[Accessibility] Draft minutes for 11/10/04

[John Goldthwaite]

I was having a hard time keeping up with the conversation yesterday.  Please
check this over and if you can fill in some of the blanks, send it to me.
Thanks.


Accessibility meeting 11/10/04

Doug Beatty
Sandy Gabrielli
John Goldthwaite
Bill Haneman
Earl Johnson
Peter Korn
George Kraft
Janina Sajka
Gunnar Schmidt
Matthew Wilcox
Allen Wilson

Minutes:  11/03 minutes approved as submitted.
Janina- we have a few odds and ends to deal with, Sandy has been handling
many of them.
Sandy- I talked to Scott Belden director of the Hawaii Open Source Education
Foundation about doing a talk at lunch on Tuesday.
Earl- how much time are you thinking of?
Sandy- maybe a half hour during lunch.
Janina- during lunch makes sense.
Bill- what’s the purpose of the talk?  We need to remember that this is a
working meeting
Sandy- just to let you know about what is going on in Hawaii.
Bill- I tend to think we have less time that we think we have.
Earl- [question on equipment to do the audio streaming for the conference ]
Sandy- I am going to talk to HOSEF about some resources.  We’ll have a Linux
lab set up at the conference.  We’ll

Janina- he is inviting us to come early to make a presentation on
accessibility or demo.
Sandy-  his organization is the only one on Linux in the state and he has
been trying to learn about accessibility.  They are interested for special
ed and education efforts.
Janina- they work around the Pacific, not just Hawaii.  They’re doing
recycling.

Sandy- I’ll send the link about the conference to the group.  It is a good
match for us.
Janina- if he can set up streaming servers and make sure those are working,
that would be great.
Sandy-  they will have the equipment set up for their conference during the
prior week and will just have to move the servers over to our area.
Earl- telephone set up?
Sandy- there is a Polycom system in the room.  It would be good to have a
way to dial into the room.
Earl- we have several people that will want to teleconf.
Bill- some are very important contributors who don’t want to travel to the
US for the conference so we need to have methods for them to participate.
  -  [discussion  on audio facilities]
Bill- it would be better to have live mikes.
Janina-
Doug- I checked and found that I need to update several components for the
streaming software to run on my Suse system..   If they have a Debian system
they might not have to.   We could talk to Scott today and go through these
details.
Janina- George, how many responses have we had to the invitations?  Lets go
through the list and if necessary make some personal calls to talk to them.
We should put ourselves on the list as well at a11y.org.

[ reviewed the A list and people volunteered to call each attendee.  Sandy
will forward the assignments to Peter and he will add it to the blog running
list.   ]
Janina- I will create a B list that we can discuss next week.

Janina- I’m reasonably confident that we can offer the audio over the web.
I just saw a new VoIP vendor in Europe that’s offering transatlantic for a
few cents a minute.
Doup- I use skyp

Janina- If you think of other people, send them to me.  I’ll have a B list
to Peter by Friday and the group can review his page before the next
meeting.
Sandy- Neil is also making a list of the people we have contacted over the
last year.
Janina- that’s good for Asia Rim projects, remember this is a working
meeting and not instructional.
Allen- suggested contacting Chinese Red Flag project.
Janina- send me the contact info to me, Allen.   Sandy, Doug and I have
worked on the agenda.  If V2 does come out we will give them a slot.   They
will become an ISO work group, this is future technology that we want the
hear about.  Either Shari Trewin or Gottfried can give a presentation on V2.
We are still playing with day one but it is largely settled.
Earl- we talked about convergent ISO standards.
Janina- especially those standards that we should know about or have a
position on.  Bill we’ve given you almost all of Day 2 for AT-SPI.  We
thought an entire day is needed.  If you could see how to divide the time
between topics.
Peter- I’ll do it.  I’ll have a look at it offline.
Sandy- Neil expressed an interest in moderating the Future technology
session on Friday.
Janina- we’d welcome that.

Janina- No one has added anything to the Friday session.

We spend most of our time on item 1- AT-
We also set a goal to add as much as we can by the time Longhorn ships.

Earl- we want to have accessibility requirements for the people
Janina- that fits under item 2
Bill- I’m concerted about , it says engineering research.  That’s is out of
scope for us.  We can use current and emerging technology, but we don’t have
the resources needed for research.
Janina-  The things we will want to put out are the requirements for
accessibility.  The rest of community is not going to produce technology for
accessibility,  We are going have to provide the plan for achieving it in
the course of other development.
Example- magnification,  the right way to deal with the whole morass around
audio.
We need to discuss what kind of features are needed in audio to support
accessibility.
Earl- yes we can pass it off to the group working on audio.
Janina- built in vs. bolt on.  We have magnification that we haven’t put
into a block.  I broke into 2 pieces.  The TTS and the services that a TTS
will need.
Earl- that sounds like beginning to flesh out what the requirements.
Janina- we owe NSF a lick and a promise on the future stuff.  I had a few
items under that area.
Problems?
Sandy- I like the idea of have blocks of time for breakout sessions by
topic.  If we through those in a separate sessions.
Earl- what do we have as open 
.
Janina-  we have less than 12 hours open.  I suspect we have about 6 open.
We’ll need an hour on magnification and an hour on ..
Next week we’ll get reports on the phone calls to individuals.  If the
person can’t come, ask them who else could cover that role.  We’ll continue
to flesh out the agenda, probably for the rest of November.  In Dec. and
Jan. we can work on some advanced positions on some of the topics.   Sandy,
Earl, Randy and Janina will conference on Friday to work on the agenda.

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