[Accessibility] Draft minutes November 5,2003 Linux accessibility workgroup

John Goldthwaite john.goldthwaite at catea.org
Fri Nov 7 05:27:02 PST 2003


November 5, 2003 Draft Minutes Linux Accessibility workgroup

Jonathan Blandford
Sandy Gabrielli, Project Archimedes
John Goldthwaite
Bill Haneman
Randy Horwitz
Peter Korn
Janina Sajka
Gunnar Schmidt
Neil Scott
Sharon Snider
Allen Wilson

Action item:
Janina- ping Gregg Vanderheiden on the legal agreement and to see if he has
someone who could participate in the Keyboard workgroup
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Minutes from the Oct. 22 meeting were accepted without further changes.

We will make the announcement in January before Linux World.  A draft of the
announcement is circulating.  The text has been drafted and Janina should be
able to send it out shortly.

Bill – need to talk about the project in conferences before January.  That
makes it possible that it will end up on mailing lists.

Neil- talked to Doug about a face to face in Hawaii.  It would be a good
location if we want to have people from Japan, Australia, and other parts of
SE Asia.

Peter- Microsoft announced the Accessibility API for Longhorn at their
professional developer’s conference.  We need to move ahead so that our
efforts are not overshadowed by Microsoft’s API.

Bill read about another Linux standardization effort underway.  Not one of
the main standards organizations.  It looked like an industry effort.  Will
find it and pass it on.

Sharon- what do we need to do to release it earlier?
Janina - need to get it to everyone, review.  Work on PR effort to get it to
key press people.  Scott McNeil is working with his PR firm on that.

Peter- is there any reason we can’t distribute it to the group for early
review?
Janina will distribute it this afternoon.

Organizing working groups-
We need people to lead the AT-SPI and keyboard groups. Bill was nominated
for the AT-SPI group at the last meeting.  We need someone to lead the
Keyboard group.

Bill- Earl Johnson expressed interest in the Keyboard work.  Should we have
people from ? join?
Peter- what do we expect the groups to do? AT representation – candidates –
an architect for main AT product and architect from one of the main
applications.  Toolkit vendors should be important.
Gunnar- Asked Trolltech people to join the group.

Peter - A lot of what they tried to do in the existing AT-SPI was looking at
what AT vendors were currently doing and looking at what they would like to
do.

Bill- should be focusing on what is existing.  We don’t have that much
latitude in creating a standard.  Focus on how do we make the existing ABI
work.  If we have to look at long-view, evolution it becomes a 5 year
project.

Peter- want to make sure what we are standardizing on is extensible.  That’s
what we’ve already done with the AT-SPI.

Bill- We need to balance extensibility with getting the standard completed
in a reasonable time.
Janina- write a version 1.0 with the things you know are well accepted.  If
its something that’s in evolution, that would be held for the next version.

Allen Wilson- thought the SPI was owned by Gnome, that LSB will adopt it as
a standard.
Bill- to take the existing Gnome SPI and make it into a pan-Linux standard
will take some modifications.

The work team isn’t to set a course for the AT-SPI development, its to get
make the LSB standard.

Group would investigate cross platform issues.

Sharon- According to George Craft, we should create a test for each section
as its written.
Either each group develops the test methods as they go or works closely with
a test group.
Mixture of tests and a series of manual test assertions.
Bill- who is going to do the work?  The scope of creating an automated test
suite will be more than we can do.  If the sub-committees need to come up
with working test suites, we’re under-resourced.  If we just give a
description of the test procedure, then we should be able to do that.

Allen- Until we get a better idea about what each group is going to do, its
hard to be

Bill- Proposal for what ABI and API we want to verify.  If we’ve validated
our assumptions with respect to interoperability, we can go to ask for
resources to write the verification suite.  There are companies and
organizations that are interested in promoting standards, who would support
it.

Janina- sounds like a good first set of tasks for the AT-SPI group.

Bill- will be a certain amount of architectural discuss, not for making new
development but just to see that we have the right architecture define.

Janina- Is next step defining the scope of work and discuss it via email?
Bill- would be willing to do it.

Peter- other subcommittees – AccessX?
Janina- Let’s invite Earl on the next call.  Pulling out parts of the xkb
that should be done quickly.
Peter – Allen Coopersmith good for this?
Bill- decide on a subset of xkb that addresses the most accessibity issues.
Which xkb features should be exposed to the end user?  Fob that to the
desktop group since that’s part of the desktop and manual test assertions.
Xkb not adopted by x.org as a standard.  It’s a large product.  Its
important to decide which xkb features need to be included, want get those
that are needed and not those that are of only theoretical interest.
Janina- will talk to Trace to see if they have someone who can participate.

Face to face meeting:
Peter- Two disability meetings- ATIA- Orlando in January and CSUN - Los
Angeles in March. Neil has invited us to Hawaii.

Neil - Good hotel in Waikiki for $40 per day.  Typical fares for $350 from
West Coast, $500 East Coast, 700 Japan.  Invitation to visit the Archimedes
project in Hawaii.

Peter- many of us will be at CSUN anyway for the Linux meeting.
Bill- has some reservations about CSUN- high distraction factor
Peter- agrees, have the meeting on the Sunday after CSUN.
Bill- we need more than a single day.  It would be good to have a couple of
days to do the AT-SPI organization.
Peter- there are synergies that we can get from CSUN.  He may be staying for
another conference the following weeks so could stay for two days.  May have
problem getting management to approve a trip to Hawaii.
Bill- concerned about productivity on the day after CSUN.

Janina- consensus seems to be that we need to meet but need to work on when
and where.

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





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