Meeting minutes
Agenda Review & Announcements
*introductions*
janina: Welcome everyone
Janina: We're joined by accessibility colleagues from Epub to better understand their concerns with Fixed Layout: https://
janina: We also want to propose a technical approach for epub that we believe could fully support a11y but also fixed layout which is often important to epub business cases
Janina: Please note we expect to expand our conversation to the team that prepared fixed layout if we reach conclusions about our recommendations
Gottfried: are we going to touch on the relation to WCAG 2.0 today?
<Gottfried> Manifest on convergence of e-book accessibility standards: https://
janina: We're looking at actions we could do in the short term and medium term.
AvneeshSingh: Cristina is on the call for this point.
<Zakim> Gottfried, you wanted to ask about EPUB accessibility guidelines and relation to WCAG 2.0
TPAC 2024
<Gottfried> ack
<Roy> TPAC homepage
Epub Accessibility Issues and Opportunities
Relationship of EPUB accessibility and WCAG Level A
Cristina: We thought we'd provide an overview first, then technical details.
… There's an EU accessibility act that is wide legislation that requires a lot of services and products to be accessible by June 2025. This includes ebooks.
… The commission was asking which standards are used in the publishing industry. The more widely used standard is EPUB. We tried to work on the EPUB standard in W3C. This was previously being managed within IDPF, but was merged info W3C.
… We wanted to be sure there was complete alignment as to what is required by the law and what is available in the standard.
… There are some aspects of publications that are not supported by WCAG; the commission therefore didn't include ebooks in that mandate.
Gottfried: Why did you point to WCAG 2.0 Level A as the mandatory standard to fulfil as EPBU3? Why not WCAG 2.1 Level AA, or WCAG 2.2 Level AA - for example: contrast is not included in WCAG 2.0 Level A.
AvneeshSingh: EPUB accessibility was originally created in 2016 in IDPF. There were a lot of complexities during the merger. In 2019/2020 we got an opportunity to work on the next revision inside W3C. The IDPF version was out of date.
… We want organizations to follow the newer W3C standards.
AvneeshSingh: We wanted to align to the latest version of WCAG. But the publishing industry moves very slowly. For EPUB accessibility 1.1 (decided in 2020) includes WCAG 2.1, people will struggle to move, and will thus not move to the newer W3C-maintained versions of the standards.
… So we allowed them to use WCAG 2.0, but strongly recommended supporting later versions. It was a hard decision to make, but we didn't want to leave the industry behind on older versions of the standard.
AvneeshSingh: There's a difference between standards and legal mandates. Standards are created from a global point of view. Mandates are geographically local. The EU could choose to mandate a specific version of WCAG.
Gottfried: We have a circular relationship now. EU commission says look at the standard; the standard says look at the legislation. The industry will thus pick the lowest burden (WCAG 2.0 Level A) for EPUB 3 publications.
<AvneeshSingh> conformance section of EPUB Accessibility 1.1 https://
Gottfried: I would say that EPUB is better for accessibility than PDF - but publishing in PDF has a higher bar (WCAG 2.1 Level AA, as mandated by EN directive)
… That's why I would urge you to move to requiring WCAG 2.2 Level AA ASAP.
<shawn> EPUB Accessibility - EU Accessibility Act Mapping https://
Cristina: We are working on this area in relation to future updates of the act.
gpellegrino: There is a missing link which is relating to the accessibility mapping (a W3C Note that we just updated). Within the Note, we took each of the requirements from the law, and mapped them to EPUB accessibility and legal requirements.
… Level A is not enough for some aspects of the law. For some legal requirements (e.g. contrast), Level AA is required.
… Other requirements exist for areas outside of accessibility, e.g. DRM. Also there is accessibility metadata which is a separate spec. Conclusion is that WCAG 2.0 Level A is not enough to meet the legal accessibility requirements.
AvneeshSingh: And you've pointed the EU to this document?
gpellegrino: Yes, this explains the minimum levels required.
<gpellegrino> Here you have the mapping: https://
Cristina: the document is publicly available
Gottfried: I'm aware of it, but I'm afraid publishers won't be aware of the implications of the mapping.
gautierchomel: We observe in France and Italy that the industry is not taking the lower denominator - we're seeing a lot of goodwill and work being done.
Fixed Layout
https://
janina: What are the concerns? We have some longer-term suggestions at least - maybe there are short term ones too.
janina: We do not have everyone involved in this work in this conversation - the goal here is to understand the challenges, and involve everyone as soon as we can.
shawn: I have been doing some reading to aim to understand this area more. Let me pose a question to check my understanding... With EPUB 3, the addition of fixed layout does not enable text adaptability. So the note seems to be explaining more about limitations like that, as well as some things that can be supported for accessibility. Is that an
accurate understanding of the situation?
