[Accessibility] FSG workgroup meeting minutes 5/26/04

[John Goldthwaite]

Accessibility Working Group Meeting May 26, 2004

Doug Beattie
Sandy Gabrielli
John Goldthwaite
Bill Haneman
Randy Horwitz
Earl Johnson
Peter Korn
Bill LaPlant
Janina Sajka
Gunnar Schmidt
Kris Van Hees
Deedra Waters
Allen Wilson

Minutes from our last meeting – May 4- approved but need to be posted.

Bill is optimistic that we can get SUN to be host for the call for the near
future.

Janina will be leaving AFB on June 28.  Hopeful that she will be able to
continue with FSG.

Action Item Review – nothing new from Trace on the licensing but Trace is
joining FSG.

Ephraim said to send him the proposal directly so that he can review it.
Then we can enter it in Fastlane after any corrections have been made.  FSG
will sign up for Fastlane and will submit the proposal.

Earl – the proposal looks good.
Janina- I put back the Gnopernicus language but also added the information
from Katty’s Orca post.  I can remove it if needed.  We got some language
changes from Bill LaPlant that make it more research oriented.
Peter- should we add things about Python spell checker
Bill – I don’t think so those are just proof of concept.  We could list the
categories of things in development
Bill- we want to make our strength clear to NSF
Peter- the whole electronic curb cut idea that not only is it critical but

Bill- we’re not trying to convince people to add accessibility to their
software, we’re trying to convince NSF to fund the meeting.
Janina- I’m not too worried about it, Ephraim is going to look at it.  If we
show that things are being looked at in research environments that could
lead to new things.

Peter- by noting that its of critical interest to accessiblity, but is also
of interest to other people.
Bill- they are building prototypes but your statement is stronger than that.
I’m not sure about this Orca statement.  They are just starting.  It does
address the question of whether we have an architecture with more than a
couple of clients.  It strengthens the .  It wouldn’t be correct to
characterize Orca as an end user assistive technology.  But it does
Peter- I’d be more tempted to mention Orca in a paragraph that talks about
several other products in development;  I’d mention what Orca is and what
the others are,  test frameworks,
Janina- I like that.
John- I thought we should explain what the AT SPI and XKB are earlier in the
proposal or some sort of overview of the architecture.  We meantion AT SPI
and XKB when talking about AT products that use them but we don’t explain
what they are at the end of the proposal.
Janina- Peter can you take a cut at the ORCA.
Peter- Bill can you get me the original text.
Bill- not this week, you can get it from the conference in Australia, search
for James Hensteridge.

Allan- do you think this needs to be strengthened before we need to send it
in?
Janina- no, I’m happy with it but I’d like to get the Orca material
corrected.  If we can’t get that corrected by tomorrow, we’ll drop it.  We
can just review that section.

Peter- I think I found the LCA conference with the presentation on Gnome.
Kris- I think we discussed that we’d include all names and not just a
subset.
Janina- we did.  Please send me the text you’d like included.  I also left
Jonathan since he hasn’t been on a call for about 6 months.

Budget –
John-
Sandy- how much local travel should we cover?  Should we have a van?
Bill- that depends on how far it is from the hotel to the conference area.
Some of us need door to door transportation.
Janina- there are at least two people who need accessible transportation.
Sandy- there is a bus system.
Earl- I’ve found that public transport isn’t always dependable and we should
have a van.
Sandy-  we will look into getting a university van and driver.
Bill- as long as the van is accessible.  The one problem I know about with
public transportation is that it maybe in name only.  It may require
scheduling far in advance.
Janina- We won’t let thinks fall apart at that end.  We’ll get a van.  Also
we need to see if there are still restrictions on service animals into
Hawaii.
Bill- Here’s some web info; they have changed the requirement so you don’t
have to have 120 day quarantine if you have the correct paperwork.  I’ll
forward this link to the list.

Peter- I have a paragraph- this goes after the paragraph on GOK

In addition, there are several research projects that are using AT-SPI. Orca
is a research project exploring the use of scripting in Python to customize
the screen reading experience for specific applications and specific tasks,
thereby increasing the efficiency of the user experience and lowering the
barrier to entry for developers wanting to contribute to accessibility
enhancements.  Also, several companies are exploring the use of AT-SPI for
automated software testing, leveraging the detailed information exposed for
all user interface elements to programmatically validate aspects of the
graphical user interface.


Bill- I don’t think I’d mention the spell checker in that context, its not
being actively developed.
Janina- without that sentence it sound fine.

Janina- I’ve started a action related to Shared I/O that would relate to the
accessibility - .. Fedora,  Dave Milke Braille, brltty  looking at merging
those two and give one set of instructions.

Bill- did you get any feedback from Dave on the licensing?
Janina- I’ll do that on our audioconference.  That’s my Shared I/O report.
I’ll make the changes we talked about and resend the text of the proposal.

Deedra - Brltty isn’t going to make it into the next release of Gen 2
Janina- there will be a lot
Deedra- my groups wants to keep Speakup moving forward.  We’ll  One of our
Speakup developers is also a kernel developer and is getting Speakup put
into the kernel tree.
Bill-  .. part of a
Janina-  before it was monolithic, now its loadable.

Earl – I need to know who in the XKB can meet next week.  We need to come up
with a teleconference number.  What’s the alias for the keyboard group?
Doug- accessibility-kbd ;  you can join all these groups on the website
Bill- if we’re all invited, send it to the entire list.

Bill- for the last few years there has been a Linux conference in Bordeaux.
We have an accessibility meeting as par to  July 6 – 10.  The accessibility
meetings are July 7 & 8.  I’ll be there as will Janina, David Boulter,
Thomas Freihof, Silvia Chard,
There is some funding available to fly people to the conference.  We’re
hoping to get someone to talk about speech recognition but the person we’d
like to come.

Sandy- I just sent something a link from the Hawaii Dept of Agriculture to
the list.
Janina- good, its not quite like going to a foreign country but almost.
Glad we’re going to move forward with the NSF proposal.  Earl’s group will
meet next week, the rest of us in two weeks.

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