...
The morning session's log is attached and available via the following url: osa-morning.txt
The afternoon session's log is also attached and available via the following url: osa-afternoon.txt
Note that all timestamps are Eastern Daylight Time. The full day's log is follows in plain text:
08:11 -!- davidb [davidb@atrc-3D52FB31.ca.mozilla.com] has joined #OSA
08:12 < davidb> hi jamon
08:38 -!- davidb changed the topic of #OSA to: Open Source Accessibility http://bit.ly/U53H7
08:42 -!- michelle [michelle@atrc-460ECAD4.cpe.net.cable.rogers.com] has joined #OSA
08:46 < davidb> hi michelle :)
08:46 < michelle> hi davidb!
08:46 < michelle> are you in Vancouver?
08:49 < davidb> michelle: unfortunately not! nancie is limiting my travel :)
08:50 < davidb> and i'm already heading to cali for a week later this month
08:50 < michelle> ah
08:51 < michelle> looks like the meeting will be really interesting
08:51 < davidb> michelle: do you know if there is a known start time for the meeting?
08:51 < michelle> I figured I could stay a little in touch here but it seems like it's mostly the folks not at the meeting
08:52 < michelle> this says 8:30 but that would be vancouver time: http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Draft+Agenda+OSA
08:52 < michelle> so I guess 11:30
09:52 < davidb> hmm ok i might miss the first bit
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11:23 -!- walterbender [d106da33@atrc-CC4ADA36.atrc.utoronto.ca] has joined #OSA
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11:29 < richardschwerdtfeger> Good morning
11:30 < davidb> hi richardschwerdtfeger :)
11:30 < davidb> hi walterbender yura michelle
11:30 < richardschwerdtfeger> Does the conference start soon?
11:30 < michelle> hi everyone
11:30 < davidb> I *think* so.
11:30 < richardschwerdtfeger> ok
11:30 < davidb> I can't call in just yet.
11:30 < richardschwerdtfeger> I am dialed in but am getting the folksy music
11:31 < yura> hi davidb
11:31 < richardschwerdtfeger> not bad
11:32 <@jamon> hi davidb, we're running a phone line from across the building
11:32 -!- mode/#OSA [-o jamon] by jamon
11:32 < richardschwerdtfeger> that must be a really long wire :-)
11:33 < jamon> heh, yes, at least 50' just in the room, not sure where it goes after that
11:34 < richardschwerdtfeger> Hi Jamon - I am Rich and work for IBM
11:34 < jamon> hi richardschwerdtfeger, Jamon here, from the ATRC
11:37 < davidb> Jamon can build an apache server out of paperclips.
11:38 < jamon> ok, phone update, because of the construction, most of the phone lines to the building aren't working
11:38 < jamon> the building technician has a 300' extension he's trying at the moment
11:38 < davidb> skype?
11:38 < richardschwerdtfeger> I just got bumped off
11:44 < walterbender> will someone ping us when the phone line is ready?
11:45 < davidb> jamon: ^
11:50 -!- becka11y [bgibson@atrc-CAB74533.bluebird.ibm.com] has joined #OSA
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11:59 < Conference> check check one two
11:59 * davidb steps out for lunch
12:02 < Conference> Jutta: FYI, the phone lines to the building have been cut for construction, so we are trying to deal with the fact that we have no way to participate in the teleconference. But I think we have a solution.
12:02 < richardschwerdtfeger> ouch
12:03 < richardschwerdtfeger> what is that - skype?
12:03 < Conference> Hi IRC people - I'm Kirsten and I'll be your friendly transcriber today.
12:03 < richardschwerdtfeger> I see
12:03 -!- eeejay [eitan@1BCC0DA0.DC2756F6.49581133.IP] has joined #OSA
12:03 < richardschwerdtfeger> so how do us deaf people raise our hands?
12:03 < Conference> And yes, they're trying some things with Skype.
12:03 -!- davidb is now known as davidb_lunch
12:03 < richardschwerdtfeger> :-)
12:03 < eeejay> hello
12:04 < Conference> Everyone can see the channel - so you could ask a question in the channel.
12:05 < Conference> Jutta: So if I can get everyone's attention, and I think we'll try to begin.
12:05 < Conference> J: Is this projecting to the back? No.
12:05 < Conference> J: So welcome, everyone, to the Open Source Accessibility FOrum. We have had a few challenges this morning.
12:05 < Conference> The reason we're all running around is because the phone lines to the building have been cut.
12:06 < Conference> We have no way of connecting in other than Skype, and we're trying to find ways of hooking Skype into the audio system.
12:06 < Conference> How many people need Skype to connect?
12:06 < Conference> About 8-10.
12:06 -!- colin [colin@407AB422.3D46BDBB.49581133.IP] has joined #OSA
12:06 < Conference> I have a Skype teleconference number we can use...
12:06 < Conference> J: I think we're set. In terms of logistics, a few things I should tell you. Wifi instructions are on the back of your nametag.
12:06 < richardschwerdtfeger> Pina does not have an IRC client
12:06 < colin> Hey all, we're close to getting our audio issues solved here.
12:06 -!- WillieWalker [wwalker@FC0354DD.59F5993A.49581133.IP] has joined #OSA
12:06 < Conference> If you have trouble, raise your hand and someone will come and help you.
12:07 < colin> Give us about five more minutes, and you'll have us on the bridge.
12:07 < Conference> We have an IRC channel and we have Kirsten here who has agreed to transcribe and will be transcribing onto the IRC channel the discussions happening both here and in the teleconference.
12:07 -!- OSA-User-04 [80bd7124@atrc-CC4ADA36.atrc.utoronto.ca] has joined #OSA
12:07 < Conference> Hopefully the IRC will be a good backup if you have trouble hearing.
12:07 < richardschwerdtfeger> where do we hook in over voice
12:07 < Conference> Thanks so much, everyone, for making it here - there's been quite a few travel stories and we'll have to swap them at dinner.
12:08 < Conference> I haven't been shaking peoples' hands or giving them hugs - two weeks ago I was in a bicycle accident and broke three ribs and my right hand.
12:08 -!- Jan [chatzilla@6EEFCFCF.1F12ED18.49581133.IP] has joined #OSA
12:08 < Conference> So I won't be shaking peoples' hands or hugging them on my right side. That's why the homework assignments came out so late.
12:08 -!- bcaldwell [bcaldwell@atrc-347EAB50.trace.wisc.edu] has joined #OSA
12:08 < Conference> My son wrote a song called "The Amazing Healing Machine" because he saw all the contusions and scrapes. But I still look pretty beat up.
12:09 < Conference> One of the things I want to do as our first order of business is thank UNESCO, because they have made this possible and has graciously agreed to not only sponsor this and help many of you get here, but also has shown a great deal of interest in this particular topic and help move it along quite admirably over the last two years.
12:09 < Conference> We have from UNESCO Mr. Abdul Waheed Khan, who is Information & Communication at UNESCO. His bio and all the bios are up on the wiki.
12:10 < Conference> In order to do justice to all the things Mr. Khan has accomplished over the several years in his post, it would take quite a while, so I invite you to read thebio on the wiki.
12:10 < Conference> Inviting Mr. Khan to come up and talk about UNESCO's interests in this area.
12:10 < Conference> (Member) 3 or 4 people are connected but aren't here (in the teleconference)
12:11 < Conference> We are working on it. Sorry!