AvneeshSingh: You're right that this document is more about finding recommendations/ways to make fixed layout accessible. Several of us in the Publishing group provided feedback. The initial content is giving the impression that it's a guideline document, rather than best practice. We have suggested changing the title to reflect that.
gpellegrino: I took part in some of the discussion on this document. The aim from my point of view was to suggest guidelines to do the best the publisher can to produce pixel layout publications when they're the preferred format (like comic books, or cook books) whilst also trying to make that output as accessible as can be.
<Zakim> shawn, you wanted to comment on "making fixed layout accessible" and to say 1. clear communication of reality, 2. possibilitties, 3. future
gpellegrino: The state of the art involved a lot of spaghetti code; low semantics. The aim at the beginning was to try to improve that.
shawn: It's important to have clear communication. A lot of people, e.g., are not aware that PDF is not accessible for people who need text adaptation. I'd like to make sure that we don't make the same mistake with EPUB - that we're clear up-front about what Fixed Layout can and can't do. I appreciate that a lot of what this document does is to
convey that.
shawn: Once we're clear on that, we can do more to suggest medium-term fixes to address it - e.g. if we have semantically good text content and can encourage reading systems to access the plain text, then there's a way to 'have our cake and eat it too' (riffing off cook books being an example). And there may be bigger picture ways to improve the
technology.
gautierchomel: Regarding alternative rendering method, from a reading system development point of view: we're already doing extraction from Fixed Layout to push it to TTS. This is partly because of the state-of-the-art of production tools - as gpellegrino highlighted the spaghetti code produced by those tools. We want to be able to say 'this is the
start/end of a quote' etc.
gautierchomel: Because we're providing a stream to TTS, that means we could provide a reflowable view of the Fixed Layout content. There is still a lot of road for us to cover; the journey is wrong.
janina: Stressing the importance of clear communication - how we characterize a publication. Noting that this is a Note; it seems to read more like a spec. There are expectations that when a W3C doc has 'accessibility' in its name, that all of the use cases that need to be addressed are going to be directly addressed. This document says some things
that can be done, and some that can't.
janina: I'm concerned about calling this 'accessibility' - I'd be more comfortable with 'challenges around accessibility' or 'accessibility that we can and can't achieve today with fixed layout'. I understand there are business cases for fixed layout. But calling this only 'accessibility' I feel dilutes the W3C brand.
<Zakim> shawn, you wanted to ask about title considerations?
shawn: Does anyone want to share alternative title considerations/recommendations?
AvneeshSingh: Some of us felt that the title was a bit more like a spec - some direction from APA may be of help.
Possible future directions
<PaulG> https://
janina: APA believes that we can manage Fixed Layout and also do some of the reflow. We can't do this overnight. Think of this as a preliminary conversation on EPUB next
PaulG: The work linked above has been exceptional in data visualization on the web; this is no exception. The tl;dr is that the visual nodes and the programmatic linking of those nodes is expressed in a JavaScript notation. That could be changed to RDF, it could be embedded HTML; that's not important though.
PaulG: The point is that we have a programmatic relationship between the data points and the rendered visuals.
PaulG: In the case of the Data Navigator: that's a fixed set of code that interprets that graph structure, and on top of the UI provides keyboard accessibility, and hints for AT.
PaulG: This is a great example of what we can do if we follow that pattern of providing programmatic structural/semantic information in the content.
PaulG: The current Fixed Layout document only talks about semantics such as headings - not semantics that would cover the flow between separately laid-out sections, for example.
PaulG: This gives us some great ideas for future best practices, and gives us some ideas to prototype against. They have great examples too.
janina: This sounds like tantalizing ideas for future directions - I leave it to the EPUB people. We could discuss at TPAC?
NehaJ: One of the examples uses PNG; SVG would allow us to add more accessibility.
<AvneeshSingh> +1 png is good example of challenge
PaulG: The PNG is the 'hard' use case - they were using this to document that point. With SVG they look at how it could be easier to inject the programmatic info.
PaulG: The user agent or parts thereof could be activated when needed by the user to improve the rendering - this could drive business for people who've struggled with fixed layout before.
gautierchomel: We have quite complex EPUBs including examples from Highcharts for example - works quite well in current reader. The problem with Fixed Layout is not so much whether we can solve the problems, but that the tools that produce the Fixed Layout files don't produce good semantic output.
<shawn> [ fyi, I had a nice chat with Wendy Reid (listed Editor of the fixed layout accessibility note) after another meeting yesterday ]
Urgent Spec Reviews
Pointer Events Level 3
<Fredrik> w3c/
https://
matatk: We have asked for review of these changes. So do we need to change before we move to next level?
matatk: Dr. Keith thank you for the detailed review!
matatk: Thoughts on this Dr. Keith?
Dr_Keith: no pressing issue
matatk: we can let this go, but we can work on accessibility consultancy work
matatk: Dr_Keith work will be base for next work assignments