When is display transformable

[Matt Garrish]

Further to the last email, a more fundamental question I have is when is a resource considered to be display transformable?

 

If I have an ebook that could have its text resized and colours controlled depending on the features of the user agent, does that mean the content is display transformable? Or does display transformability mean that the display can be controlled independent of the user agent? (e.g., embedded controls to change font size, etc.)

 

Is display transformability an indication of when you should or shouldn’t try to modify the content? For a fixed-layout ebook, should this value not be set, even though you could potentially alter the appearance? (Feels like a trip back to the author-wins style sheet days.)

 

All html pages would seem to be controllable to some extent, even if the content author does nothing special, but what is controllable may have no useful effect (e.g., changing background colour when the page is an image).

 

The property makes sense when I don’t scratch the surface too deeply, but the mix of what the user agent does and the format of the content allows leaves me questioning myself.

 

Help wanted.

 

Matt

 

 

[Liddy Nevile]

I agree with this! It is not simple...

so I welcome more thinking about it. I suspect that by being clever
and elegant with the refinements of displayTransformable we can get
there, but sometimes I wonder if that is a term that rates alongside
visual, auditory etc, and is not best used as an accessibilityFeature...

but I am still not decided - so yes, more thinking, I reckon.

I suppose that while we want the terms to be reasonably understandable
on appearance, we can have definitions for them and rely on wizards
etc to help users and resource providers choose among them.

There is also the difference between resources that make it possible
to transform them and those that, once transformed, still make sense -
eg pixel-size restrictions....

I find that this term, for example, is quite difficult when I am
writing the PNP for a person - what they want ...but I have in mind
the problem that I, as a Granny can play with transformable text but,
I think it is Anastasia's Granny, there are those who are deemed
unable to do that - like lots of people.

Liddy

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[Matt Garrish]

I think the answer may ultimately fall into best practices. We can be more
precise about the nature of the display transformability characteristics,
and that's a good thing, but I don't think values alone will be self-guiding
in this case.

The definition for displayTransformability might be along the lines of: The
content is not restricted in such a way as to prevent a user from modifying
the appearance of the content to better suit their needs, or options have
been built in to simplify modifying the appearance (e.g., scripted controls
to change font sizes, colours, etc.).

The guidelines would then elaborate that there needs to be meaningful
control in order for this property to be set (e.g., text-based html
documents, not image-based ones).

It doesn't fully address the user expectation of how the content is
controlled, but if someone is looking for a transformable format maybe we
can assume that they understand the UA dependence angle. I wouldn't want to
make the definition too restrictive (e.g., require built-in control),
because there is value outside of html pages in which the only control is
through the interface (e.g., PDFs that can be resized or unlocked Word
documents with modifiable styles).

Matt

[Liddy Nevile]

after thinking for a while about this (years?), I have moved towards
thinking of transformable as not so much an accessibility Feature of
visual, auditory and tactile modalities, but rather that it is,
itself, an accessMode.
I think this might work better - ie transformable can be tagged to
content that can be used in all the sensory forms. I realise that
within this we might have transformable text, and transformable images
(SVG) tc - and this inclines me to this position.

Others??

Liddy

[Cheetham, Anastasia]

On 2013-12-04, at 2:02 PM, Matt Garrish wrote:

> Further to the last email, a more fundamental question I have is when is a resource considered to be display transformable?
>
> If I have an ebook that could have its text resized and colours controlled depending on the features of the user agent, does that mean the content is display transformable? Or does display transformability mean that the display can be controlled independent of the user agent? (e.g., embedded controls to change font size, etc.)

I think we should remember that the point of the a11y md is to help in the process of matching resources to an individuals personal needs and preferences. So in terms of display transformability, we're trying to record information about whether or not this resource can be used by someone who's likely going to want to tweak the appearance because the default appearance probably doesn't work for them. Regardless of whether the transformation can be carried out through user agent features or built-in controls, if it's transformable, it's transformable.

That said, it might be helpful to provide enough detail to allow users to be able to distinguish between those two cases.

> Is display transformability an indication of when you should or shouldn’t try to modify the content? For a fixed-layout ebook, should this value not be set, even though you could potentially alter the appearance? (Feels like a trip back to the author-wins style sheet days.)

I don't think that was the original intent with the displayTransformability property, and I don't think that would be particularly useful. We want to encourage authors to create transformable content, not give them an out ;-)

> All html pages would seem to be controllable to some extent, even if the content author does nothing special, but what is controllable may have no useful effect (e.g., changing background colour when the page is an image).

It's entirely possible to use CSS to actively create a non-transformable page (e.g. fixed pixel font sizes, !important tags, etc), just as it is possible to use CSS to create an eminently transformable page (e.g. background images instead of <img> tags, font icons, etc). It seems to me to be a useful thing to be able to inform potential users that yes, some effort has been put into ensuring that this page is nicely transformable.

On 2013-12-05, at 9:05 AM, Matt Garrish wrote:

> The definition for displayTransformability might be along the lines of: The content is not restricted in such a way as to prevent a user from modifying the appearance of the content to better suit their needs, or options have been built in to simplify modifying the appearance (e.g., scripted controls to change font sizes, colours, etc.).

This seems to be going in the right direction.

> The guidelines would then elaborate that there needs to be meaningful control in order for this property to be set (e.g., text-based html documents, not image-based ones).
>
> It doesn't fully address the user expectation of how the content is controlled, but if someone is looking for a transformable format maybe we can assume that they understand the UA dependence angle. I wouldn't want to make the definition too restrictive (e.g., require built-in control), because there is value outside of html pages in which the only control is through the interface (e.g., PDFs that can be resized or unlocked Word documents with modifiable styles).

It does seem that we might want to try to come up with a property that can be used generically to mean "content not restricted" as you describe above, but that _can_ be refined with more details.

So, just brainstorming, something like

displayTransformability
displayTransformability/CSSEnabled
displayTransformability/CSSEnabled/textSize
displayTransformability/CSSEnabled/contrast
displayTransformability/taggedPDF
etc.

--
Anastasia Cheetham Inclusive Design Research Centre
ache...@ocadu.ca Inclusive Design Institute
OCAD University