W3C

Timed Text Working Group Teleconference

17 March 2022

Attendees

Present
Andreas, atsushi, Cyril, Gary, Nigel
Regrets
Pierre
Chair
Gary, Nigel
Scribe
nigel

Meeting minutes

This meeting

Atsushi: Can we cover the Charter and TPAC topics first?

Nigel: [iterates through meeting agenda]
… Any other business?

Rechartering

Atsushi: AC review for the Charter is open until next Wednesday.
… All the AC reps for today's attendees have responded.
… But some TTWG participants' AC reps have not yet responded, so I'm reminding them
… via the minutes.

Nigel: Noted, thank you.
… I think the situation re support and objections is the same as last week for objections (1),
… and more support.

Atsushi: Yes

Gary: How does the formal objection affect chartering process?

Atsushi: On the part we wrote about implementation requirements.
… There is one request to change for two independent implementations.

Gary: Can we proceed with that or do we need to resolve the objection before we can proceed?

Atsushi: We need to resolve the FO before we proceed. I believe we have no response from the AC rep though.

Nigel: That's correct, no response yet.
… I will send a reminder.
… It is not clear _how_ we will resolve the objection!

Gary: Yes, that's the difficult part. From a process point of view, it's easy!

TPAC

Atsushi: We really need to respond about the TPAC questions - on-site/off-site/hybrid.
… It's a reminder for Chairs to respond to the WBS.

Nigel: Almost everyone has not responded to the email question I sent out.

Gary: I'm probably not going to travel for it.

Nigel: OK I will extrapolate from me, Andreas and Gary and send a response, albeit an inaccurate one!
… I think that will have to do.
… What's the response date?

Gary: March 28th

Andreas: Pierre had some comments last time, which can be taken into account.

Nigel: I didn't know how to process his comments in terms of a survey response.

Gary: He said it was too soon to decide, which is why I gave my response.

Andreas: Yes, if I had to decide now I would say no.

Nigel: Nobody is being asked to decide now.

Cyril: In my case, I could travel. I went to a conference 2 weeks ago, it was good!
… It's a lot of ifs, but if there is an agenda, and nothing changes, I would be able to go.

Nigel: That's my position as well.
… OK we have a mix, which I can use. Thanks everyone!

Atsushi: Not for me but for the Chairs to decide if we need an offline venue and if so, how large.
… For me, I suppose it will be difficult to travel from Japan even in September.
… So for now I should say regrets for on-site, but I could join somehow remotely.

Nigel: OK, thank you.
… I think that's almost everybody.
… Gary, either of us can do this, do you have a preference?

Gary: I'm happy to take it on.

Nigel: Thank you!

IMSC HRM

Nigel: In Pierre's absence, quick update.
… We've merged most of the open pull requests.
… There's one more where Pierre and I have been going round the loop on introductory text.
… Please take a look at https://github.com/w3c/imsc-hrm/pull/43 otherwise
… I think we're nearly there so it may get merged very soon.
… There is one open HR issue which we tried to resolve, but was reopened.
… I think that's a misunderstanding and am hoping that the Privacy & Security reviewer who raised the issue
… will agree, after further thought.
… I think we should consider renaming the defined term "glyph" which doesn't carry it's usual meaning,
… in the HRM. I think this is a cause of technical misunderstandings that we can mitigate.
… Aside from all that, when we've merged all these PRs the plan is as discussed for me to send Wide Review comms.
… If anyone has any suggestions for alternative names for glyph, please let us know.

Gary: Should we also add a note that the font does not need to be loaded?

Nigel: Yes, I think PR #43 adds text that explicitly says that no external resources need to be loaded.

Gary: Perfect.

Nigel: Any more on IMSC HRM?

[nothing more]

DAPT REQs

Nigel: As promised Cyril and I have completed a first ED of the WG Note for the requirements for DAPT.

Draft ED Note for DAPT REQs

Nigel: I was wondering if we could and should adopt the same working mode as for IMSC-HRM where
… a PR merge to the default branch triggers publication on /TR

Cyril: Yes that'd be great

Gary: Ship it!

Nigel: Atsushi, can we do that?

Atsushi: I have not studied yet about publication rules for WG Notes so let me check the document about draft note.
… DNOE. I believe it is easier than pubishing FPWD but I'm not sure what we need.

Nigel: We can make a proposal and resolution.

Atsushi: I believe we do need that, but I need to check the Process document for what to do next.
… In any case I propose to ask for consensus here.

Nigel: Yes, let's do 2 proposals.

PROPOSAL: Publish the Draft Note of DAPT requirements on /TR as a WG Note

<atsushi> DNOTE / draft note

PROPOSAL: On merging pull requests to the main branch of the repo, trigger automatic publication of a WG Note as an update.

Nigel: Any questions or comments on those proposals?

Andreas: The first proposal is to publish the draft as a WG Note as it is now?

Nigel: Yes

Cyril: As an Editor's Draft?

Andreas: And the second one is for automatic republishing?
… I raised an issue about accessibility, which we should consider before publication.

Nigel: I didn't see that yet.

Andreas: The image should have an accessible equivalent for screen readers, and the table has some problems.

Cyril: The screen reader says the names of the layer and shape when you hover over.