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12:11 < Conference> Khan: I am really delighted to be here with you this morning, for a variety of reasons. It is an area of great interest to UNESCO.
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12:11 < Conference> Being an intergovernmental agency, our resources are not limited to the formal structure of UNESCO, but it goes much beyond. We work in 193 countries, that's virtually all the countries in the UN system.
12:12 < Conference> We have a very unique structure within UNESCO, in every country including Canada, we have National Commissions for UNESCO. We also work with NGOs starting 6-7 years ago.
12:12 < Conference> We have added a lot of private sector resources. There are some partners around the table here.
12:12 -!- peteb [ptbrunet@7583D7F9.5DC9263C.49581133.IP] has joined #OSA
12:12 < Conference> Certainly UNESCO has had a long tradition of working with non-governmental organizations and volunteer agencies.
12:12 < Conference> I am delighted to be here, it is great to be back and a wonderful city.
12:13 < Conference> I will briefly describe to you what is UNESCO's interest, why we are in this space and so on.
12:13 < Conference> I was going to say, but I must start with an apology, because UNESCO really hasn't done all that it has been saying it will do. Although we have tried a few times working with organizations and individuals, but not to the extent that I would like.
12:13 -!- korn [Peter_Korn@895169C2.F5E5346E.49581133.IP] has joined #OSA
12:13 < Conference> Let me briefly share with you: many of you may be aware of the world summit that was held in Geneva and Tunis.
12:14 -!- colin [colin@407AB422.3D46BDBB.49581133.IP] has quit [Quit: colin]
12:14 < Conference> It was in recognition of the growing importance of information & communication technologies.
12:14 < Conference> As another integral international agency, UNESCO was one of the associated agencies.
12:14 < Conference> We consulted a large number of NGOs in order to provide UNESCO's input to the discussions and delibrations. It became very clear to us that the discussions were centered around technology, not the human dimensions of the impact of technology.
12:15 < Conference> It is at that point, and in collaboration with our NGO partners, we began to talk about knowledge societies rather than information societies.
12:15 -!- janina [janina@308E1CDA.EB2B881A.49581133.IP] has joined #OSA
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12:15 < Conference> It was our conviction and is now that when information is made accessible to people, they can process that information and it becomes useful.
12:15 < Conference> We started articulating, what is the notion of knowledge societies? And we offered this framework.
12:15 -!- janina [janina@308E1CDA.EB2B881A.49581133.IP] has joined #OSA
12:15 < Conference> It has to be based on the human needs and human rights. That is the most fundamental.
12:16 -!- colin [colin@407AB422.3D46BDBB.49581133.IP] has joined #OSA
12:16 < Conference> It must also recognize diversity, pluralism and inclusion.
12:16 < Conference> We talked about four pillars of knowledge creation, because if you don't create knowledge, there is not much to benefit the society.
12:16 < Conference> Knowledge preservation: much of our knowledge was created in the past centuries, and UNESCO is involved in knowledge presevation.
12:17 < Conference> Knowledge dissemination and sharing of knowledge.
12:17 < Conference> Knowledge is of no value if it is not utilized to address basic problems that humanity confronts.
12:17 -!- test [812ad0b9@atrc-CC4ADA36.atrc.utoronto.ca] has quit [Quit: CGI:IRC]
12:17 < Conference> FOur fundamental principles: universal access to information & knowledge, freedom of expression, cultural & linguistic diversity, & quality education for all.
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12:18 < Conference> We know that what has made this society is because of the explosion in the development of new information. When you look at the advances from 19th to 20th century, all of a sudden we have all kinds of devices and as we speak someone is developing new means of access and communication.
12:18 < Conference> If the advances are at the heart of information societies, we see that those who have access to that have access to knowledge, tend to be prosperous, tend to be included.
12:19 < Conference> Those who have no access tend to be poor & marginalized, and excluded from development.
12:19 -!- peteb [ptbrunet@7583D7F9.5DC9263C.49581133.IP] has joined #OSA
12:19 < Conference> Because of the speed that information is generated & utilized, serious concern that this will lead to knowledge divide. People who do not have access will get more & more marginalized.
12:19 < Conference> Persons with disabilities constitutue 10% of the world's population (600 million people).
12:19 -!- OSA-User-00 [8e969ab2@atrc-CC4ADA36.atrc.utoronto.ca] has joined #OSA
12:20 < Conference> Not going to define disability, that is a broad consensus among experts that 10% of the world population has some form of disability.
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12:20 < Conference> Also well known that fewer than 2% of children with disabilities in developing countries are in school.
12:20 < Conference> When we talk about universalization of primary education, we realize how far behind we are in achieving that goal by 2015.
12:21 < Conference> There are critical challenges in access, affordability, quality, equity. Also bulk of what is offered through conventional system of training & education in developing countries: question of relevance, few provisions for new skills, life-long learning. Unemployment is rampant.
12:21 -!- laurel [Laurel@23B82342.B8897AA.E05A3BF9.IP] has joined #OSA
12:22 < Conference> When you look at the international commitments, starting in 1948, universal declaration of human rights. Still one of the most fundamental documents that forms the basis for any discussion on equality, access to information & knowledge.
12:22 < Conference> UN Standard Rules in 1993, UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, 2006.
12:22 -!- anastasiac [team@9796FC24.B8897AA.E05A3BF9.IP] has joined #OSA
12:22 < Conference> World Summit on Information Society, action line 3 talks about access to information and knowledge.
12:23 < Conference> Talks about open source & free software in order to increase competition & affordability.
12:23 < Conference> Chapter 4, capacity building, addresses the need to ensure benefits offered by ICTs for all.
12:23 -!- jess [jess@67C90267.997F8F3C.49581133.IP] has joined #OSA
12:23 < Conference> When we talk about use of ICTs for people with disabilities, somehow at the periphery or the margin, people think of it as some form of "doing good" or charity. That is not true when you look at the international instruments.
12:24 < Conference> Is responsibility, duty of all governments to practice inclusive education and other human rights.
12:24 < Conference> What does UNESCO do? I would be the first one to admit that UNESCO, although in a very privileged position, has not done as much as it ought to have done in this space. Promotes the concept of knowledge society.
12:24 < Conference> Recognizes dignity, rights and well being. FOsters international commitment.
12:25 < walterbender> can someone let Dr. Khan know that without FOSS, his principles of freedom of expression and diversity are not met...
12:25 < Conference> Prepare national policies and encourages local governments to introduce legislation, define new services, including access to internet & educational opportunities.
12:25 < walterbender> that he only refers to it in regard to cost and competiton is pretty disheartening, to say the least
12:25 < Conference> Develop national standards for services, train key professional, adapt digital media and so on.
12:26 < Conference> If you look at UNESCO's area of mandate, it is the only UN agency that has multiple mandates. The WHO deals with Health Issues, and so on. UNESCO is the only agency that has education, sciences, culture, communication.
12:26 < Conference> The use of information & communication technology is more multisectoral. Benefit of capacity, quality that you can share with persons with disabilities in all spheres.
12:27 < Conference> We have one of our means of enhancing access to marginalize population, community multimedia centres. You are in one of the most privileged, when you travel to rural areas in many parts of the world, believe me, the majority of the people do not have access to these devices.
12:27 < Conference> For them the only source of knowledge is old radio. Now, fortunately, mobile telephony. That is the fastest technology being integrated in developing countries.
