[Accessibility] Accessibility minutes 10/19/05

John Goldthwaite jgoldthwaite at yahoo.com
Wed Oct 26 12:23:28 PDT 2005


	
10/19/05 Minutes FSG Accessibility Workgroup

Bill Hanaman
Gunnar Schmidt
Olaf Schmidt
Janina Sajka
John Goldthwaite
George Kraft		
Catherine Lawst
Peter Korn
Earl Johnson
			

Janina- AT SPI traffic has been good, progress in
leaps and bounds, next Meeting?
Catherine- the next meeting will be a week from
Friday.
Janina- I distributed a brief outline for the NSF
final report.  I mentioned - meeting on
magnification made significant progress. Could
someone write a paragraph on the magnification
meeting.  We could use little summaries on each
meeting and that could be an adequate report.  
Earl- I can’t find the report in my email.  We
did the functional spec, some formatting
problems.  Will fix and notify people when it is
ready.

Bill- I have been posting updates to the AT list
and to ~billh, the new stuff is marked since
1.7.0;  1.7.0 doesn’t exist.  When we decide on
the release, we’ll release 1.7.0.  

Janina - we had several sessions on AT/SPI. 
Bill, could you do a summary of those? 

Bill-  yes, I can do that,.  Peter, maybe you and
I could do a paragraph on the magnification.

Olaf- ... could do ...  KDE speech dispatcher,  
Bill- we don’t have to reached a consensus on
each topic, just that the different parties met
and have been in contact since to discuss the
topics.
Janina- I agree, we cannot expect to have
consensus on each topic.  We had many of the key
people from many areas.  Olaf, I’d be happy to
help you with that if you would start a draft. 
It doesn’t have to be lengthy.
Peter- we were able to enumerate all the
problems, we
Janina- the problems statement was an outcome.

Bill- There has been code written for Speech
dispatcher for Gnome speech although it hasn’t
been integrated.  That was some thing as a r
Olaf - plan for use of speech dispatcher in KDE
4.
Earl- in other area- keyboard access in KDE.  I
could do a couple of paragraphs.
Olaf- accessX feature for the next version we
have implemented everything that as been
discussed here.

Janina- in the area of Braille, Coordination
between several communities 
initiated, including two French development
groups who had not previously coordinated
efforts.  Some of the French folks had not met
each other before the conference.

Earl- can we use some of the material from the
pre-conference material?
Janina- yes, we can use that.  Also include list
of participants, participants by organization and
those of have become active with the project
since the conference.
Olaf- which category?
Janina- is it useful to breakout the participants
by activity
John- you don’t need to much.  I believe it is
primarily for the program officer’s use and he
won’t have time to read too much detail.

Janina- getting speech in kernel, bios and boot
loader.  We looked at future some.  Bill will
cover some with doc and ..     Would Monday be a
problem for deadline for the paragraph?  Would
people like a full document sooner?
Earl- we should get our material to you by Monday
and you’ll integrated it?
Janina- yes

Olaf- I just posted a note on patents.  We need
to check the standards proposals to see that
there are no patents.  - open source
representation of the standard.  GPLL ,, SUN
would not be able to use that for Solaris unless
they changed the license.  Must be available 

Peter- are you familiar with the statement Sun
made in Massachusetts about ..  A summary- any
piece of code that reads the open document format
is free from any patents Sun holds.

Olaf- that goes beyond what I suggest
Peter- yes, any code that implements the
accessibility architecture is free from patents.
Olaf- I don’t know how important it is... LSB
library licensing.. Patents are a different
thing.  Basicly, that would be easier and
shorter, if all the companies participating would
be happy with such language.
Peter- may take longer for all companies to gain
approval of their legal departments.  
Olaf- with my language there is the issues of
sub- patent.  If we use my approach all the
parties in this working group, each would have to
state their patents before releasing...    It is
some thing for the potential pat to discuss..

Peter- we don’t have any participation from Apple
and Microsoft who have done much work in this
area and may hold patents in the area.  If they
do participate this language would then
neutralize those patents if they wish to
participate.

Janina- do we want some statement like this to go
out with the keyboard spec?
Peter- I would not want to hold up the keyboard
spec for this language.  This is non-trivial
language.
Bill- because the prior art of the keyboard spec
is available in open licence, there is low
probability of a problem.  Olaf’s idea is
important and ...
Olaf- If someone found such a problem, KDE would
have to break
Bill- with patents, we don’t have the resources
to do an exhaustive patent search.  We could
easily inadvertently violate a patent.
Janina- we can’t indemnify anyone, we’d just have
to make a statement that...
Bill- what Peter said- we don’t need to describe
the terms before we release the keyboard spec. 
We can apply the policy retroactively to the
spec.
Olaf- could we have a statement of intent on the
patent issue?
Peter- its one thing for us as individuals to
make a statement but we lack the authority within
the company to make a statement.
George- It would me nice if the FSG had not
shelved there patent policy.  All the companies
and agreed to support FSG and that would bind
them to it.
Peter- are you volunteering to go back to the
board on that question?
George- I can do that.

Earl-..
Peter- it would be a simple statement, if it
relates to accessibility, we’re not going to sue
you on that.
George- I’ll send a note to Jim Zemlin.
Olaf- its clear we don’t want to standardize on
anything were there is a software patent
Peter- I don’t think that’s the right approach,
better to say that any patent that might impair
this work, we pledge that any patent we have will
not be used against any signer of the spec...
Olaf- many software patents are very broad and it
is questionable whether they will hold up in
court...
Peter- if there is a patent that Sun, Adobe, IBM
holds which may be a problem, that would
neutralize it.

Olaf- I was thinking of a third party
Peter- that will be a small group compared to the
unknown third party group.
Olaf- the SUN statement approach is a far better
approach, could you send it to the list?

Janina- I propose we revisit this in two weeks. 
We should have some paragraphs to discuss next
week.  I must say I have enjoyed the joint
authoring process with this group.  John will
send out a list of the assignments.







		
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