OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC

Question from Thorsten Zachmann 

On 21/02/07, David Faure 

On Wednesday 21 February 2007, Dave Pawson wrote:
> On 21/02/07, David Faure 

On 21/02/07, David Faure 

Hi Dave, David,

David - if I understand you correctly, you are saying "do in master 
pages for animations what we do in non-master/normal pages for 
animations."  Thus, if there is no accessibility issue with animations 
in normal pages, in theory we won't be introducing one in master pages.  
Correct?


Peter
> On 21/02/07, David Faure 

On 21/02/07, Peter Korn 

On Wednesday 21 February 2007, Peter Korn wrote:
> Hi Dave, David,
> 
> David - if I understand you correctly, you are saying "do in master 
> pages for animations what we do in non-master/normal pages for 
> animations."  Thus, if there is no accessibility issue with animations 
> in normal pages, in theory we won't be introducing one in master pages.  
> Correct?

Yes. Those two issues are orthogonal (whatever accessibility issue there is in normal pages
there is in master pages too - I'm not saying there isn't an issue, I'm saying it's unrelated to my request),
and because of the accessibility question I didn't get any answers about the initial question :-)

I would like to suggest for the next conference call that we vote on the simple issue
of "allowing animations in master pages". KOffice's presentation program needs this,
and OpenOffice's Impress seems to need it too, since it is currently possible to assign
an animation to a shape on a master page but then nothing happens... which shows
that the need is there, but that ODF has a deficiency on this topic.

As far as I can see the concrete proposal would be to add
        
after
        
in the definition of 

On 12/09/2007, David Faure 

Hi Dave,

We should discuss animation accessibility soon in our SC - perhaps at 
our next meeting.  Questions we should explore include ways to tag the 
animation with ALT text descriptions, suggested UI for authors to do 
this, guidelines for when animations should be so tagged (does every 
animation need a description?  is there a way to indicate 
'non-informational/decorative animations' as such, so the user knows 
they exist and knows they needn't care about them), etc.


Regards,

Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

> On 12/09/2007, David Faure 

Hi Dave,

We should discuss animation accessibility soon in our SC - perhaps at 
our next meeting.  Questions we should explore include ways to tag the 
animation with ALT text descriptions, suggested UI for authors to do 
this, guidelines for when animations should be so tagged (does every 
animation need a description?  is there a way to indicate 
'non-informational/decorative animations' as such, so the user knows 
they exist and knows they needn't care about them), etc.


Regards,

Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

> On 12/09/2007, David Faure 

On 12/09/2007, Peter Korn 

Hi Dave,

[moving just to the SC mailing list]

Indeed, your example of the animated graph is a good one.  On the flip 
side, you can imagine something like the animated logo of a company (vs. 
the static image logo of that same company), or images of tweeting birds 
in the background of a presentation on ornithology.  The animation 
itself contains no semantic meaning - it is decorative.  It is, perhaps, 
one step above the interstitial slide animations, where one slide wipes 
left to the other, vs. irising open. vs...

What I think we need to do is ensure the format provides a means to 
convey at least a text description of the animation meaning, and to 
write guidelines that help authors decide when they should use it.  That 
of course means we need author guidelines (vs. authoring tool guidelines).


Regards,

Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

> On 12/09/2007, Peter Korn 

On 12/09/2007, Peter Korn 

Hi David,

David Faure wrote:
> On Wednesday 21 February 2007, Peter Korn wrote:
>> Hi Dave, David,
>>
>> David - if I understand you correctly, you are saying "do in master 
>> pages for animations what we do in non-master/normal pages for 
>> animations."  Thus, if there is no accessibility issue with animations 
>> in normal pages, in theory we won't be introducing one in master pages.  
>> Correct?
> 
> Yes. Those two issues are orthogonal (whatever accessibility issue there is in normal pages
> there is in master pages too - I'm not saying there isn't an issue, I'm saying it's unrelated to my request),
> and because of the accessibility question I didn't get any answers about the initial question :-)
> 
> I would like to suggest for the next conference call that we vote on the simple issue
> of "allowing animations in master pages". KOffice's presentation program needs this,
> and OpenOffice's Impress seems to need it too, since it is currently possible to assign
> an animation to a shape on a master page but then nothing happens... which shows
> that the need is there, but that ODF has a deficiency on this topic.

Hmm. We have accepted that already on March, the 12th. The resulting 
changes will be in draft 6. When I have uploaded it, can you please 
check whether the changes we made are appropriate from your point of view.

Michael


> 
> As far as I can see the concrete proposal would be to add
>         
> after
>         
> in the definition of