12:28 < Conference> We developed accessibility guidelines for community multimedia centres. We have libraries and content development projects, for example Greenstone has been used by education institutions, talking books, training persons with disabilities to use PC software, support distribution of quality audio-visual programmes, Taha Hussein Library for Blind & Visually Impaired
12:29 < Conference> Lack of awareness of what technology can do for persons with disabilities: media does not provide coverage. We have been sensitizing media professionals, why it is important to talk about the issues.
12:29 < Conference> Radio has great potential as medium of education. This is one of the areas where UNESCO has done a fair bit of work. It is not always combined witha ccessibility issue.
12:29 -!- Victor_Tsaran [chatzilla@9D955248.1F12ED18.49581133.IP] has joined #OSA
12:29 < Conference> I was very fortunate to have the privilege of heading a very large university with two million students in open & distance learning. My personal interest in this area developed only when I was approached b a number of interest groups working for people with disabilities.
12:30 < Conference> Since yours is a new method of education, this system is ideally suited for people with disabilities. So why don't you open learning centres for people with disabilities?
12:30 < Conference> One of my colleagues left to open such a centre. First time media recognized it was important for people with disabilities to access education. Universities do not provide architecture in their design, to go to a classroom.
12:31 < Conference> Open & flexible learning has emerged as one of most user-friendly services.
12:31 < Conference> Founding the centre, I was approached by the superintendent of the most secure jail in Delhi, asking why don't you start study centres in jail? Because they are also disabled in one form or another, they cannot access classroom.s
12:31 < Conference> Look at the irony of the comparison between the true, and yet it is true that they are barred from the formal process of education et cetera.
12:32 < Conference> Fortunately in this case a lot of media support. So open & flexible learning is one of the areas through which UNESCO works in this space.
12:32 < Conference> Open training platform is based on a number of free courses, many education institutions, more than 400 courses available.
12:33 < Conference> Free & open source software portal gives access to documents and websites which are references for Free Software/Open Source Technology Movement. Only in this space for last 3-4 years.
12:33 < Conference> Some of our products that we have produced using FOSS.
12:34 < Conference> I can't miss the opportunity of a small ad: we are organizing a pavilion at the ITU Telecom World 2009, seeking partnerships from all interested parties. UNESCO only organization on ICT accessibility at this global world telecom forum.
12:34 < Conference> My colleague has provided some information I would be happy to share with you. Happy to answer any questions. Thank you for this privilege.
12:34 < Conference> Jutta: FOr those of you who are asking, we will put the presentation up on the wiki momentarily.
12:34 < Conference> J: The phone lines have been restored, so the next logistical thing to do is test whether we can hear people on the teleconference.
12:35 < Conference> J: Someone is going to do a soundcheck to make sure we can hear everyone. Is anyone on the teleconference at the moment?
12:35 < becka11y> dialing now
12:35 < Conference> Member: They all signed off until they heard you were on again.
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12:36 < Conference> J: We'll wait one second. I'd like to do a quick round of introduction. We have most peoples' bios on the wiki.
12:36 -!- WillieWalker [wwalker@FC0354DD.59F5993A.49581133.IP] has quit [Ping timeout]
12:36 < Conference> Member: Moderator has not yet joined?
12:36 * bcaldwell I'm getting "The moderator has not yet joined."
12:36 < Conference> J: All of the bios are under the attendance page, and if anyone hasn't added your bio, please do so or send it to me.
12:36 < Conference> J: I also wanted to thank Kirsten. She's quite amazing at her speed of transcribing, even better than some people who use standard real-time captioning systems.
12:37 < Conference> J: While we're waiting for teleconference to resume, quick round of introductions.
12:37 < jamon> can people confirm that they can hear us in the conference line?
12:37 < Conference> Jan Richards, University of Toronto, heading our participation in the AEGIS project
12:38 < korn> We can't hear anyone on the phone.
12:38 < korn> Is someone on the phone talking right now?
12:38 < Conference> Stian Haklev, Peer2Peer University
12:38 < korn> Is there anyone in IRC land who isn't in the room, able to hear the folks in the room via the teleconference bridge?
12:38 < Conference> (testing phone)
12:39 < Conference> No response? No one can hear us?
12:39 < becka11y> those of us on the phone can't hear people at the conference
12:39 < korn> Becky, what number have you dialed into?
12:39 < Conference> Can anyone hear us now?
12:39 < becka11y> 866 276 0948
12:39 < bcaldwell> nope, still can't hear you
12:39 < walterbender> I just called the conf. nu,ber and it claimed that the moderator has not yet joined...
12:40 -!- WillieWalker [wwalker@FC0354DD.59F5993A.49581133.IP] has joined #OSA
12:40 < Conference> My name is Pete Burnet and most recently worked with Accessible2.
12:40 < becka11y> yes, claimed no moderator initially then opened up and participants on the phone can hear one another (at least Pina and I can)
12:40 < Conference> Freedom Scientific Jaws team. Most recently just started working with Jutta, looking into investigating implementing ? into JAva Access Bridge.
12:41 < Conference> Peter Korn, Sun Microsystems. Technical manager of AEGIS, which I won't introduce now ince we'll be talking about it a little later.
12:41 < Conference> Greg Fields, accessibility product manager at RIM, working with a few others in this room. Focused on global accessibility, most on blackberry.
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12:42 < Conference> Dawn Mercer, Seneca College, Deelopment of Open Technologies working with Mozilla. And with SUN and Red Hat. And probably, IBM too, on development of open source software and we're interested in hearing what pther people are doing and ways in which our efforts can work with others.
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12:42 < Conference> Janina Sajka, most relevantly I share the accessibility workgroup - Linux Foundation, W3C, I've been around accessibility in all kinds of ways as consumer and other ways, developing standards.
12:43 < Conference> Jess Mitchell, Fluid Project at ATRC with Fluid Engage, Decapod trying to address accessibility and usability in web applications. Little presentation about that later.
12:43 < Conference> iris Neher, ATRC.
12:43 < Conference> Greg Gay, Learning Management System at ATRC, Achecker.
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12:44 < Conference> Mara Hancock, UC Berkeley, working with Jutta on Fluid Project, Sakai, now heading up Opencast Project, open source platform for video & audio podcasting
12:45 -!- peteb_ [ptbrunet@7583D7F9.5DC9263C.49581133.IP] has quit [Ping timeout]
12:45 < Conference> Chris Mackie, associate program officier at Andrew W Mellon Foundation. ONe of larger private open source, 50 projects, 2/3 out of funding and self-sustaining. Sakai, Opencast, others coming up, new scholarship project. Mellon FOundation's constituencies: libraries, museums, wildlife conservation. ALl missions touch on reaching out to entire population.
12:45 < Conference> Those institutions that don't increase are terrified of being sued - carrot & stick.
12:45 < Conference> Sharon Hu, UBC Instructional designer, finding out about accessibility - sensitive to issues we talk about today
12:46 < OSA-Pina> anastasiac:
12:46 < Conference> Natasha Boskic, UBC, education & technology manager, developng online courses & helping faculty. Funding from BCCampus to redesign courses for accessibility and improving for students.
12:47 < Conference> Steve Hockema at U of T teaches course on inclusive design. Partly to learn what he teaches about so he can go back to the course with it.
12:47 < Conference> Eitan Isaacson, funded by Mozilla, touch & go on many projects looking for something more permanent.
