2006-124 Meeting Minutes
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PDF-UA 2006-124
August 8, 2006
PDF/UA Working Group DRAFT Meeting Minutes
Teleconference
PDF/UA (Universal Accessibility) Working Group Draft Meeting Agenda
Tuesday, August 8, 2006, 3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M. EST
Conference Call Information
International Dial-in: +1-303-928-2600
U.S. Dial-in: 1-888-742-8686
Conference ID: 7083945
NOTE: The meeting will be conducted "live" on the Wiki.
Roll Call
Duff Johnson, DJ, Chair - Document Solutions
Angy Brooks, AB, Technical Editor - Independent Accessibility Consultant
Joe Clark, JC - Independent Accessibility Consultant
Ferass El Rayes, FER - Netcentric Technologies
Betsy Fanning, BF - AIIM
Loretta Guarino-Reid, LGR - Adobe Systems
Richard Herring, RH - Independent Accessibility Consultant
Greg Pisocky, GP - Adobe Systems
Neil Soiffer, NS - Design Science
Duff Johnson called the meeting to order at 3:06 pm EST
Approval of PDF/UA 2006-123 Agenda DRAFT
Brooks / Soiffer
Approval of 2006-122 DRAFT Minutes
Soiffer / Guarino-Reid
Report on / update and discuss PDF/UA - Action Items
Duff Johnson, chair commended the members for the increased traffic on the Wiki.
Chair proceeded to the status of open action items. Angy Brooks updated the list accordingly and posted the revised list to the Wiki.
Select and review a specific "leaf" (the Chair suggests: Natural Language Specification
True "Meat of the Matter" and increasingly will have to be addressed outside of meeting conference calls. Once again, the Chair commended the group for taking this to heart since the last meeting.
Ferass El Rayes took the group through the process he underwent in developing the Natural Language Specification leaf. One addition he recommends adding to the commentary is a "Rationale" which illustrates the importance of the item to achieving accessibility in a PDF file. Natural language relationships are heirarchical in nature. At the top level the document has a language identifier which applies to all subsequent children unless it is specified differently at a lower level of the heirarchy. With Unicode text, the language is defined using an escape character sequence. Ferass discourages the use of these method for changing the natural language specification. In the discussion it was determined, this is the only method available for changing the natural language for an alt text description in PDF. THe complexity of doing this in certain user agents may require the implementation of normally undesireable workarounds, like the creation of "dummy" alt text tags to hold new natural language specifications. Compromise is new change to the Reference, but a change to the UI in the user agent to facilitate the proper implementation of switching natural language specifications within a string of text.
For consideration as an Appendix. Discussion of existing features and how they may impact the specification.
If there are other options at a publisher's disposal, they should be given precedence over employing the Unicode escape characters.
AI: AB The note has to be written and placed in the Wiki. What an application should be offering to provide. On the Working Draft at the bottom of the page, Annex C Authoring Tool Recommendations will be created with a link back to the discussion on Natural Language Specification.
LGR: There are proposals that Ferass made that will indeed restrict the current PDF Specification for PDF/UA purposes.
JC: The serious problem to fix is multi-language documents. In theory under ISO 6392 for HTML you can specify MUL for multiple then specify the specific languages in their proper locations.
DJ: Two points to be made here, bless the whole document with a language
JC: There is a concept of the multi-language documents, it has two, three or more base languages. It has to be structurally possible to identify a document as a multi-document language.
LGR: What is the accessibility benefit of listing multiple languages?
JC: There is an accuracy advantage because the document could have two languages of equally legal weight.
LGR: We are overloading the use of the attribute, because now the purpose is not to define the docunment's language but to alert the Assistive Technology how to treat the delimited content.
LGR: For the purpose Joe states, this definition of a document as multi-language can be accomplished through the meta-data.
JC: The HTML and PDF specs mistakenly impose a one language view.
DJ: As a functional matter, it is a "blank"
LGR It's optional.
JC: Since Lang=MUL is in 6392 let's
DJ: You're suggesting adding the MUL attribute...
