Meeting minutes
xfq: Let's start the meeting.
… Today we have two guests, one is Murata Makoto from Japan
… He participated in various national and international standards organizations, including W3C
… Murata-san has been involved in accessibility, and hopes to explain what he is working on to the TF
… in particular ruby and vertical writing topics
… And the other guest is Roy Ran from the W3C Team.
… Roy is a Web Accessibility Specialist in the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
… he works for the W3C China host and works with several accessibility related groups
… he is responsible for the promotion, coordination, and harmonization of web accessibility standards in China
Specifications being prepared by the technical committee of the Japan DAISY Consortium
Makoto_Murata: I'm Makoto
… I've been involved in standardization since I was 26 years old, for 34 years now
… I was involved in the design of XML 1.0 as a WG participant
… I was involved in RELAX NG, OOXML, and EPUB
… I was the technical lead of @@
… after that I started to be interested in accessibility issues
… I started to be involved in EPUB 3
… I'm the chair of the technical committee of the Japan DAISY Consortium
… we're working on a set of specifications for Japanese EPUB publications
… some issues are relevant to Chinese as well
… that's why I'm here to present and explain these to you
… https://
… please open this link ^
… there are quite a few documents
… we have three sets of documents
… the first one is "Space as Word Dividers"
… just like Chinese text, Japanese text does not use space as word dividers
… but elementary school students, especially the first/second grade students sometimes need space
… some disabled people also have difficulty reading Japanese text without spaces
… so what should we do?
… we're preparing a type of document that can be rendered without space and can be rendered *with* space
… by enabling different style sheets
xfq: https://
Eric: this photo was taken by me ^
… it's Chinese textbook for foreigners
Makoto_Murata: do Chinese kids need such space?
Eric: no
… only required by foreigners
Makoto_Murata: how about people who have dyslexia?
… ~6% people in Japan struggle with reading Japanese text
… use of space as word dividers helps them a lot
… we're wondering if some Chinese have this problem
xfq: maybe Roy knows?
Roy: I did a research during graduate school
… I learned from the research that some Chinese people had cognitive disabilities and may need space as word dividers
… this may help some people who have cognitive disabilities
… but not very common as a general use case
Makoto_Murata: we feel guilty if we ignore 6% of Japanese people
… what we're trying to do is to embed wbr elements between words
… and enable different style sheets for people need space
… we can also rely on Morphological Analysis to insert wbr elements or U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE
… it's in css-text-4
… Thai people have similar requirements
… are you interested in using it for Chinese disabled people?
… @@ EPUB
… magnify the text for people with low vision
… @@ hide ruby
… possible by using computers
… https://
Eric: it's needed for teaching Chinese as a foreign language
[Murata-san explains the example in CSS]
Makoto_Murata: see the "Discovery of Space as Word Dividers" document
… it will introduce word-divider metadata to Schema.org and ONIX
… It should be possible to find EPUB publications that can be rendered with space as word dividers as explicitly specified by authors.
… It should be possible to find EPUB publications that can be rendered without space as word dividers.
… the next topic is about ruby
… to my suprise, some ruby is difficult to read for some people
… they think ruby is a part of the character
… they can't separate ruby and base character
… so some people would like to hide ruby
… others would like to use different colors for ruby
… and some people would like to widen the gap between ruby and base text
… there are different requirements
… I believe that CSS Ruby already provides properties for widening the gap between ruby and base text
… and changing the color of ruby is very easy
[Murata-san explains general-ruby and para-ruby]
Makoto_Murata: a single document, but rendered differently: without ruby, para-ruby style, and general-ruby style
… controlled by CSS
… switching style sheets is very useful
… the last problem is about the switching of horizontal and vertical writing modes
… https://
… some people have difficulty reading vertical text
… we would like to render the document differently for different people
… we would like to revive IDPF's Alternate Style Tags
… mentioned in section 4 ^
… we would also like to introduce a set of metadata for announcing horizontal/vertical writing mode
… vertical text is often seen in publications from Taiwan
… I can imagine similar problems for Taiwanese people
Bobby: in Taiwan, many novels are vertical in print
… but the eBook is horizontal, because many RS (such as Kindle) do not support vertical writing mode for TC
Makoto_Murata: Alternate Style Tags is just a convention for using the HTML link element
… @@ consider EPUB Multiple-Rendition
… need some experiments
… looking forward to your contributions and input!
xfq: questions?
Roy: this is Roy from W3C China
… in China there are some accessibility organizations trying to find standardization opportunities for EPUB accessibility
… I think your information is very useful for those organizations
… is it OK to share it with them?
Makoto_Murata: no problem, go ahead
Roy: thank you
Makoto_Murata: Japan is also working on JIS standard about EPUB Accessibility
… https://
… I am also the chair of the upcoming JIS committee for creating a JIS standard based on ISO/IEC EPUB Accessibility
Eric: Roy, do you know any expert in China working on Guobiao standards about this topic?
Roy: not now, but I can reach out
… another comment
… I work for the Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working Group
… and the Personalization Accessibility Task Force
… and the Coga Task Force
… the two TFs have relevant work for you
… https://
… ^ semantics like metadata, to help user to choose which kind of website they want to use
… https://
… ^ this document lists requirements for people with cognitive and learning disabilities
… I think the publishing industry may have a lot of cognitive-related accessibility issues
… it would be useful if you can look into these two documents and give some feedback
huijing: when you mentioned experiments, what kind of experiments are you looking for?
… implementation?
Makoto_Murata: everything
… implementation, creation of documents, experiments for kids using eye tracking etc.
[Discuss デジタル庁 and accessibility]
[Discuss accessibility in Taiwan]
xfq: Thank you for coming! Let's move on to the next agenda item.
[Makoto leaves]
[Roy leaves]
Handling apostrophes in pinyin
https://
Eric: I took a closer look, this may be a problem.
xfq: Do we need to write requirements?
Eric: probably yes.
… also the line breaking / hyphenation of pinyin
huijing: there is no direct relationship between requirements and whether they can be implementated
… we should first understand what we want and write down the requirements clearly
… https://
Bobby: maybe a dictionary or machine learning is needed to implement this?
xfq: maybe not?
… see the example in https://
Eric: There are rules for inject these apostrophes
xfq: basically switching between mono-ruby and group-ruby
Bobby: Florian and fantasai are finishing css-ruby-1
[Discuss a few Bopomofo-related CSS, OpenType, and Unicode issues]
xfq: I'll file an issue
Eric: I will write the requirements
Go through the pull request list
https://
https://github.com/w3c/clreq/pull/347
xfq: https://
[Discuss the text]
en: A method of aligning both edges of all lines (except the last line) in paragraph to be the same given length by removing or adding pre-defined adjustable spacing.
zh: 通过挤压或拉伸预先定义的可调整空间，将段落中每行（最後一行除外）首尾对齐的方法。
^ Final version after discussions
xfq: I'll update the PR
https://github.com/w3c/clreq/pull/344
xfq: I updated the PR after the last meeting
… OK to merge?
All: looks good
Next teleconference time
March 24 (Wednesday), 19:00-20:00 (UTC+8)
AOB
Bobby: Happy Chinese New Year!