12:47 < Conference> Willy Walker, Sun Microsystems, 20 years in open source accessibility, leads GNOME. GNOME is open source and we work to make it accessible to a wide # of disabilities.
12:47 < becka11y> the phone folks can hear!
12:48 < walterbender> easier just to read this great transcript
12:48 < Conference> Victor Tsaran - Yahoo!, involved with accessibility for ten years, as a consumer and also a trainer, training in Middle East, open source system & courses.
12:48 < Conference> Yahoo library open source & very accessible toolkit. All open source, go to browser.
12:49 < Conference> Allow musicians to access, about fun, access, games.
12:49 < Conference> Jutta: Just to do another soundcheck. Can everyone hear us?
12:49 < Conference> Can you count to 50 while we do the soundcheck on this end?
12:49 < Conference> Speak louder please
12:50 < Conference> (numbers coming in) You guys are all going to have to speak up. We can hear you, it's just a little muffled.
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12:50 < Conference> Louis Suarez-Potts, SUN & OpenOffice, relay what's happening in the community, includes people working outside of SUn unable to attend this meeting.
12:51 < Conference> Gregg Vanderheiden of Wisconsin, 40 years in this field, 2 rehab engineering centres, join with Gallaudet. Co-chair web content accessibility guidelines for W3C.
12:52 < Conference> Jens Haeusser, UBC, Fluid Project...
12:52 < Conference> Paul Zablosky, IT dept at UBC, active participant in Fluid initiatives, currently working in identity & identity management
12:52 < Conference> Colin Clark, tech lead for FLuid Project, works open source communities, helps architect & develop infusion framework, accessible web app framework
12:53 < Conference> Yura Zenevich, student at ATRC, currently working with Jutta and others on Fluid Engage in particular and Fluid Fusion
12:53 < Conference> Jamon Camisso, U of T as well, accessible mobile applications, helping out with AV today:
12:53 < Conference> Quick request: please don't speak too close to your microphone, we have the volume maxed.
12:53 < becka11y> conference dissappeared from phone :-(
12:53 < Conference> Come grab me if any problems.
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12:53 < richardschwerdtfeger> we were dropped
12:54 < Conference> becka11y: looking into it!
12:54 < richardschwerdtfeger> will call in
12:54 < Conference> We lost our phone line *sigh*
12:54 < Conference> Skype solution?
12:54 < Conference> Greg: I can give a number we can Skype into.
12:54 < Conference> The Macs seem to be incompatible with the audio, if someone can donate a PC.
12:55 < Conference> Can someone go grab the audio guy?
12:55 < Conference> Apologies to everyone on teleconference. We're in a building that is under construction. I shouldn't even say this, luckily they haven't cut the internet.
12:55 < Conference> I'll knock on wood, cross our fingers.
12:55 < Conference> We should prefer something open source to Skype anyway.
12:56 < Conference> Maybe we'll proceed with the program and then have the introductions from everyone on the teleconference in a few minutes.
12:56 < Conference> The presentations from the teleconference are a little later, so hopefully we'll have figured out a Skype solution or the phone line will come back up.
12:56 < Conference> Jamon, if you could hunt up a PC even as a loaner from the folks here... great.
12:56 < Conference> Jutta: So: what do we hope to accomplish today?
12:57 < Conference> I promise you, from here on in, we will not have a day of presentations. There are many with the exception of a few presentations which will set the tone & direction.
12:57 < Conference> Most of today you'll be put to work. We have an ambitious work agenda with a document that shows the cufrrent work & status of current work.
12:57 < Conference> So we can get a sense of where we're at and what we still need to do. Identify gaps & critical works in order to achieve some criterion that Mr. Khan set out. Hope to develop strategies & a road map moving forward.
12:58 < Conference> Most important document, we will share at Open Source week at Toronto in October with a broader group of community.
12:58 < Conference> What in fact is the problem space, or scope? One of the things that prompted this, dinnertime conversations & conferences where people were asking how many people with disabilities can reliably use open-source systems & applications?
12:58 < Conference> When we survey community, not as many people other than technically savvy who can use open-source platforms and AT. Obviously something we want to address.
12:59 < Conference> How many people with disabilities can afford not to?
12:59 < Conference> Chapter for ITU policy maker's handbook: state of AT around the work. How many people around the world have access to AT? Is it available for purchase in your country? Maintained & serviced? Cost less than 50% of annual income?
13:00 < Conference> Basically just leaves North America, few countries in Europe, not even Japan. Most of world does not have access to assistive technology, let alone proprietary AT. Many people cannot afford hardware, software around the world.
13:01 < Conference> Technology gap is increasing. Average user is accessing, how many apps, desktop etc, that is growing. Price is going down. Functionality that you can get online or through ICT is increasing. Really really critical things you need to do, education, employment, social participation, socialization, enjoying culture, essential activities now depend on access to ICT - that's growing.
13:01 < Conference> Part of that domain that's accessible is actually shrinking. What people with disabilities have access to is shrinking.
13:02 < Conference> While price of everything else is going down, price of AT keeps going up. Functionality and scope of compatibility keeps going down.
13:02 < Conference> Opposite trend happening for people with disabilities. Everyone else getting lower prices, greater access. People who rely on alternative access systems are able to access less & less at greater & great price.
13:02 < Conference> Very compelling agenda: critical thing we need to do, whether as developers, institutions with legal commitment.
13:03 < Conference> Good news: the direct access is improving. Trend toward more direct access. Means that accessibility is built right in to the operating system, content, as opposed to having to rely on AT. Over last 5 years, more sustainable approach. Features that support accessibility don't disappear - many apps, ATs do.
13:04 < Conference> Issues of personalization & familiarization. You know your own screen reader quite well, but other things change.
13:04 < Conference> What are unique advantages of open source? What can we do that we can't do in closed systems? Should we mimic them & create a parallel source? Or can we do something innovative and radical?
13:05 < Conference> How do we reach critical mass to make it viable for people with disabilities to use open source systems, and for organizations to adopt them?
13:05 < Conference> Approaches: make sure OS applications are accessible. Provide open source developer supports for creating accessible systems (both OS and proprietary).
13:05 < Conference> Create OS assistive technologies. Create accessible OS infrastructure.
13:06 < Conference> I'm going to stop for a second - do we have another soundcheck?
13:06 < Conference> Can teleconference hear us?
13:06 < Conference> And we can hear you. This is miraculous.
13:07 < Conference> Introductions for people on teleconference. Please speak clearly & loudly.
13:07 < Conference> Becky Gibson - web accessibility architect with IBM, on Aria, open source javascript toolkit, implemented ARIA in that toolkit, core widgets fully accessible
13:08 < Conference> David Bolter is from Mozilla and will be coming back.
13:09 < Conference> Moving on to Rich Schwerdtfeger: responsible for accessibility strategy IBM, 20 years, focus these days is ARIA specifications, leads effort in open AJAX alliance, libraries for tool manufacturers. Open source communities, Mozilla Foundation,
13:10 < Conference> Walter Bender, founder of Sugarland, Sugar developed for 1 Laptop Per Child, in the hands of over a million children around the world, open source software. Some accessibility features, need to do a lot more work.
13:10 < Conference> Two comments regarding the discussion: in our experience, our users aren't helpless and waiting, they're taking actions, modifying code. Teachers, users. Empower the end-user in spirit of free software, access, expression to do some of this work.
