IT Accessibility Committee November 2006 Newsletter

### Edited by Joel Obuchowski

November IT Accessibility Committee Meeting

WHEN: Thursday, November 9, 2:30 - 4:00 p.m.
WHERE: 411 State Street, Albany
WHAT: We'll be talking about:
Updates to P04-002, S04-001, and the new best practice guidelines
The ongoing issue of AJAX and other Rich Internet Applications
Upcoming briefings for the Executive Committee and Corporate Roundtable
Web site updates
Agency contacts
Agenda for the rest of the year

Web Guild Hosts Adobe for Best Practices Talk

Adobe Systems will be presenting and demonstrating its accessibility solutions for PDF files. In this session, a workflow for the production of accessible PDF files based upon their characteristics and intended use will be discussed. From scanned content to PDFs originating from popular word processing and desktop publishing applications, Adobe will demonstrate the methods and techniques for turning PDFs originating from various sources into accessible documents and forms that can be used by people with disabilities in conjunction with popular assistive technology products or using the built in accessibility accomodations that are included in Adobe Acrobat and the Adobe Reader software.

December 1, 2006
9:00 am - noon
NYS Museum Theater, Albany, NY
Pre-registration is required. Register at:
http://www.nysforum.org/seminars/wmg-12-1-06/

NEWS/ARTICLES

New York State Agency News - "OFT's Accessibility Policy and Standard Revised, Guidelines Issued"

P04-002, Technology Policy on Accessibility of State Agency Web-based Intranet and Internet Information and Applications S04-001, Mandatory Technology Standard on Accessibility of State Agency Web-based Intranet and Internet Information and Applications A new document, G06-001, Best Practice Guideline on Accessibility of State Agency Web-based Intranet and Internet Information and Applications, has also been issued. This provides advice on ways to achieve compliance with the Mandatory Technology Standard's 14 guidelines.

You will find links to all of these on the OFT Technology Policy Page: http://www.oft.state.ny.us/policy/indexa.htm (External Link).

Internet Explorer and Firefox Release Major Revisions

Both Microsoft and Mozilla have released major revisions to their products in the past month. Internet Explorer debuted the full release of version 7, and within days, Firefox 2.0 came along.

The general consensus seems to be that IE 7 is much more standards compliant than IE 6, although there is grumbling in the some of the web developer message boards about having to un-hack web content that was tweaked to display acceptably in IE 6. For more on some of the new features of IE 7, like full-page zoom in, read Jeffrey Zeldman's column entitled "IE7 CSS Tweak Show and Tell" at http://www.zeldman.com/2006/10/27/ie7showandtell/ (External Link).

PC Magazine also has reviews of both Firefox 2.0 http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2047963,00.asp(External Link), which was rated 'very good,' and IE 7 http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2041270,00.asp(External Link), which was rated 'good.'

You can download Firefox 2.0 at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/(External Link). One note, however...many of your themes and extensions will need updating.

You can download IE 7 at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/search.aspx?displaylang=en(External Link) (it's somewhat ironic that the browser didn't make the list of the top five popular downloads).

Tim Berners-Lee Outlines New HTML Direction for W3C (excerpted from http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/166(External Link))

For the past few years, those of us who cared about web standards have been working under the assumption that the W3C was leading the way from old, outdated HTML to XHTML, and eventually, XML. We understood that a large part of that evolution was the separation of content and presentation, and that we'd have to exercise a little more discipline in writing our code so that it would conform to standards. From time to time, we'd notice that we were working in a vacuum, that we were doing a lot more work than other people, and that other peoples' non-compliant code often looked just as good in a browser as our squeaky-clean, semantically-correct code did. It was discouraging, but we were sure we were on the right path.

In a late October entry in his blog, Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the World Wide Web, seems to be conceding that the mountain isn't moving.

"There has been discussion in blogs where Daniel Glazman, Bj�H�nn, Molly Holzschlag, Eric Meyer, and Jeffrey Zeldman and others have shared concerns about W3C works particularly in the HTML area. The validator and other subjects cropped up too, but let's focus on HTML now. We had a W3C retreat in which we discussed what to do about these things."

"Some things are very clear. It is really important to have real developers on the ground involved with the development of HTML. It is also really important to have browser makers intimately involved and committed. And also all the other stakeholders, including users and user companies and makers of related products."

"Some things are clearer with hindsight of several years. It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally. The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn't work. The large HTML-generating public did not move, largely because the browsers didn't complain. Some large communities did shift and are enjoying the fruits of well-formed systems, but not all. It is important to maintain HTML incrementally, as well as continuing a transition to well-formed world, and developing more power in that world."

"The plan is to charter a completely new HTML group. Unlike the previous one, this one will be chartered to do incremental improvements to HTML, as also in parallel xHTML. It will have a different chair and staff contact. It will work on HTML and xHTML together. We have strong support for this group, from many people we have talked to, including browser makers."

"There will also be work on forms. This is a complex area, as existing HTML forms and XForms are both form languages. HTML forms are ubiquitously deployed, and there are many implementations and users of XForms. Meanwhile, the Webforms submission has suggested sensible extensions to HTML forms. The plan is, informed by Webforms, to extend HTML forms. At the same time, there is a work item to look at how HTML forms (existing and extended) can be thought of as XForm equivalents, to allow an easy escalation path. A goal would be to have an HTML forms language which is a superset of the existing HTML language, and a subset of a XForms language wit added HTML compatibility. We will see to what extend this is possible. There will be a new Forms group, and a common task force between it and the HTML group."

"There is also a plan for a separate group to work on the XHTML2 work which the old 'HTML working group' was working on. There will be no dependency of HTML work on the XHTML2 work."

For the full blog entry, please see the URL acknowledged at the beginning of this article.

Other W3C News

Mobile Web Best Practices

On November 2, the W3C advanced the Mobile Web Best Practices as a Proposed Recommendation. These guidelines have been written for designers of web sites and content management systems, and describe how to author web content that works well on mobile devices such as Blackberries, web-enabled cell phones, and PDAs. The workgroup will accept comments through December 11. For a full version of the proposed best practice guidelines, see http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/PR-mobile-bp-20061102/ (External Link).

XForms 1.1 Working Draft Released

If you read the Tim Berners-Lee article above, you probably noticed that he mentioned extending web forms as a interim step in moving to XML. According to the W3C, XForms 1.1 was "designed to refine and strengthen the XML processing platform introduced by XForms 1.0." The new version adds "several submissions capabilities, a more powerful action processing facility, the ability to manipulate data arbitrarily and to access event context information, and adds numerous helpful data types, utility functions, user interfact improvements and action event handlers." You can find the XForms home page at http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/ (External Link).

WAI Launches Project to Improve Accessibility of Rich Internet Applications

The WAI has released the Roadmap for Accessible Rich Internet Applications, under the umbrella of the WAI-ARIA project. The roadmap "identifies some technology gaps to achieve the desired access. Some of the technologies required to fill these gaps are under development in other W3C Groups, such as the XHTML Role Attribute Module [XHTML-ROLE] being developed by the HTML Activity. The remaining gaps are planned to be filled by two companion specifications: Roles for Accessible Rich Internet Applications [ARIA-ROLE] and States and Properties Module for Accessible Rich Internet Applications [ARIA-STATE]."

To find out more about the issues and this project, and to read the companion documents, start with http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-aria-roadmap-20060926/ (External Link).