JC: I will restate my proposition. If we want to recommend instead of leaving teh root tag blang set language = MUL
LGR: As long as it's a MAY statement, not a MUST.
DH: I have seen several different ways in which multiple languages are supported in a document. Saying it's MUL does not always tell you what the lower level languages are. I am wondering if we are creating more problems by doing this and not thinking of the consequences of doing this.
DJ: Joe's point is a worthy one and needs to be enshrined in a comment that should be added to the page.
JC: Which set of language codes do we want to adopt? Spec has reference to ISO 6391 (limited set of languages 45%), Library of Congress using 6392 which leaves 20% of languages out. Summer Institute of Linguistics (6393) won't leave any languages out.
DJ: Another example for when language specification has to be handled by escape codes would be Bookmarks.
LGR: Multi-media is an annotation
JC: So theere is no way to tell what the language of a multi-media element is.
LGR: YOu can wrap structure around it.
FER: Ends up as an untagged annotation until you tag it.
During the discussion, NS provided a link to the discusssion of the MUL language code from ISO639:
From http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/normtext.html,4.1.2 Special situations
The language code mul (for multiple languages) should be applied when several languages are used and it is not practical to specify all the appropriate language codes.
The language code und (for undetermined) is provided for those situations in which a language or languages must be indicated but the language cannot be identified.
DJ: Are there other adjustments to this page before we leave it. This is exactly the kind of structure and discussion of the content that is required for each leaf of the content. Thank you very much Ferass for this page. So what do you think, is there anything else to be done here?
FER: Well certainly if somebody would care to reveiw the text for acceptance of the language I would welcome that.
JC: This is a reasonably solid start on the natural language discussion, which is nothing compared to abbreviations and acronymns.
BF: It needs some additional fleshing out. THere are some other requirements which we need firmer about.
DJ: it would be instructive Betsy if you could make a note or two on this page along those lines. That would be a valuable service to the rest of us.
Review and update "out of meeting" work assignments.
DJ: I want to make sure we have clear assignments going forward.
Betsy will edit natural language specification page.
NS Neal's will be updated.
LGR will continue movement
JC to come up with genres that will be exempt, that statement needs to moved.
AB: We will leave it here for the moment and I will make a note to move it into the spec.
GP Continue to flesh out the forms discussion.. And don't forget fonts.
AB meta data
DH has executed changes in a variety of pages.
DH: I would just as soon continue to proceed as I have been, tackling items that occur to me.
DJ: I should continue to spawn the template page into various leaves that don't have them.
LGR: I feel it would be helpful if people would send something to the list when they feel something is ready for review.
DJ: Great suggestion. I encourage people to do that.
Discuss and set Committee milestones and target timeline
DJ: October 17 - 18 face to face meeting tentatively scheduled for Toronto. U of T, ATRC. Adobe Toronto office. 2 city blocks from the
AI: GP: I will look into availability of Adobe meeting facility.
Airport is Peason Intl AIrport code is YYZ.
BF: I will be in Canada in Ottawa on Tuesday and I can join you all in Toronto on Wednesday. AIIM is doing a solutions seminar on Thursday in Toronto.
Link to the Gladstone...
http://www.gladstonehotel.com/
An initial Headcount was taken. The face to face details will also have to be advertised and Renee Georges can also reach out to seek participants from the AIIM website.
Additional discussion/wrapup
FER: If anyone has some free time, I would urge people to look at acronyms and abbreviations.
DJ: I would even recommend making that the leaf for our next discussion.
DJ: Dick Herring and I discussed the notion of developing a target schedule to help move this effort along. Betsy, is there an existing set of milestones that you feel we could adopt?
BF: I have those, high level deliverables that we would look for from the committee that we could assign dates that you can honestly work towards. Let's discuss the details.
DJ: The committee has to discuss the way points and deliverables. Probably an overdue discussion, but something we need to talk about. This pace will only increase.
Next meeting Tuesday, August 23, 2006 3:00pm - 5:00pm EST
Adjourn
El Rayes / Soiffer
Meeting adjourned at 5:10 pm EST