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13:11 < Conference> We have an opportunity in terms of outreach and access, relatively simple technology hasn't been adopted wholeheartedly, and that is provide USB.
13:11 < Conference> End run around gatekeepers. Just want to plant that seed.
13:12 < Conference> Pina : Scotiabank, Canadian Financial Institute on Assistive Technology. Leverage open tools in our environment, development & user perspective. AODA standards committee for Ontario.
13:12 < walterbender> ^provide USB^Live USB
13:12 < Conference> Ben Caldwell:
13:13 < Conference> (thanks walter - hard to hear teleconference speakers as clearly)
13:13 < Conference> Jutta: Thanks everyone. Hopefully phone line will stay up.
13:13 < Conference> Calling upon Peter Korn and Gregg Vanderheiden.
13:14 < Conference> J: Peter's going to talk about a project called AEGIS, a large consortium that began in Europe and has involvement of number of orgs. Also partner project here in Canada called AEGIS Ontario.
13:15 < Conference> Peter: Just trying to get the slides up, if you could post the presentation to the wiki, people can follow along as well.
13:15 < Conference> Jutta: Will be posting 4 presentations on wiki.
13:15 < Conference> Peter: Just want to give very brief overview of AEGIS. Big project. At a glance, it's an EU supported project.
13:16 < Conference> open Accessibility Everywhere: Groundwork, Infrastructure, Standards. 12.6M Eurio investment in accessibility. FP7-224348, grant from European Commission as part of Seventh Framework Programme.
13:16 < Conference> Consortium of 20 organizations, not going to read them all out, several present in the room, Sun, ATRC, RIM, quite a few others.
13:16 < Conference> 42 month project, began Sept 2008
13:16 < Conference> 5 grossly-speaking "phases": requirements gathering
13:17 < Conference> We have 5 disability organizations participating, finishing up user requirements gathering and putting together all reports & personas.
13:17 < Conference> Specifications & architecture is 2nd phase, we are in middle of putting together what work should be in more detail
13:17 < Conference> Development of infrastructure & toold
13:17 < Conference> Development of prototype applications. Finally, user evaluation and feedback. Here we are now in month 12, tailing off phase 2, in middle of phase 2 and beginning 3 all at same time.
13:18 < Conference> Work is looking at entire value delivery change of ICT. Left half of slide is app development. If I making an application, doing this in 1 or more tools, toolkits, looking at source code & being informed by in order to make my app.
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13:19 < Conference> Then goes into an end-user environment - desktop, cell phone, web browser. Need some sort of accessibility framework, need assistive technologies, support for AT.
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13:19 < Conference> AEGIS has specific work packages in every aspect of this value delivery chain. Toolkits, developer tools, sample apps. On run-time side, number of sample accessible apps, improving web browser, frameworks for web & mobile, open desktop, developing or improving AT for desktop web, mobile in AT support libraries.
13:20 < Conference> Three broad areas: work on open desktop, including magnification (ATRC), OpenOffice.org, text-to-speech, accessibility testing framework, realtime text, eye tracking via commodity webcams
13:20 < Conference> Access to Rich Internet Applications: ARIA in web from development through to browser. Dynamic/visual Web 2.0. Things in the family of Flash, not that we're working on Flash in particular, Java FX.
13:21 < Conference> Doing work in Java-based mobile devices, SUN family of Java on mobile as well as Blackberry Java mobile and that's RIM's primary participation in this. That includes taking 3rd generation/API based approach that we have proven in desktop and are seeing in web. Bringing that to mobile. Looking at developer tools for mobile.
13:21 < Conference> Prototype 5 assistive technologies.
13:22 < Conference> Why are we doing this? In addition to Jutta and Dr. Khan's points, every second of every day 4 babies are born, 36 cell phones activated, 400+ web pages created.
13:22 < Conference> 1.3+ billion cell phones sold in 2008, 12.8+ billion new web pages appeared in 2008. Already 1 trillion web pages: how many are accessible? How do we keep from falling behind?
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13:23 < Conference> AEGIS in today's context & UNESCO view of world: we need to do a lot of things. I thought I was giving my presentation later, so I presumed we'd already walked through what we need to do. AEGIS gives a significant set of targeted investments.
13:23 < Conference> Funding work to address number of areas on our list. Code going into existing FOSS technologies - improve Firefox, improve OS Desktop, Open Office, Blackberry and so on. I shouldn't put Blackberry in the list of OS technologies, but going into many technologies.
13:24 < Conference> Also into new technologies, web & mobile. Bring new blood into the field. 20 members, not all have done accessibility work before. Hopefully see them bring new blood in.
13:24 < Conference> Also validating this by European disability organizations, not just thinking "Okay, this is cool, it worked on my laptop". Hundreds of people with disabilities trying our prototypes. Refining iteratively over next 2.5 years.
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13:25 < Conference> New platform for accessibility. Also creating potential new model for getting accessibility done, European FP7 funding. If we prove it works for AEGIS, maybe it can work for AEGIS++, other things.
13:25 < Conference> AEGIS doesn't give us results everywhere we need them - not cognitive, speech recognition, digital TV, cloud computing.
13:26 < Conference> Doesn't give us thoroughly polished/hardened solutions. Research project. To greatest extent possible, hope research will carry us through, but what we have promised and what commission is funding is prototypes & pilots.
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13:27 < Conference> Doesn't give us adoption, force Red Hat, Solaris to take work in open desktop, doesn't force RIM or Nokia to take mobile work. Doesn't address adoption by developer. Doesn't mean develops will use it or users will adopt it.
13:27 < Conference> Outside scope of research work.
13:27 < Conference> Doesn't address end user infrastructure (trainers, experts, people who are able to use & teach others). Doesn't do much outside Europe, US, Canada.
13:27 < Conference> But - we are interested in collaborating with folks in all of these areas and others not mentioned on this slide.
13:28 < Conference> Formal relationship with Raising the FLoor. Specifically designed AEGIS to work in partnership with other accessibility efforts, Mozilla, Dojo and so on.
13:28 < Conference> Jutta, if you want to do questions?
13:28 < Conference> No questions?
13:28 < Conference> While Greg sets up we'll take a quick coffee break. Refreshments in lobby. If we could all gather back in 10 minutes?
13:29 < walterbender> question: if we have a project that could use help, how does one approach AEGIS?
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13:30 < Conference> Addressing question from IRC. The AEGIS description of work was written, submitted & approved by the European Commission, so we do not have a pot of money that we can give to new efforts working on new things. All 20 members have their first year's worth of funds and some of those groups are hiring people.
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13:31 < Conference> Probably best thing to do is send me mail (peter.korn@sun.com) and let me know what it is you are interested in working on, or seeing work done on, and I can look through the 400-page non-public description of work, see whether we're already doing work in that area, and whether and how we might collaborate on it.
13:31 < Conference> Does that answer your question?
13:31 < Conference> Walter, you were on the audio before, are you no longer able to speak on the teleconference bridge?
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13:32 < Conference> The bridge is not done, we can hear Becky.
13:32 < walterbender> I find it easier to listen in on IRC
13:32 < Conference> I'm going to speak to one thing, Walter, I'm going to guess as to one of the areas you would like to work on: getting the uNIX accessibility framework on the
13:32 < walterbender> I'll send Peter a follow-up email
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13:33 < Conference> ONe of the specific AEGIS-funded tasks is replacing one of the memory and processor intensive facets of the framework, which requires CORBA, with one that requires DBUS.
