[Accessibility] Minutes for August 20

John Goldthwaite john.goldthwaite at catea.org
Wed Aug 20 12:44:47 PDT 2003


Meeting minutes 8/20/03
A meeting of the Accessibility Working Group was held by
teleconference on Wednesday, August 20,2003, at 2:00 PM U.S.
Eastern Time.

Attending:
Doug Beattie
John Goldthwaite
Bill Haneman
Janina Sajka
Sharon Snider
Matthew Wilcox

Action Items:
Janina-
3. Xkb - Janina will look at Bill’s xkb proposal and see if we
can reuse it.
4. Text-only accessible booting – Janina with Matthew Wilcox,
Kirk
5. Guidelines for Sys admins – Janina with help from Doug
7. Text to Speech – Janina will talk to Mark Mulkayhe
8. V2 – Janina
9. Sys Admin – Janina
10. Installation – Janina
11. Braille – Janina has written to Mario.
12. Structured navigation – Janina

Kirk/Mario
2. AT device handling

Jonathan & Bill-
1. AT-SPI – work with Peter Korn on this.
6. Service API Support for Magnification  - Jonathan will talk to
Peter.

John-
13. Voice I/O

---------------------------------

Bill has been notified that there is a call for proposals for
engineering work.  Need it by September 1 and should have Gnome
cast.  Median grants $30,000.  NEC Foundation.

The Action items for last week were the assignments for writing
FSB102 section B and C on needs.  These are high level statements
of needs.

Structured navigation- Bill concerned about defining the user
experience provided by AT.  Janina- This is to provide user
agents with logical units of navigation.  We want to make sure we
can easily separate structure and content.
Bill- where does this impact desktop standards versus the access
API?
Janina- mapping interface to different user needs.
Bill- user agents should make that possible if we specify our
goals.  Doesn’t see structured navigation as part of the spec but
should be facilitated by what we do.  This should be one of the
questions we ask as we write the spec: how we will be providing
structural information and ways of navigating through structure.
Janina- want to make sure the interface isn’t  different in each
area of the OS.  It would be better to provide a single logical
way of doing navigation.
Bill- need to facilitate both consistency and extensibility.
Make sure someone doesn’t view our spec as locking in a single
method.

Bill- Would like to work with Jonathan and Peter in defining the
AT-SPI section.  Peter has good long term view of it.  Want to
get to support for magnification.  When will we get to
magnification?  year 2.

Some history .. X magnification is implemented with dual frame
buffers which is not the most efficient. Can say its desirable to
do it without dual frame buffers.  Want to put out a RFP for
standard way of handling magnification that will work for X,
Gnome, others..
Janina- this will be much more important as population ages, they
don’t identify themselves as disabled but could use enlargement
or enhancement.

On Windows-Intel developers are able to poke at the hardware.
Manufacturers have created semi-standard ways of doing it for
games.  This has helped magnification people in Windows.  Games
haven’t happened in Linux yet.
Doug- there is a consumer manufacturers forum for Linux in Japan.
Bill- Linux as the OS that runs the proprietary interface.
Plenty of Linux in telephones and other embedded apps.
Doug-  Linux for Tivio like devices and high definition TV.

Bill- Issue of service discovery at boot up, Braille display,
other IO.  If we’re not restricting our view to the desktop
workstation but including embedded applications.  We want these
system to know how to talk to Text to Speech or Braille.
Janina- this is why we have the V2 component.  It’s the most
generic discussion that’s going on interaction between devices.

Problem walking up to device like ATM or plugging in media.  How
does your PDA or AT device know what interface is present and
what services the device provides?

V2 – transport neutral, assuming IP.  Something that can be
expressed in XML.
Bill – how does it solve the problem of personal assistant.  I
want it to talk the device.  Need instant plug and play so the
two device begin conversation.
Microsoft and Sun are not participating in V2, Sun still has
Jenie. Microsoft, Intel – working on UPnP.  Assumptions for V2 is
wireless rather than serial device such as firewire.  This needs
to be ubiquitous so it’s a good reason for standards.

Bill- need to be taking this broad view for boot up.  Need
generic ways of handling discovery, there may not be a serial
port in a future device if wireless ubiquitous.
Bill – kernel and boot up are part of the sysadmin category.
“Out of box” activity
 start up wizards need to be accessible.
We can make some functional statements.  A bootloader like Lilo
or Grub needs to provide these features that address the needs of
disabled users.
Janina- Indentify the short list of things are need –
Bill- Spec for identifying and loading assistive technology.  If
Redhat bundled with Gnopericus, there should be a way for the
wizard to ask if you need it.
Janina- at boot up you need to specify that you want a text boot
and your speech system.
Bill- when wizard comes up it can indicate which AT is available
and have a multimodal way of making the selection.  What if the
user needs something other than the bundled AT?  Boot wizard
needs to be able to discover other AT, like a plugable device
driver.
-	Braille tty is an example of this.   .
Need small standard for AT for adding them to the configuration
or wizard setup.  Need standard way for boot wizard to interact
with AT.  Key to allowing all users to install and configure
their own machines.

Janina- this is on the Roadmap- under installation
Up to now we’ve been focusing on multimodal – text to speech etc.
Early part- how to start the negotiation for discovery is the
tricky part.  Later stages might should be easier.

Gunnar going to KDE conference – does he need some support or
interpretation to get things coordinated?  KDE access group has
consensus to work on AT-SPI but not in the wider KDE community.
Need to overcome Not invented here syndrome. Doug needs to work
with KDE people to explain the problem.

Bill- Can show them that they are embracing the Linux access
standard and not Gnome.
Doug- DoD announced that Linux systems need to be LSB certified
so this should help with our visibility.

Level of detail: enough so that another subgroup could take it
and work on it.  Will need to recruit people and find funding for
each section.  Need to do NEC proposal for the first one.
Do we need to include standards for documentation, best practices
on accessible documents?  Sharon will check with George to see
what the correct protocol for documentation is.

Our next meeting is Wednesday, August 27 at 18:00



John Goldthwaite, Senior Research Scientist
Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access, Georgia
Tech
404 894-0563 (voice)
866 948-8282 (toll free voice/TTY)
john.goldthwaite at catea.org





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