W3C

– DRAFT –
FXL Accessibility Task Force

23 October 2023

Attendees

Present
CharlesL, gautier, gpellegrino, Hadrien, jgriggs, SimonPRH, sue_neu, wendyreid
Regrets
-
Chair
wendyreid
Scribe
sue_neu, Wendy I was able to go through all the comments on the document, I included the techniques so we didn't lose the information...

Meeting minutes

<wendyreid> date: 2023-10-23

I'm going through old emails trying to find the meeting passcode can someone post it or email it?

w3c/epub-specs#2587

wendy there is a techniques document, mostly cut and paste for now

I went throught the requests, I'd like to talk about pagelist

I want to keep page lists in, we need to remind publishers why they are important. How can we make that a bit cleaner

[Hadrien] What you can do with pagelist is different than with page breaks..

that said you shouldn't take for granted the abilitiy to include a print equivalent

Wendy: yes, agreed. If I were building a fxl I would remove all the blank pages first since the don't make sense in an ebook

Hadrien: you don't need blank pages even to preserve spreads, you can make single pages centered display

Hadrien: best practice is to avoid blank pages

Gregorio: It was a previous requirement for FXL to have a pagelist. It used to cause an issue in ACE, when there was no pagelist, but it doesn't any more. We should remove the editor's note

Wendy: Let's talk about legibility, all of the comments were warranted...

I'm happy to go through that again and refine it to what is required in WCAG re text structuring...

I do want to keep some of it in, I will reference readablitiy science...

I want to add more stuff that references internationalization and readibility

Does anyone want to do more research on readability/internationalization

Gregorio: I think we need scientific reference, or remove this section only.

Wendy: I will make clear what is WCAG and what is beyond WCAG

Wendy: Has anyone done research on legibility in different scripts from the western alphabet?

Gautier: I might be able to find a resource

<gautier> EDRLab works on EPUB and Dyslexia: https://www.edrlab.org/accessibility/epub-and-dyslexia/

Wendy: sometimes publishers say "we have included the dislexia font" but we need to make it clear to publishers that this isn't a total solution

<wendyreid> Another reference I like: https://medium.com/the-readability-group

Charles: People have to be able to change the font even if the dyslexia font is available..

publishers should know

Hadrien: basically we are describing a reflowable epub. Technically it is possible to extract the content and build a relowable on the fly..

we may always come back to "how can we create a reflowable experience within an fxl

Wendy: The best we can do withing the confines of the current document is important to use standard fonts...

None of this is hard requirements but worth considering

Gautier: should we mention the limits on access from special devices? ...

alot of devices don't access fxl...

like some eink devices daisy players and braille systems...

maybe we should mention that an fxl limits the devices that can read your book

Hadrien: there are many fxl files design with specific fonts in mind expecting them to be avaiable...

this results in people cannot read these books at all if the font isn't available...

I have seen this extensively. Some reading systems embed ios fonts to solve this...

I think one of our test files is has rendering issues on android because of this problem...

Wendy: I've seen this happen when we don't have a font, or a reading system doesn't have a font, that supports languages with extended charactors...

sometimes this results in "tofu" boxes in the text...

publishers should include universal fonts or include fonts with all need charactors...

Wendy: I need to go to another meeting, if anyone has resouce this would be helpful

Hadrien: I am sharing an example of the font issue I mentioned...

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 221 (Fri Jul 21 14:01:30 2023 UTC).

Diagnostics

Maybe present: Charles, Gregorio, Wendy

All speakers: Charles, Gautier, Gregorio, Hadrien, Wendy

Active on IRC: CharlesL, gautier, gpellegrino, Hadrien, jgriggs, SimonPRH, sue_neu, wendyreid