W3C

– DRAFT –
Global-Inclusion - Internationalization Accessibility Community Group

15 01 2025

Attendees

Present
andy, Frankie, Jan, julierawe, kirkwood, Makoto
Regrets
-
Chair
Jan_McSorley
Scribe
Jan

Meeting minutes

The group started by doing introductions and welcoming a new member.

<andy> Jan gave quick intro to this group's background

Makoto's topic: WCAG 2.2 errata to address insufficient support for vertical writing and other typographic conventions of non-western languages.

Makoto: When WCAG 2.1, someone raised a question about vertical writing, but the text was not changed in WCAG 2.1. Then when WCAG 2.2 was about to become a recommendation, another concern was raised about vertical writing. There are recommendations in WCAG 2.2 that are not appropriate for vertical languages. We wanted to change normative text, but

it was blocked - it was my understanding that people from the European government wrote that section.

<andy> *Had already been approved by European governments, so no language changes could be made

Makoto: For vertical languages we need vertical margins. Makoto would like to pursue an errata to make sure that it's incorporated in the ISO standard that will incorporate WCAG 2.2.

<andy> Concern was raised with Japanese authorities by Makoto

Andy: In WCAG, how many references are there to left and right margins

Makoto: The minimal, a few paragraphs need to be changed, but if we want to be completely neutral about languages, then we probably need to change more.

Makoto: If we want to make sure that WCAG 2.2 is appropriate for all languages in the world, we might want to drop number of characters

Julie: Every week, AG meets for 2 hours and part of the time is spent on changes for 2.2.

Julie: were there issues put into Github?

Makoto: Yes, we opened issues, but they were closed.

Julie: I will look into this and maybe Makoto needs to file another issue. Julie recommends that we connect with a human and file a new issue.

Julie: WCAG 3 work - just at the beginning of drafting requirements for WCAG 3 - there are requirements being written over the next few months - one of them is about text appearance and another group about organization and structure and the other group is the plain language group where we've talked about implied meaning and will be doing other

topics.

Julie: There's an open survey that is open until January 21st, so it's a good time to join.

Makoto: I appreciate the invitation, on the other hand, I am a bit intimidated because it's not easy to simplify the needs of the Japanese language

Julie: I am intimidated by this work, but the more input we can get, the better it will be.

ACTION: item: Julie will send Makoto and Jan the name of the point person for making updates to WCAG 2.2

<julierawe> For W3C members, you can join the teams that are drafting WCAG 3 requirements. Here is background on the 8 teams that will finish initial drafts over the next 6 months:

<julierawe> Discover data-driven insights about learning differences and ADHD through research briefs, literature reviews, and user research studies conducted by the Understood team

<julierawe> Oops, wrong thing

<julierawe> Link to the AG description of the WCAG 3 teams: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1tYwmb-s8syk9JWAAsdlsCrPYfBwSy1-_BDZQDNowGjg/edit#slide=id.g322b8e79524_0_20

<julierawe> FYI, I am not sure if that slide can be viewed by anyone with the link or if you have to be a W3C member

<andy> I just opened it julierawe, thanks for sharing

<julierawe> And here is the survey to join one of the WCAG 3 teams—the survey closes at 23:59 Boston Time on Tuesday, January 21st: https://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/35422/Path_Participation_25/?

<julierawe> The survey is only open to W3C members

<julierawe> andy You can join later once you become an invited expert

Makoto: Do some people have issues with the number of characters per line?

Julie: People will have the ability to chime asynchronously into all of the changes that are happening - there are many challenges to getting everyone to the table.

<andy> Concerns expressed about issues having been closed without resolution

Review Existing COGA Personas (https://www.w3.org/TR/coga-usable/#persona) and discuss the following: (1) Are there improvements that can be made in terms of intersectionality?; (2) Are there suggestions for names of existing personas that would better reflect an international audience?

Andy: I added some notes and edited one persona in the Homework doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YL1eK0z5pQbUkmdvJWa0pTV4JhkkWZ4dqwT7yIh7CpY/edit?tab=t.0

<julierawe> Details for the new persona Len is drafting:

<julierawe> —Non-native speaker with limited language proficiency

<julierawe> —Mental health disorder

<julierawe> —Possibly a refugee with anxiety and/or post-traumatic stress disorder

Chiara: One thing to consider for the new persona - when you move to a new country, there can be an issue with depression and the language barrier can be a huge problem because you have an issue interacting with the locals.

Julie: We got feedback from someone that said that when you have a persona that has more than one big characteristic, it's hard to isolate on the needs. We can explore whether we should have anxiety, depression, or PTSD

Chiara: I think depression is a common thing when moving to a new country because they don't feel like they belong.

Frankie: I did a lot of volunteer life with refugee organizations and help them gain the digital literacy they needed to apply for jobs in the United States. The emotional changes people go through was significant. I wanted more mental health coverage in the personas - it feels like a huge gap to me.

Andy: I was also mentioning global inclusion and intersectionality on all of the personas we have. I am kind of against adding a separate persona and instead adding additional information to the existing personas: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YL1eK0z5pQbUkmdvJWa0pTV4JhkkWZ4dqwT7yIh7CpY/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.iwv30wqbni6

Andy: Should we avoid names with a religious roots?

Julie: That is a good flag, Andy - I know that Lisa is open to changing names, so maybe if we change the religious names to more global names.

Andy: We discussed being more gender inclusive - would it be a good idea to add pronouns to all of the personas?

Julie: Are you suggesting that right after a person's name, you put the pronouns right after their name?

Andy: If you put it in the header, it would be easier to find, but we can discuss where it goes, but in parenthesis so that it's clear.

Julie: If I remember correctly, one persona is they/them and there were some questions about whether that would translate culturally? The question came up about whether this would be understood by cultures where this is not yet the norm.

Andy: If we only shows pronouns for they/the and not all pronouns, then we are isolating people with they/them - by doing it for everyone, it's a consistent pattern and we're not making people stand out.

Julie: I believe we're going to try to add a photograph of the personas in the future, so there will be changes.

Summary of action items

  1. item: Julie will send Makoto and Jan the name of the point person for making updates to WCAG 2.2
Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 242 (Fri Dec 20 18:32:17 2024 UTC).

Diagnostics

No scribenick or scribe found. Guessed: Jan

Maybe present: Chiara, Julie

All speakers: Andy, Chiara, Frankie, Julie, Makoto

Active on IRC: andy, Frankie, Jan, julierawe, kirkwood, Makoto