[Accessibility] draft Accessibility meeting minutes 9/15/04

John Goldthwaite john.goldthwaite at catea.org
Wed Sep 15 12:15:25 PDT 2004


Accessibility meeting 9/15/04

Doug Beattie
Harald Fernengel
John Goldthwaite
Bill Haneman
Earl Johnson
Peter Korn
George Kraft
Janina Sajka
Gunnar Schmidt
Matthew Wilcox
Allen Wilson

Minutes for 3 meetings were reviewed-
August 11 minutes- approved.
September 1-  needs more work
September 8 minutes- approved.
Bill-  the September 1 minutes are fragmentary and there is some content
there that might better not published.
Janina- can we fix it?  Can you discuss it with Harald and revise them?
Bill- there some issues there that are appropriate for discussion within the
group but I don’t think some are necessarily representative of the group. If
we felt that all of the topics such AT-SPI and DBUS should be published, I
think that Harald and I could get together and clean it up.  The other
possibility is to just pull the section.
Janina- I wouldn’t like to pull it.  We should organize it so that we know
what should be considered and worked on.
Bill-
Janina- we need to get these in form where we can publish them.  We need to
show the substantive issues that we’ve covered.
Bill- these are some of the issues that the group talked about a year ago.
In their current form, the minutes are not helpful even as a record on the
meeting.
Janina- lets hold the notes for a week and see if we can resolve it.


Peter- at the upcoming IDEAS conference, I will be one of the two invited
keynote speakers.  Janina will also be on a panel on open source
accessibility.
Janina- that’s Nov. 2 & 3 in Washington, DC and is a conference that many US
government officials attend to look at accessible technology.
Peter- this should be a good venue to promote the open source application.
Janina- would anyone else like to participate?  This might be a good
opportunity to talk about what we are doing.
Janina- all the NSF paper work but one page has been received by NSF.  The
outstanding one is a form for electronics funds transfer which the FSG’s
bank has to sign.  If they don’t have any problems with the paperwork, we
will have $50,000 to use for the conference.
George- do we need a special bank account for this purpose?
Janina- We need to determine that.  We need to get the final budget and set
up ways to track the money we spend, whether it’s aggregated in an FSG
account or in a separate account.   NSF wants the form this week.  They want
to spend all their money by the end of the fiscal year.  I don’t know if Jim
has gotten the form to the bank yet, but we will be checking.  NSF has had
the documents since Monday and they have not asked any questions about the
details.  On the webpage, there was a question about putting the minutes in
reverse chronological order so that the latest is at top.
George- yes, we’d like to put the minutes in  reverse order and add a page
with links to the email lists.
Janina- We also need to look at the accessibility of the freestandards.org
and their CMS templates.  They have a policy of being w3c compliant and that
includes accessibility.
George- I want to make a proposal the you or Sharon be to make these minor
changes to the website without group approval.  You should not have to the
whole group form permission to make updates and  corrections for the
minutes.
Janina- certainly our content will increase – hearing no objects, Sharon and
I will deal with the website.
Willy- We’re not making enough use of the email list.  We’re just using it
for announcing the phone calls.  I asked last week about conformance testing
and dependency check..  No one responded to it.
Janina- That’s a good question, I’m sorry I didn’t get back to that.
Bill- the answer is yes,
Willy- what are the dependencies, I don’t want to have this discussed in the
meeting, let’s talk about it  on the email list.
Bill- I think we’ve talked about it.
Willy- When?  Is it in the minutes or mail?
George - can we search for that and send a url or pointer to the discussion?

Bill- we have three subcommittees that are looking at different items.
Each of those groups need to report back on dependencies.  Do we need these
now?
Willy-  not right now but we need to know at some point.  Are we dependent
on C#?  how about C++.  we need to know so that the LSB

Bill- is now the time that we need to know this?  The committees are pretty
mired.in other details.  They haven’t said which interfaces we plan to
standardize.
Janina- The response I thought of was to look at it from overview.  What is
going on in each community.  One- something intended to run on i86.   One of
the issues for allsa, what it the correct behavior for audio events.  Allsa
has assumed that they should queue which is a problem for voice synthesis.
To me that is an example where someone is having a discussion that has
impact on our work.  That was what I thought Willy was asking.
Willy-   We don’t want to get to the end and go to the LSB and they need to
standardize 10 things that we depend on.
Janina-  boot loader
 is not in user space but it has high impact on the
usability of the system.
Bill- can each of the groups do it for their area?   I’ll do it for AT-SPI.
Earl will do it for keyboard.  Janina and Willy will do it for shared I/O.
Janina-  Willy also suggested that some of us may want to use an IRC
channel.
Willy- yes, I created an IRC channel on the LSB server.

Janina- Conference.  I send out requests to the 3 conference to create a
master list of attendees from the conferences.  We need to have a conference
announcement by the time the NSF money is awarded.  We need a webpage  that
we can refer people to when we do the press release and other publicity.
Peter- any word from Hawaii about arrangements?
Janina- No, Sandy is not back in Hawaii until next week. Fluendo will
release the software they used at Guadec and other conferences this summer.
They will release the software this month.  We need to get cameras,
workers, 

Peter- I thought you were going to get the lists of conference attendees for
Guadec, LSM, and Unix accessibility conference and we’ll discuss it on
email.  Do you want to put this in a Wicki?

Janina- that’s not a bad idea,  the email list is archived and this wouldn’t
be.
Doug- the Wicki LSB is using has some problems so I wouldn’t recommend it.
George-  set up for LSB, put list of people using it on page and limited the
number of people that can use it.
Doug- on main page have lis

Peter- this is just for our own internal use.  I can get the names for
Harald and Janina and can send out the invitations.
Doug- do  you have information on who needs support and who has company
support.
Peter- come up with initial list, contact those people.  When we have green
light on conference, we could put the page up.  Our list will know that
funding may be available.  That’s what I remember we said we’d do.  I have a
couple of webservers we could use/
Janina- maybe I’m being overly cautious, but it seems like something we
shouldn’t archive.
Peter- I’m volunteering to do the website.
Earl- sounds good.
Peter- I’ll start on it.

Earl- Keyboard committee meeting on Monday

Janina – can we get some status on the meetings afterward?  Agenda
applications for the NSF workshop.   What kinds of things do we need on the
agenda?  What do you need to do face to face.   Same for AT-SPI and Shared
I/O.

Meeting next week –same time – 9/22/04



John Goldthwaite
Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access, Georgia Tech
john.goldthwaite at catea.org





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