[Accessibility] December 4, 2003 Draft Minutes

Fri Dec 5 12:10:44 PST 2003

The meeting minutes have been posted to the Web site with the requested
corrections.
Sharon Snider
Linux Accessibility
IBM Linux Technology Services
(512) 838-4127, T/L 678-4127

                      "John Goldthwaite"                                                                                                  
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                      accessibility-admin at freest                                                                                          
                      andards.org                                                                                                         

                      12/03/2003 02:30 PM                                                                                                 
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                      john.goldthwaite                                                                                                    

December 4, 2003 Draft Minutes Linux Accessibility workgroup

Doug Beattie
John Goldthwaite
Bill Haneman
Randy Horwitz
Peter Korn
Janina Sajka
Gunnar Schmidt
Matthew Wilcox
Allen Wilson

Action items:
             Peter- check on SUN facilities
             Willy- Check on HP facilities
             John- check on Georgia Tech facilities and talk to ACM meeting
               planners about airport hotel, talk to Mark Novak
             Doug- talk to Neal about facilities in Hawaii
             Janina- new draft of the NSF proposal

Minutes from last meeting accepted with changes from Gunnar and Doug.

Janina distributed a draft proposal for the NSF proposal.  Edits have been
made by Doug and Peter.  We would like to get the document to NSF by next
week so that we have some action this year.
Doug- Randy has gotten information about how to schedule IBM facilities in
San Francisco.  Have taken care of the password protection so the sublists
are consistent.

Janina- xxx is a placeholder for a quote from Singapore.

Doug- likes Bill’s re-write, add something on research in the first
paragraph.
Bill- NIST?  One of the outcomes of the standard will be a better research
environment.  Play up the positive impact on people with disability.  Will
encourage collaborative research will the outcome being interoperable.
John- put paragraph on Linux impact on scientific instrumentation.  Many
data collection systems use Linux computer systems.  Our work will help
make
these systems accessible to scientists and engineers with disabilities.

Four sections: Purpose, goals, attendees and costs.

Bill- need to have more about the meeting first, the reason we need to have
it and its benefits.  What is the purpose of the meeting, why the parties
need to meet face to face.

Janina- put the details on the project into an appendix.

Bill-The beneficiaries section should come to the front before we start
enumerating the details of the project.

Janina- will work on a new version based on Bill’s suggestions.  We need to
get figures for the costs.  These don’t have to be exact but we should be
close if possible. We need some numbers by next week.
Randy- How long a meeting?
Janina- two, maybe three days
Bill- it would help if we have identified a couple of candidate venues, not
commit but get figures for costs.  We also should look for other sources of
funding.  NSF might like to see other organizations interested enough to
contribute.
John- Perhaps companies could fund an event like a dinner or lunch
Bill- in the current environment we should keep requests to nuts and bolts
Janina- how many meeting rooms?  One large room plus two breakout rooms for
working groups.
Randy- if 30 is the maximum number, that will help on looking for a
location.

Janina- I’m getting a lot of interest on the project in Europe.
Technical University of Denmark has a proposal on a project on Linux
accessibility.
The disability center at the University of Aachen uses Linux as well as
Windows.  They train disabled students on Linux   Having an easy time
getting interest in Europe.
Randy- those are possible resources.
Janina- it’s possible we could do something in Europe in 2005 if the
interest increases. We have added Carlos Velasquez to the list, he’s one of
the accessibility researchers at Fraunhofer.  He will monitor the list and
perhaps join it later.  So Fraunhofer’s another location for a conference.
Bill- there are several people on the list would be interested in
Fraunhofer
’s research.
Janina- discussion on eEurope activity. Year of the disabled is over but
Europe is launching a eEurope initiative.

Bill There has been a lot more research money available for corporate
research on
disability.  (TIDE and IST funding)  Also more funding for Braille and
Braille instruction.

Janina- Denmark people said no one there pays for JAWS, always purchased by
the government. That’s not going to work in Viet Nam, China and India where
they have over a million blind people.  Open source solution is needed for
them.
Bill- We could do an accessible distribution of Gnome that would boot from
the CD. Need a Gnopix distribution with Gnopernicus installed.
Janina- plus a working OpenOffice or at least parts of it.

Willy- no response from Mario Lang about participating in the I/O area.
Bill- need him for the Braille API licensing.
Janina- there is also Dale Milke in Canada.  For the shared I/O, on the
synthesizer, console, desktop- how much general audio do we need to deal
with?  We will need to have good control so you can stop other sources.
Randy – have you looked at Media application server?
Bill- yes but not ready to be used directly.
Randy- it would need an extension.

Janina- How about the Jack audio connections kit that is popular with high
end audio application types?
Bill- it’s not a networked technology.  Computing environments are
distributed so you need an architecture that supports client server models.
Audio becomes political very quickly, we could spend a lot of time on it.
It’s not mature enough.
Janina- Perhaps we should determine our needs and be at the table while
audio is evolving.
Gunnar- put together requirements from our standpoint and let a later FSG
group that works on audio deal with it.
Janina- have problems in festival and flite, it is not responsive.  Next
week we’ll finalize the proposal draft.  We need to get our cost
information
together.  With extra time we can start on the invite list.

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

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