13:34 < Conference> In making this change, we specifically anticipate the ability to run things like ORCA and GNOME on-screen keyboard on memory constraint platforms like OLPC hardware.
13:34 < WillieWalker> http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/BonoboDeprecation
13:34 < walterbender> the DBUS work might be very interetsing to Sugar
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13:44 < Conference> Teleconference people still there?
13:44 < Conference> Jutta: While we're waiting, a few additional introductions - Griff?
13:44 < Conference> Griff Richards, getting a lot of feedback. From Athabasca. Hope everyone's having a great day.
13:44 < Conference> Jutta: Can people hear us? Oh good. Thank you.
13:45 < Conference> So next we have Gregg Vanderheiden, with Raising the Floor.
13:45 < Conference> Gregg: Got to keep the leg that works in good shape. Operating under a slight disability so that I have to speak at half my normal rate.
13:45 < Conference> (Thanks Gregg!)
13:46 < Conference> Common goal: put web & mobile technology in reach of those with disability, aging or economic barriers.
13:46 < Conference> Most people can't afford technology good enough to work with new technologies. Driving force of project from WCAG.
13:47 < Conference> Either had to design guidelines that were for the very best commercial AT, or go back to HTML guidelines if we really wanted to create things that would work for the AT everybody had. Not just our country, but other countries. But AT is just not available for all communities. Entry cost high, not available for all countries & languages.
13:47 < Conference> Commercial AT is having trouble - it can't reach out to all people who don't have resources. Having trouble keeping up. My favourite quote: someone came up to me with a huge information portal. On the day they released it, the screenreader company would release a new version that would work with it.
13:48 < Conference> I said "On the day you release it, only the beta testers can use it?!" This is a problem.
13:48 < Conference> FIts & starts towards ubiquitous & cloud computing, will need ubiquitous accessibility. Can't go around putting our own lightbulbs into every socket because we need our own light.
13:49 < Conference> Raising the Floor: ensure access. Free & Open Source basis. Propagate quickly to other countries & languages. Build accessibility into the infrastructure. Combination of free public access features with support from commercial sector, commercial AT as well.
13:49 < Conference> Whole thing is local action & recognition focus. Not just what Raising the Floor does, what participants do. Anyone with any disability anywhere should be able to access any information they encounter.
13:50 < Conference> Not a project or program as we've seen before. Some think of it more as a movement, a gathering of likeminded people who believe together we can do more than we can do separately.
13:50 < Conference> Canada, Europe, Israel, US, more
13:50 < Conference> RTF looking at all aspects. Research grants sometimes focus you on one thing. For example, RTF looks at user needs definition, what are continuing and evolving needs? Needs are changing continually over time.
13:51 < Conference> Second one is development of solutions, how to actually do this. Also support of commercial AT (via common components & common delivery infrastructure), so that someone can sit down and invoke their access features.
13:51 < Conference> Multiple commercial AT from different vendors, don't have situation where you have to login here, do this, authorize that to get several types of AT.
13:52 < Conference> Awareness. Even the solutions we have out there not used by a fraction of people who need them - they just aren't aware. Role of information dissemination we all know, but can never get funding on. "You want to give me money so you can go talk to people about stuff?"
13:52 < Conference> User support - you can do R&D, put prototypes out, but who supports the users? Training, people who get AT and have no idea how to use it, doesn't do them any good. Need support when things go wrong.
13:52 < Conference> Open source, multi vendor, multisource, everyone pointing fingers in other directions.
13:53 < Conference> Policy & legal issues. researcher tools. As we go through each area it helps to highlight what we need to talk about.
13:53 * davidb is IRC only; sorry. i am trying to keep up with the great transcription. please ping me if i need to dial in but i'm encumbered atm.
13:53 < Conference> Programs & projects need to bring together consumers, experts, and others, act as a consumer expert tool.
13:53 < Conference> Slides have also been posted on the wiki so Kirsten doesn't have to type everything out in detail.
13:54 < Conference> One on blindness, hearing impairment, special discussion groups, cell phone based solutions. RTF needs & features masterlist on the resources page that Jutta collected. What are all the different features in all the open/closed source, what are the research projects, so people who want to talk about features can build on what's out there?
13:55 < Conference> Individual solutions for consumer. Distribution hardening - an effort to take things developed in R&D and make them commercial grade. Those of you working in software know writing it is less time than hardening & testing it. Yet in research, none of that gets funded.
13:55 < Conference> Accommodation software is a place people can find it.
13:56 < Conference> Cross-disability telecollaboration tools, heart of RTF, can't do RTF if people can't participate, including deaf, deaf-blind, literacy issues etc. Anyone interested in that area, hit me because right this month we're putting together something about that.
13:56 < Conference> Library access points. Cognitive - we are not any time soon going to have a piece of AT that you can aim at a complicated interface and it will make it a simple one. Developing simpler versions of key functions, communications, etc.
13:57 < Conference> In addition to lots of individual solutions, user has to install many, try to work toward a unified architecture that allows us to all work off common code modules and develop solutions as extensions rather than creating separate parallel AT.
13:57 < Conference> Unified delivery architecture - get the best of all of us and choose amongst them. Interoperability standards, personalization preference, wizards, what's available? The more options, the more impossible to expect anyone to figure out what's useful.
13:58 < Conference> Extension of awareness.
13:58 < Conference> Security & privacy critical. Putting all this on the web, scary to think what people can do if we aren't paying attention.
13:58 < Conference> Commercial AT, make it a parallel partner. Unified updater, identifier, installer. More & more people don't know which version they have, how to upgrade. Finally automatic in mainstream - in OS you have to be comp sci major to install it all.
13:59 < Conference> Cycle sourcing, crowdsourcing.
13:59 < Conference> User & peer support - need to find way of getting support to users. Develop & maintain online support materials. Peer training. Specific, ie. route 66 at UNC. If you have somebody witha literacy problem, go to route 66 and it will help you act as a mentor.
14:00 < Conference> Awareness & dissemination, statistics, outreach materials. Good in some countries, others writing big grant to develop something we already have.
14:01 < Conference> Legal & policy. We are tripping over it. Things we can do as open source is great - until you deploy them en masse. As a research project, nobody cares. Ship it and they stomp it flat. Look at Kindle - everything came down and they ended out pulling out the ability for books to be read to people who are blind. Have to work it through carefully.
14:01 < Conference> Burt Blatt is helping with this, GCIT3 policymaker handling that. I was told we need to look at antitrust laws. "Are you trying to say that at no time anyone will ever charge for anything you're doing, including support?" I think we are safe, but that's not the time to figure it out, when it's half deployed.
14:02 < Conference> Developer tools, we're all familiar with that. Really focus on tools that can help NEW developers get involved. Content authors again, all our participants doing a lot of work making it easier. Our AT doesn't have to be as good if our content is better. Content doesn't have to be as accessible if our tools are stronger. Working on both ends of that balance.
14:03 < Conference> Researcher tools. Ability to get new people into the field, or people in the field, get them better connected andbetter informed. I see proposals coming through putting more money into one project than we have in our whole centre - somebody just decided to do something for people with disabilities, somebody just decided to evaluate it in year 5.
