[Accessibility] Minutes with Pete's name spelled correctly

john goldthwaite jgoldthwaite at yahoo.com
Fri Feb 11 07:44:34 PST 2005


Accessibility Conference Call Minutes February 9, 2005

Attendees (East to West): 

Gunnar Schmidt
Bill Haneman
Matthew Wilcox
Janina Sajka
John Goldthwaite
Pete Brunet
George Kraft
Larry Weiss
Doug Beattie
Earl Johnson 


1. Welcome and Agenda Review
 
2. Review of minutes  	Neil’s notes were posted to IRC
for review. IRC.Freestandards.org channel #a11y    No
objections - Approved as posted.

Bill – How do we get the password for archive?  
George- You can ask it to send the password again.

Janina- We need to go through conference audio and get
all the action items recorded.  Earl sent out an item.
Earl- I sent out a copy of the keyboard access
functional spec to everyone that attended the
conferences.  I haven’t gotten any responses yet. 
Please provide feedback.  
George- it is checked in as pdf so you can get it from
gforge also.  If you would comment to there it will
create a good record.  As we get more formalized, we
can use Bugzilla, for now pull them from the email.
Bill- thanks George, for handling the CVS, that’s very
helpful.
Janina- if you get comment from someone who is not on
the list, please forward that to the list for
distribution so we don’t miss any comments.  
George- don’t want my email out there, do we have
anyone’s email alias on the site.
Janina- we could set up a comment account on the a11y?
George- they can always sign up on the site but check
that they don’t want mail, that would 
 Earl- sign up to access.  Will open up to spam.
Bill- how about, create an alias account that can send
comments to that redirects to the list.  Then turn it
off after the comment period is over. 
Account is a redirect that is a member of the list,
for a period of time email sent to it gets on the
list.
George- I’ll ask Stuart Anderson how to set it up.
Janina- sounds like something we will use repeatedly
so it would be good to know.
George- LSB was using anonymous Bugzilla submissions.
Doug – we didn’t want to have anonymous.  We want to
be able to check back if we needed clarification on
their comment.  If we had questions, we had to throw
the comments away.

Janina- someone noticed that the main list is not
readable, although all the other ones are readable.  
We must have been protecting email addresses.
George- I will take a action item to fix that.

Meeting Follow up
Janina- Hynek and Mark Mulkahey have started talking
about the audio requirements.  Do we need to set up
some separate list for them.
Bill- we can use the current one for now.
George- could you ask them to start posting to the
distribution lists.
Janina- may want to set up a couple ad hoc groups but
we can use the I/O list for now.

Janina- any comments on processes at the conference. 
We didn’t talk about the wireless before hand and had
some problems.  We set up the guerrilla network to get
around the problems with the College’s network.
Doug- we could assign a couple of people to make sure
we have this taken care of before the next meeting.
Janina- it would be good to have a session to note the
problems before we forget.  The next location needs to
be a room where we can bring water and coffee. 
Several of the speakers had problems getting through
their sessions without some water.  Also need to
debrief Stewart and Kevin about the audio and video
problems.  Can we use this number, George?
George- just let me know when you’ll be doing it.

Willy- would like to discuss getting involved with the
BIOS group.  Looking at Intel – tiano-core.  Is it
better to have a accessibility discussion on the
tiano-core site or a BIOS discussion on a11y?

Doug- we would be guests there…
Willy- that sounds like two votes for doing things
with them. 

Janina-  want to know issues are being handled if it
is not in our scope.  Some of us may participate or
find someone from the area to do it.  We can find
people who are interested and we just need to.  Please
send out the webpage url.  That is very promising
stuff.  I hadn’t thought we could load alternative
drivers that early.
Willy-  may be able to see BIOS pull it from x
Bill- any way we can see a public archive if we’re not
actively involved?
Willy- it is public so you should be
Bill-  I have an action item with Harald, Jonathan and
to make a public statement on AT/SPI that is time
sensitive.
George- add me to that.

Janina- I’ve been chair since early on.  The position
should be elected periodically, no specific time. This
would be a good time for election.  I’ll stand again.
Doug- we need to decide who is a member of the group
and eligible to vote.
We have some guidelines from the other groups, George
is familiar with them.
Janina- well taken.  Is there any office guidance?
George- LSB doesn’t have guidelines but Free Standards
does and I will forward those to you.
Janina- this seems like a good time to decide what the
term of office is and when to hold election.  

Bill- we achieved a lot in firming up our plan.  Have
we done any strategies on how we will resource the
validation tests?   We have good plans on producing
the specifications.  How do we resource?

Janina- I have an action item to get with Mike
Paciello to discuss other resources.  We have a call
scheduled for Friday.  Did this come up in the
resource session?
George-  you have to define the project, size it,
determine resources.  FSG can help some but mostly it
requires going to companies and trying to recruit
people.  There are two cases where we have gotten
outside money.  The LSB had purchased tests for
testing vendors.  LSB is trying to purchase more for
$500,000 but haven’t raised the money.   Testing code
isn’t too sexy so you have to pay people to work on
it.

Doug- we have people at NIST that looking for ways
they can create the skeletons of test suites.  These
would take assertions.  Beyond that we haven’t had
discussion about government funding.  We have talk
some about getting universities to help with the
coding.
Janina-  we’ll have to find the resources, hopefully
we won’t have to write it ourselves.

John- It may be difficult to do it with university
students.  We don’t have any continuity with students
as they are turning over fairly rapidly.  We should
see if we can find computer science professors who do
research on testing and see if they feel these are
valid research topics for their grad students. 
Georgia Tech and other universities have a Research
Institutes that do contract work and can hire student
assistants and GRAs to do the work but a firm that has
expertise in testing software might be more
productive.   We might also be able to get funding
from the US government via a project organized by the
Department 508 coordinators.   Dr. Bill Peterson, who
is the program director for half of the Dept. of
Education Rehabilitation Engineering research centers
( including those at the Trace Center ) is leaving
that position and taking the job as Director of the
508 program at the Dept. of Homeland Security.  We
should be able to get Bill to raise this with the
other 508 coordinators and see if they can engineer
some funding for us.

Doug- we should be able to get funds from Foundations.
 If we can get corporate funding they might match it.
Janina- could be, it would give them a way to test. 
Now they just have the VPAT which is subjective at
best.
Doug- we should also see if the European participants
can get funds from the EU.



Bill-  once we have the spec’s in hand, it will give
us a better case for funding. We want to make sure we
have the resources so that we can hand it off.

Janina-  we need to keep things moving,  didn’t expect
you to say later this year, that’s great.

Janina-need to think about when to have another face
to face.  We likely need to get the subgroups together
first for spec writing.  Willy suggested Ottawa in
July. 

John-  I looked into the NATO Research Workshops
http://www.nato.int/science/   They are now funding
only security and terrorism related topics except for
topics proposed by the new members Bulgaria and
Romania.

Doug- my cousin retired from NATO language school but
is still working for them, I’ll talk to him about it.

Bill- some of us will have difficulty traveling again
this year.  I have seen a couple of talks that were
funded by NATO so they seem to have some interest. 
Likewise there are activities in the EU but there
funding is more for a corporate model.  

(John- The EU funds a number of projects via their
Information Society Technology programs.  They require
participation for at several partners with inclusion
of corporate, university and disability organizations.
  http://www.cordis.lu/ist/  Carlos Velasco and Jan
Engelen (Kris’s advisor) have had several of these
grants and could help us organize those )



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