Alexis Rossi <[email protected]> wrote: > This is a long one, so let me state my goal up front. I am trying to > ascertain whether there is community interest in trying to make sure future > RFCs can be fully read and understood without relying on information in > imagery (SVG or ASCII). This is an accessibility issue, but I think it also > may be helpful for people who learn in different ways. We are not talking > about trying to address this in older RFCs, just new ones.
Fair enough.
Older RFCs do get revised, and re-working those sections could be painful.
> RFC 7996 contains the following language in the introduction:
> "Note that in RFCs, the text provides normative descriptions of protocols,
> systems, etc. Diagrams may be used to help explain concepts more clearly,
> but they provide supporting details and should not be considered to be
> complete specifications in themselves."
The language is not strong enough, and is probably not well enough understood.
> Some people think that we already have the general idea in the community
> that the text should be normative, and that imagery should be a helpful
> illustration of the text. (So you could have normative info in an image,
> but that shouldn't be the ONLY place where it exists.)
By "normative" do you mean BCP14, or just that it defines things?
> Others have made the point that this has never been an accepted norm for
> ASCII art. We haven't found a citation that says otherwise (other than
> 7996). And it seems that in regards to packet diagrams specifically, BCP
> 22/RFC2360 Section 3.1 [2] actually tells us to put normative info into
> ASCII art.
I think that it's time to move to machine readable descriptions of packet
formats, and to derive diagrams from that. We had a document go through
dispatch a few years ago that was mentioned, but I can't find it right now.
25 years ago, I proposed a declarative language for packet formats, but at
the time, it's applicability to documents was not understood.
> 1) provide adequate alt/desc text within the code to fully describe the
> content of a diagram/image to someone using a screen reader (SVG only)
> 2) use aria labels appropriately to allow a screenreader user to navigate
> the diagram (SVG only)
> 3) fully describe the normative information in the text (TXT has all the
> info needed outside of the ASCII art, and SVG points people to the
> text)
Yes, but can we also provide a useful label in txt?
What about in PDF?
> A fourth path has been suggested: using a formal language to describe
> diagrams. UML was suggested as a possibility. I have not yet found
> convincing evidence that UML alone is sufficiently accessible to people
> with visual disabilities.
UML is useless to me.
Too complicated, does many things I don't need, fails to do things I do need.
(I've tried multiple times over 30 years)
--
Michael Richardson <[email protected]>, Sandelman Software Works
-= IPv6 IoT consulting =- *I*LIKE*TRAINS*
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