14:04 < Conference> If we can create tools to bring the new people in, so people can meet some informed consumers and consumers don't skin them alive and they never look at the field again. COnsumers can be very... honest. When they come in, so they can know better what's been done.
14:04 < Conference> Smaller programs at universities, so they can do good work without a really big team.
14:04 < Conference> Organization & sustainability. Benefiting people who can't read, just approach any computer and be able to access it, huge population in the world.
14:04 < Conference> People with wide range of disabilities, older people and don't think of themselves as having disabilities.
14:05 < Conference> WHen they turn volume up, they don't feel they've accessed an accessibility feature.
14:05 < Conference> People who need special AT, cannot afford their own, have low incidence.
14:05 < Conference> Got to work for AT vendors, new AT vendors, mainstream technology companies.
14:06 < Conference> Governments are actually really looking at this now. As they try to work and address needs of constituents, have no financial resources. Never realized it was a big problem before, and back off when they see how big the number is. Might avoid it because no budget.
14:06 < Conference> More efficient ways of serving large numbers of people.
14:07 < Conference> Status: first funding Oct 2008 from NIDAR as part of Trace Core Centre Grant. Organization stage. Gathering interested parties, over 50 people/orgs.
14:07 < Conference> Look at website for full list. Investments and programs have put in more than 100k - Adobe, AEGIS, ATRC, Benetech, IBM Japan, NIDRR, Trace, I probably forgot somebody and apologize.
14:07 < Conference> Go to raisingthefloor.net
14:08 < Conference> Interest inventory: http://raisingthefloor.net/interest-inventory - walks you through programs, say you're interested in following, participating, managing, leading, or already have program you'd like to involve. Helps us plug things around
14:08 < Conference> Some of us we know what you're doing but it wasn't the thing you're most known for.
14:08 < Conference> Thank you.
14:08 < Conference> Jutta: Any questions for Gregg?
14:08 < Conference> Pete: What kind of collaboration between RTF and AEGIS?
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14:12 < Conference> Peter: To complement that further, it's wrong to think of RTF as Gregg's project and he is the master of it and everyone else is employee. We don't divvy up work or assign people. A lot of what it is trying to do is what AEGIS has funding to do; we coordinate with each other and say "Okay, this is covered here, focus other efforts elsewhere" or "You want to work on this? Well, those folks are, go talk with them".
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14:13 < Conference> Another important facet behind AEGIS: to the extent that we are working in existing OS tech, improving GNOME magnification plugging into Orca, we are working with existing people and bringing more resources,more blood to that table. Natural collaboration point.
14:13 < Conference> Gregg: Also RTF at its best doesn't do anything all of its participants do. Provide resources: attention, tie people together. Some efforts had no funding and ended. Some way of figuring out how to get those people attached to something with funding, or get them funding to bridge?
14:14 < Conference> Trying to get direct resources, we'll talk later about one very large possible effort that RTF would help to cause happen, but with a broad range of people and players.
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14:15 < Conference> Member: Talking about legal and policy issues and awareness raising. Often we tend to undermine importance of legal & policy issues, and yet for things to happen on large scale, must find ways & means of building policies & looking at legal aspect of new ideas. UN agencies do a reasonably good job. Don't have resources for R&D, but can help with legal & policy. UNESCO is very interested in collaborating in that area.
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14:16 < Conference> In October we will bring 300 ministers together - awareness raising at the government level, and with media. Platform to raise awareness on issues of this level of significance.
14:16 < Conference> Media interventions can be counterproductive, but you can't afford not to look into the potential.
14:17 < Conference> Gregg: Very important, raises another thing: we are going to have to look at different branches that come together on this. Not only governments, but private sector. Research, delivery. Lot of places responsible for education, but if you can't do education without accessing, look at tremendous work from FLUID etc with education drive to it.
14:18 < Conference> I was talking with head of a major government agency on different topic, and he said "Don't think of us as just a funding source. Tremendous number of people in IT and accessibility, and everyone treats them like a client or patient that you have to treat. We are here and can be part of your team." It never occurred to me until he said that.
14:18 < Conference> We think of them as bureaucrats, and a huge percentage aren't, they are actually doing things.
14:19 < Conference> Peter Korn: Maybe getting ahead of agenda, but it seems the Apache model of accessibility if you think of the server. All manner of people use it, some people add the features they need, nobody buys it. Government uses it too.
14:20 < Conference> I think that is a very attractive model for OS accessibility that a university, rather than purchasing commercial AT and pushing the vendor to add a feature, would take some open source AT and add the feature and contribute that back. Same whether you're in education or government or a school for the blind in India.
14:20 < Conference> We don't have funding models for that, we have them for acquisition.
14:20 < Conference> Important policy aspect.
14:20 < Conference> Gregg: Thanks.
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14:21 < Conference> Jutta: Thank you. I think this discussion brought out a major advantage of OS: we don't have to worry about borders and boundaries about whose space is what.
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14:22 < Conference> Can make necessary adjustments so we're not redundant. Two people talking about Fluid, part of both the previous projects we've talked about. Taking a somewhat different approach: trying to infuse accessibility through an almost viral process into all the software created in OS and proprietary software. Jess and Colin will come up and speak about that.
14:22 < Conference> Jess has posted something as an attachment.
14:22 < Conference> Jess: I contend we're a bit unusual as a software development project - we don't have slides.
14:23 < Conference> We're going to try to chat through our approach, give a little detail at thebeginning. We're an open source program funded by Mellon - thank you CHris Mackie.
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14:23 < Conference> A large team of distributed members. This is today's elevator speech. We produce accessible, high-performance clean and nimble technologies.
14:24 < Conference> Focused on being a community producing this solution. Go to our web site to see complete list of partners. Very proud of our community.
14:24 < Conference> International project, volunteers, students. Our work stretches from policy, practice, implementation, dissemination...
14:24 < Conference> Jutta's efforts and participation in these policy committees set the tone for what we do. Inspiration for us pushing boundaries. We have luxury of not having too many boundaries.
14:25 < Conference> On practice end, work to build solutions with accessibility in mind from beginning. Iterating to improve products. Feedback from testers in accessibility community, hallway at partner institutions, constantly trying to get feedback.
14:26 < Conference> Take on usability and accessibility at large, they come hand in hand. Usability from screenreaders to degradation in browsers. People struggle with browser compatibility, graceful degradation.
14:26 < Conference> Take on those hard problems as a community. Testing, lots of testing, user feedback in the process of building. Things that usually get done last get done first.
14:27 < Conference> Focus is on design for everyone, adaptive usability. Ability at run-time to reconfigure the content of a page or an application based on user preferences & needs.
14:27 < Conference> On implementation end, work with communities to incorporate solutions into the work. Work with Sakai, uPortal, museums, web apps, developers.
14:27 < Conference> Help to incorporate into code base. uPortal shipping with every one of our products, Sakai as well.
14:28 < Conference> Dissemination - open source available to eeryone, we take that seriously. Value documentation. All of our solutions are available, thinking, decision-making. A lot of information out there, whoever is coming in can use it. Depending on who's coming in to take a look at our work, they may look at it differently.
14:29 < Conference> Developers may incorporate our code solutions - drag & drop ability. By virtue of that we are infusing their apps with accessibility.
14:29 < Conference> Inculcation - teach people to write more accessible products. Teach user centered design principles.
