[Accessibility] Notes from 9/21 teleconference

Catherine Laws claws at us.ibm.com
Thu Sep 22 10:50:40 PDT 2005


Since no one officially took minutes yesterday, here are some notes I took.
Please correct any technical inaccuracies.

Attendees:
Sun: Bill Haneman, Earl Johnson, Peter Korn
FSG: Janina Sajka
KDE: Olaf Schmidt
IBM: George Kraft, Cathy Laws, Randy Horwitz

- Statement on Desktop Accessibility Development:
http://accessibility.freestandards.org/a11yweb/forms/soi.php
1 new signature from Calum Benson. Go ahead and publish. Earl Johnson was
asked to sign it. George changed date to publication date of 9/21/05.
Need to publish it to a lot of lists. Everyone send in their list of
addresses to the FSG accessibility list.
Also, post keyboard access spec (
http://accessibility.freestandards.org/a11yspecs/kbd/AccessX-func-spec.html
).
Bill - Post on Gnome list or GAP main page.
Janina - write to Amanda McPherson, the FSG PR person, to post it.
Olaf - post on acessibility KDE list and LSB.

- Janina:  LinuxWorld Expo in Frankfurt, Germany, November 15 - 17
http://www.linuxworldexpo.de/linux_messe.php?lang=en
Request for ODF (Open Document Format) meeting there.  Interest from the
Irish government and EU. Janina will look into it.

- Earl: Keyboard GAP Analysis: 4 items (can't reference posting because
archives are not there)
1. Turning off features, timeout when no activity, and never timeout - XKB
only handles StickyKeys and SlowKeys
Earl -  Remove 7.5 (the never timeout option) because it is the same way
things are already for BounceKeys, MouseKyes, ToggleKeys
Bill - What's the benefit of the timeout for the target end user? Only
indirectly because it improves usability and acceptance by other
non-disabled users in a shared, multi-user environment.
Janina - Does it hurt our credability? I enabled earcons all the time at
the agency where I worked and I got lots of negative feedback. Does the
feature timeout when you logout of the session?
Olaf - If someone leaves the computer without logging out, other users will
be affected. We need to be able to turn off the feature more than worry
about the timeout.
Earl - We don't say what the environment really is, whether it is a single
user, multi-users that log out, or a library type of environment where
users don't log out. Does it make sense to specify this in our spec?
Janina - Just include a footnote to document this. Run the spec through
this group for the final wording.

2. No keyboard gesture for turning on/off MouseKeys and RepeatKeys.
Bill - Shouldn't draw attention to these. Maybe put in an addendum.
Janina - If it needs to be addressed in the future, let the public bring it
up.
Bill - Set expectations. This isn't a new invention, just matches
expectations of keyboard functions found on other systems.

3. Audible signal.
Earl - Just trying to match what's on other platforms at a lower level
(beeps instead of up and down tones.) Beeps are not as distinguishing as
tones.
Bill - Some platforms are not capable of generating different tones.
Janina - Old ToggleKeys is out there.
Peter - If the spec just said there had to be different beeps to map to
different things, that might be enough.
Bill - Intentionally omitted which tones. If we went back and included
language from KDE spec about tones, how many platforms are we excluding?
George - In conformance test, for UNIX LSB, we say you must do this if you
have this on your system, but if your system doesn't have it, you don't
have to comply.
Bill - We don't control implementation, so we can't write that in the spec
about how to do different beeps. Can't rewrite XKB.
Peter - So what's wrong with saying platforms don't conform?
Let's table this conversation.

4. Visual Bell.
Earl and others - Functionality in XKB but removed because no part of KB
access. Targeted for hearing impaired. Argument for keeping it in - because
there is no other place for it. It's semi-orthogonal - it's serving another
type of user.
Bill - it's associated with KB not type of user.
Janina - it's been here historically.
George - XLIB KB also has it. But that's an implementation. Hate to specify
just part of a library.
Bill - Huge effort to write a conformance test for all of XKB. Our spec are
partly about desktops and partly about libraries. Visual Bell is such a
minimal feature for the hearing impaired compared to ShowSounds. But it
still has value and it is what ought to be there even though it is not new
invention and not comprehensive.

Janina - Finish up next week.
Peter - Reference Trace as the origin for all of this, not Windows.

Cathy Laws

IBM Accessibility Center, WW Strategic Platform Enablement
11501 Burnet Road,  Bldg 904 Office 5F017, Austin, Texas 78758
Phone: (512) 838-4595 or (512)838-2308, FAX: (512) 246-8502
E-mail: claws at us.ibm.com, Web: http://www.ibm.com/able

A word aptly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver.




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