[Accessibility] October 11 FSG Accessibility minutes .

[David Bolter]

Hi Bill, All,

Agreed!  Coincidentally a couple messages earlier in my inbox I received 
an email detailing some resources some students here will be using for a 
little project.  They are developing a firefox toolbar item to check 
colour contrast etc.  I felt these links might be worth sharing here.  
If this kind of thing is inappropriate for this list please let me know.

Color deficiency simulator:
http://www.visibone.com/colorblind/

another simulator:
http://www.vischeck.com/

Color perception paper:
http://www.4colorvision.com/files/colorcontrperf.htm#equations

Color tool:
http://www.colorfield.com/index.html

Example color contrast ratios:
http://juicystudio.com/services/coloursaferatio.php

Color blindness theory:
http://steve.hollasch.net/cgindex/color/color-blind.html

Study showing accessibility barriers:
(see Table 5 - all groups, except completly blind, identified poor color 
contrast as a problem.)
http://www.drc-gb.org/PDF/2.pdf

Study showing algorithm can predict which colors people find readable:
http://www.aprompt.ca/WebPageColors.html

Color FAQ:
http://www.poynton.com/notes/colour_and_gamma/ColorFAQ.html


cheers,
David

Bill Haneman wrote:
> Hi:
>
> I have a couple of comments about the minutes:
>   
>> We also discussed color themes. Many applications need more colors 
>> than KDE and Gnome provide. Will be getting suggestions together.
>>     
> This came up again on the gnome-accessibility mailing list, in the 
> context of providing color-blindness support for apps that draw things 
> like pie charts, etc. it's certainly an important problem that needs a 
> solution.
>   
>> Olaf- has there been any discussion of the accessibility independent 
>> of Bill Hanaman?
>> Janina- said there was a meeting in which they got way down into the 
>> details. Didn’t do that at the Gnome meeting since many people would 
>> have been lost in that discussion. It was mainly an introductory day. 
>> We thought we’d have an agenda starting at 8:30 to 5 but the 
>> organizers wanted everyone in plenary meetings until 10:30 the morning 
>> and after 3 in the afternoon so we had 3 hours less than we expected 
>> and things had to be compacted. We had to remove the session on 
>> testing and that was moved to Saturday before the access meeting 
>> occurred so I missed that.
>>     
> We got down into a lot of technical detail on Saturday and again on 
> Monday. The plenary sessions were also developer sessions, which took 
> place before the break-out groups met. The accessibility-related 
> breakout groups and the Saturday accessibility group reported back to 
> the morning and afternoon plenary sessions several times over the 
> weekend. Some pretty important and encouraging things emerged from this, 
> so I think this was a very positive set of meetings.
>
> On Tuesday and Wednesday I attended a mozilla accessibility 
> summit/hackfest which is still going on. Good progress is being made 
> there too, and I understand that the latest versions (beta, perhaps?) of 
> Firefox 3 already are substantially accessible via orca, which is a big 
> improvement over Firefox 2. For stability reasons I would suggest that 
> only early adopters and testers use Firefox 3 at the moment, but the 
> accessibility support seems much improved.
>
>   
>> Olaf- the KDE conference was oriented toward developers so it was much 
>> more technical.
>>     
> There may be some confusion about this in the minutes; actually the 
> Gnome conference was intended to be entirely a developer conference as 
> well. It is true that some Mass folks showed up who were not developers 
> but the focus of the discussions was on topics of relevance to 
> developers. In some cases these topics were discussed from an end-user 
> perspective but the intended policies and plans that came out of the 
> discussion were still aimed at developers. Overall, having attended both 
> conferences, I would say the Gnome one was at least as developer-centric 
> as the KDE one.
>
> Regards,
>
> Bill
>
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