[Accessibility] FSGA Minutes for October 11, Draft #2

[Janina Sajka]

10/11/06 FSG Accessibility minutes    .

Attending:                 
Gunner Schmidt
Olaf Schmidt
Janina Sajka
John Goldthwaite
Gary Cramblett
Cathy Laws
Doug Beattie

John will catch up on the notes from 8/30 and make corrections to 9/6 notes.
One correction to last week - AOL was added to the TIETAC.  Last weeks notes
approved with this change.

Janina-Larry Weiss asked us to look at the Freestandards website for
accessibility.  It passed the W3C validator with no problems.  Janina found
them usable but some problems, a search field is the first field and causes
problems - try to avoid have an open field as the first item on the page -
this makes it easier to scroll down the page with the screenreader.

Gunner- You need to put cursor in text field if it there.

Janina- still using lynx so it is

Doug- do we know Dave Bolter?

Janina- heÂ’s the primary programmer on the GOK on-screen keyboard

Doug- Okay, heÂ’s added to the list

Janina- a number of Novell people were at the Gnome accessibility conference
last week.. At least 3 , some from their Cambridge Usability center.  Also
people from WebAIM, Redhat, and State of Massachusetts IDT department, There
was a wide range of experience in accessibility, some new people, some of the
accessibility developers.  Bill did a very cogent job of organizing the talk
on the ATK AT/SPI architecture.  A number of people asked for the slides.
There werea  number of demoÂ’s archer, gok, etc.   Discussion in the
afternoon. Using accessibility as test method for desktop- for
interoperability testing not accessibility. This was all on Sunday,
which is the only day I attended.

Olaf- small KDE meeting in Dublin.  Gunner presented general intro to AT/SPI.
Olaf presented a how to session for programmers. Things that have an impact on
access- keyboard layout.  Many questions on how to do things.  For bigger
picture - we had meetings with Gary to plan how to complete the implementation
of AT-SPI in KDE. Later in the day there were presentations and general talks.
Still need to summarize this for the group but I will leave to Bill Hanaman
and Gary.  We also discussed color themes.  Many applications need more colors
than KDE and Gnome  provide.  Will be getting suggestions together.    

Janina- I agree we need both Gary and Bill on the call for the deeper
discussion.

Gary- Harrald is a key player in the discussion so we need Harrald and Bill at
a minimum. IÂ’d like to see that continued in a sub-forum.

Janina- I will email Bill and Harrald and organize that.

Gary- I think Harrald is busy with their 4.2 release.

Janina- when is the release date for 4.2?

Olaf- 4.2 was released last week.

Janina- Okay so maybe Harrald is more available now.

Gary- you mentioned that a couple of Massachusetts ITD people at Gnome.  I
observed that they tended to look at Free and open source as a product to be
purchased.  They didnÂ’t realize the Mass could participate in the
development.

Janina- they mentioned that it was under discussion but I donÂ’t know what
the impediment is.  If they are getting applications to free, maybe they would
like to contribute some of the financial resources to provide the kind of
support they would like.  There is more than programming- support,
documentation.  That was discussed at Gnome and I think they understand that
better than they did last year.  The more interested they are in adopting the
technology, the more they maybe willing to become involved.  They seem to be
uncertain whether this an opportunity or trap.  It seems that they are making
progress.

Gary- I know they have to follow acquisition regulations so what seems obvious
to us may be a serious problem for them.

Janina- Massachusetts is still figuring out what their standard should be and
how to judge candidate applications.  In terms of accessibility, no one from
the Mass. ITD has any Linux/Unix accessibility experience.  The access person has some
experience with remote access shell but some time ago.  This is Joe Lazzaro
who is very smart and competent.  I donÂ’t think Open Office and Firefox are
ready but by the time they are perhaps Massachusetts will be ready to
implement.

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.

Janina: DidnÂ’t do that at the Sunday Gnome meeting since many people would
have been lost in that discussion.  It was more of an overview day.  We
thought weÂ’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.

Olaf- the KDE conference was oriented toward developers so it was much more
technical.

Janina- the new W3C guidance will talk more about contrast when
discussing colors.  There will be something that you can objectively measure.  

Olaf- I looked at that. We wanted to allow the user to change the colors
according to their needs in addition to contrast.

Janina- weÂ’ll yield back the rest of the time today and meet again next
week when we should have a more of the group with us.

Olaf- We asked that a question on software patents be taken to FSG board?  Has
this been discussed?

Janina- I hasnÂ’t yet.  There has been a request to revisit all the issues
around intellectual property.  We and other groups have requested that and the
board will be working on that which would include software patents.  DidnÂ’t
you provide us with a draft last year?

Olaf- the idea was that companies that participate in FSG would do something
similar to that in Open Documents. Companies participating in FSG would give
up related patent rights.  The keyboard is relatively simple.

Janina- your recollection is that we came up with

Olaf- George said he wanted to discuss it with the FSG board.  

Janina- we should come up with the guidance we would recommend to the FSG
board.  It should be something that will sit well with us.  I will put that on
the agenda, perhaps next week.  We need to have more people here to have a
useful discussion.

Olaf- I donÂ’t think the patent is urgent but wanted to discuss it.

Janina- it is not urgent but the discussion will take a while.  We need that
in place before releasing the AT/SPI standard. If we wish to get AT/SPI out in
2007 we need to resolve the intellectual property issues.

John Goldthwaite
jgoldthwaite at yahoo.com
828 885-5304
Additions and corrections added by Janina Sajka


Addendum From Bill Haneman:

I have a couple of comments about the minutes:
> We also discussed color themes [at the Gnome Developer Conference]. 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.

> Janina: DidnÂ’t do that at the Sunday Gnome meeting since many people would 
> have been lost in that discussion. It was more of an overview day. 
> We thought weÂ’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

-- 

Janina Sajka				Phone: +1.202.595.7777
Partner, Capital Accessibility LLC	http://CapitalAccessibility.Com

Marketing the Owasys 22C talking screenless cell phone in the U.S. and Canada--Go to http://ScreenlessPhone.Com to learn more.

Chair, Accessibility Workgroup		Free Standards Group (FSG)
janina at freestandards.org		http://a11y.org