Reid Reid: if people have ideas about what should be on our home page, let me know. Are there any other topics to raise?
<Gautier Chomel> +1 to discuss process for updating the pages and housekeeping
George Kerscher: for future meetings, the issue of CG incubation and hand off is a good thing to understand, including Github issues
Brady Duga: do we have any control over this? Should we get someone from W3C to talk to us about how this is supposed to work
Brady Duga: it seems W3c should have a process for moving Github documents
Gautier Chomel: there is no process in place, we are discussing it. It is not easy to understand this process. We should keep in mind how we want to work and see how it all works together. There is a github restriction to separate out the publishing groups. This is a steering committee issue
Wendy Reid Reid: who are you talking to about this?
Avneesh Singh: they are open to discussion, but github isn't owned by the W#C. Maybe we can have an intermediary repositiory or another workaround.
https://
Wendy Reid Reid: TPAC registration is open, please register to be in person or remote, it helps us to know how many people will be there. It is 10/26 in Dublin. We are scheduled for the first 2 days of the week. I just got my airplane tickets. Maybe now is a good time to book.
… if you are an invited expert there is a fund to get support, I recommend applying for funds to help. The can help with travel expenses. For an invited expert, registration fees are waived. Don't let registration costs scare you.
Brady Duga: get your rooms now even if you are not sure because they might run out.
wendreid: eligibility is for invited experts, more than 6 months, have role of chair, follow code of conduct
Brady Duga: Thursday is the APA meeting? are doing this virtually?
Wendy Reid Reid: we are working out a virtual meeting in late August and September so we will cancel the f2f at TPAC
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