Nigel: That doesn't sound good - it may need an aria label.

Cyril: I didn't realise it is clickable.

Nigel: Yes it takes you to the spec text about it.

Cyril: Oh wow. We should add a note about that.
… We should open issues about the Editor's Note so we can reference them. I can do that now?

Nigel: Yes please go ahead.

Cyril: We should address those but I don't see them as blockers to publication.

Nigel: Andreas, I don't know why the table isn't accessible, I just used standard Respec.
… If you can add more detail it would be helpful.

Andreas: Maybe you can try it and see if it says what you expect. I don't know if an "X" is meaningful.
… It would be good to fix that before publication.

Nigel: Okay, Andreas, you would like to see this fixed before publication.

Andreas: If we publish this and advertise it, I think it should be fixed before.

Nigel: I will amend the proposal

PROPOSAL: Publish the Draft Note of DAPT requirements on /TR as a WG Note after issue #4 has been resolved

Nigel: I think this amended proposal will not make any difference to timelines because our 2 week decision review policy
… should give enough time - oh actually, the pull request needs its own 2 weeks, so maybe that's not quite right.
… Anyway, I agree we should resolve that.

Atsushi: We may be able to do these in parallel.

Nigel: Yes, we should. I may be able to open a pull request for this tomorrow morning.

Atsushi: It's up to you.

Nigel: Okay, any more on the proposals?
… Any objections?

No objections

RESOLUTION: Publish the Draft Note of DAPT requirements on /TR as a WG Note after issue #4 has been resolved

RESOLUTION: On merging pull requests to the main branch of the repo, trigger automatic publication of a WG Note as an update.

Nigel: Thank you.
… Obviously please do raise issues as normal if you would like any changes to the document.
… Thank you Andreas for raising those issues.

Cyril: What does it mean for writing a specification against the requirements?
… Can we start working on an ED for a FPWD?

Nigel: Yes I don't see why not.
… We must also validate these requirements.
… Obviously any changes to the requirements might have impacts on the specification.

Cyril: I will start working on an Editor's draft, which we can finalise later.

Nigel: Great, thank you.
… I think I should write a Chair's blog post about the requirements document to try to get as much review input as possible.
… I've already shared it with some contacts, and would encourage everyone else to as well.

Behavior with controls, particularly non-native controls, overlap w3c/webvtt#503

Gary: I don't think we will completely cover this today but I think that's fine. It's a big topic.
… Background: the question arises from when there are captions at the bottom of the display area. What happens
… when the user interacts with the video player and the controls are shown.
… The controls can obscure the captions, which can be problematic from an accessibility standpoint,
… for those that depend on the captions.

github: https://github.com/w3c/webvtt/issues/503

Gary: WebVTT right now with native controls has a mechanism to say that the captions should rerender to account for the native
… control bar.
… But then how do you handle this with a non-native control bar?
… Also the behaviour potentially has bugs because it can cause cues to reorder,
… which could be confusing to the user.

Nigel: The bug part needs to be fixed, because displaying lines out of order can't be right.

Gary: I think it is to spec as written now.
… It's an issue if you have 2 cues, one for each line, instead of a 2 line cue.
… If only the second line gets obscured but the first can be positioned normally, then the second one gets moved and ends up above the first one.

Nigel: That's 2 cues rather than 1 cue with a line break in it?

Gary: it's 2 cues with each line in a separate cue rather than 1 cue with a break in it.

Andreas: I second that this is an important issue.
… I encountered it with subtitles for audio only, and in some browsers the control bar never disappears.
… Then the WebVTT cues can be permanently obscured by the control bar.
… I did not investigate if that is spec conformant.

Gary: With an audio element?

Andreas: With a video element pointing to audio content.

Gary: Interesting that the controls are always visible.

Andreas: The question on the solution part is if it is for the HTML spec or for the WebVTT spec?

Gary: I'd argue for both because there's the reordering behaviour and also can you represent non-native controls
… so that the captions don't overlap - that may be for the HTML spec.

Cyril: I don't know if this is true for all players, but some of the Netflix players reduce the size of the viewport when controls appear.

Gary: You shrink the text area?

Cyril: Yes, it temporarily squishes until the controls disappear.
… This makes the text move.

Nigel: Some BBC players do the same thing as what Cyril said, but...
… our newer UX design puts the controls in the vertical centre, so that doesn't work any more!
… Some time ago I suggested an API for saying where not to put captions.
… This is a real problem - it's not just controls, it can be other overlays too.

<atsushi> +1 on issue ;)

SUMMARY: Issue discussed and recognised, applies to all caption formats.

Meeting close

Nigel: Thanks everyone. Next time we meet the UTC time will be different, and the meeting will
… be at the usual local time for all regular participants except Atsushi, for whom it will be 1 hour earlier.

Atsushi: I heard that the US will not have DST from next year.

Gary: Yes the Senate passed it but it still has to go through the House and the President.

Nigel: OK, thank you. [adjourns meeting]

Summary of resolutions

  1. Publish the Draft Note of DAPT requirements on /TR as a WG Note after issue #4 has been resolved
  2. On merging pull requests to the main branch of the repo, trigger automatic publication of a WG Note as an update.
Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 185 (Thu Dec 2 18:51:55 2021 UTC).