14:30 < Conference> Create a solution: the code. Teach others how to do it themselves: the design handbook, so they can do the stages of the work that we do. Give them the tools to do it themselves: the framework.
14:30 < Conference> I think that's what we wanted to get at. Colin: The only thing I might say about the technology - we got really involved early on with the Rich Internet Accessibility Effort, add ARIA support to Dojo, involved in jQuery community.
14:31 < Conference> As we did this work we built up a set of tools, around how to build large complex web applications, meet the needs of users and remain accessible. Make the work of developing rich & complicated apps easier. Infusion takes a different approach.
14:32 < Conference> Not only is our community open and transparent, but so is our community. Turn standard model on its head, support ability for applications and users to come in and adapt, reconfigure the interface based on their needs and the integration they're doing. Support rich amount of reflection and logic that's part of infusion. Other applications can reflect on deeper level what's going on.
14:32 < Conference> Fluidproject.org has a big button where you can learn about and download infusion. Want to do a little demo of the options?
14:32 < WillieWalker> http://fluidproject.org/
14:33 < Conference> We have links to the design handbook, user centered design where we can help you through examples of user testing, paper prototypes.
14:33 < Conference> Colin: The demos are here, so we won't run you through one.
14:33 < Conference> Jess; We'll show the concept, we won't do it on the website. UI Options allows us to transform the content of a site based on user preferences and needs.
14:34 < WillieWalker> http://fluidproject.org/releases/1.1/components/uiOptions/html/UIOptions.html
14:34 < Conference> Jutta: People can explore these... How do we provide a consistent experience across multiple applications, but accommodate diverse needs? This allows you to enable each user to declare their preferences for display, control, content organization and take that from application to application. Based on ISO standard.
14:34 < Conference> Somebody with alternatively access needs could create a profile and client applications could respond.
14:35 < Conference> One way someone with disabilities can invoke their personal preference profile to other computers as needed, reorganize page so it's not so busy, change contrast, a whole number of display and control type options. We are creating further options, this is the beginning.
14:36 < Conference> Could you repeat what was said on the bridge?
14:36 < Conference> Peter: I'm just guessing as to how this is implemented under the covers and wondering about those potential limitations. These options are cookies on the device and then they apply to all FLUID-based components and apps on my browser?
14:37 < Conference> Jutta: I'm just going to respond to that. If you're talking about how do you make this portal, or how are you implementing it?
14:37 < Conference> Peter: Does this apply only to FLUID-based web apps?
14:37 < Conference> Jutta: There's other applications and programs using the ISO standard but Fluid through UI options -
14:37 < Conference> Colin: The preferences are portable, based on the Access For All standards.
14:37 < WillieWalker> http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=41521
14:38 < Conference> Cookies could be tied into OpenID and have that information persist on a larger scale. We spent a lot of time looking at what we could do with minimal intrusion on others' markup. Need to sprinkle in a few CSS classes to get the basic transformations and then you can go need. Does require our skinning system but made the entry level fairly low.
14:39 < WillieWalker> http://engineers.ihs.com/news/2009/iso-elearning-user-preferences.htm
14:39 < Conference> Peter: I'm wondering about bridging the gap between the desktop and web browser. We did some of this with Firefox as far as picking up desktop theme settings and applying that across, but I'm not seeing how what you've built here hooks in with that for a seamless experience.
14:40 < Conference> Jutta: We've had other projects where we've looked at Windows desktops using ISO to do te transformation there, WebForAll. Fluid is focused on web applications, but we hope to stitch together and create a more seamless interaction between desktop and web apps. But yes, this is a good topic for later.
14:40 < Conference> Jess: We built Fluid to decouple it from obligating any user from adopting all our solutions, shopping cart approach. Specify what you'd like to do, choose which aspects of Fluid solutions you're using. No obligation to use all of them.
14:41 < Conference> Peter: Intersection between web accessibility and mobile web best practices. Have you done anything around rendering Fluid to mobile web browsers?
14:41 < Conference> Colin: In Infusion 1.2 release in September you'll see mobile work, themes and UI layer for iPhone first but number of devices, Android, hopefully Blackberry and so on. APproach for web authors is they can port the web tools to mobile space easily.
14:42 < Conference> Jutta: Important question, brought up this morning just how much of the world has mobile but not internet access. A critical area we need to look at.
14:42 < Conference> ANy other questions? Victor?
14:42 < Conference> Victor: Looking at the demos - would be great if you had instructions. You probably know that, but for the record.
14:42 < Conference> Colin: We've got plans to rework our demos.
14:43 < Conference> Victor: Have you reached out to the CMS, like Drupal? Bridging Fluid with other CMS?
14:43 < walterbender> Is it just me, or is any one else offended by the fact that the ISO recommendations are not freely available on the web?
14:43 < Conference> Colin: The ideal is to layer it with other apps. We're watching CMS very close. Really hoping we'll have a Drupal module. jQuery is already there, and Drupal, one of our volunteers is working on an Infusion module for Drupal.
14:45 < Conference> Jutta (to Walter): Yes, ISO 24751 tried to get through a motion within JTC1 that all ISO standards related to accessibility should be freely and openly available. Halfway accomplished - the first part IS available, and somehow they made the second and third part NOT freely and openly available. Working on it quite actively, please everybody voice your outrage in support of us!
14:45 < Conference> Member: One thing to be careful of - this is how they pay their staff. If they make them free, they will go bankrupt.
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14:46 < Conference> Jutta: We have talked about this - there have been a number of funding options, they have access to a funding source that would well exceed the money they make in accessibility, so that isn't the issue. Any advice, strategic advice and outrage you can express would be great.
14:46 < walterbender> I don't believe that for a second
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14:47 < Conference> We're a little behind in our agenda - thank you, Colin and Jess. We're going to have lunch in 45 minutes, so for the next 45 minutes I'd like to get a start on looking at the document that we've created on current work. Thank you everyone for contributing to that.
14:47 < walterbender> referring to the brakrupt asserion
14:47 < Conference> I want to look at the status - we haven't filled that out. Where are we at? Many of us know about these projects, lots of web links point to it, but we don't know where that area is at, is it available, has it been abandoned, is it compatible, is there funding and support etc.
14:48 < Conference> Jan is going to connect over here, and actually edit the wiki as we speak.
14:48 < jamon> http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Current+Work+OSA
14:48 < Conference> Jutta: I'm going to call on a number of you to update us on particular areas. If everyone can bring up the wiki page that lists the current work?
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14:48 < WillieWalker> http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Current+Work+OSA
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14:49 < Conference> Go down to Draft Documents and Homework. What I'd like to do is go through each of these large general areas, feel free to tell us to reorganize it. First area we're trying to express what is happening - Operating Systems and Desktops.
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14:50 < Conference> How accessible are these areas? How compatible are they with AT etc? Is the effort in this area? Peter wants to comment.
14:50 < Conference> Peter: Addressing the organizational question, putting the two in the same area is misleading. GNOME and KDE are graphical environments. Talk about the status of GNOME and KDE accessibility, status of work going to harmonize those two, and in a separate layer, what of that is available where on what UNIX environment.
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14:51 < Conference> Without going into that level of detail right now, people ask "Is Linux Accessible" and you have to ask "are you using KDE or GNOME, etc"?
14:52 < Conference> Peter: I'll yield to Willie Walker on this. I think on a gross level, GNOME has the most mature set of accessibility and self-consistent level of accessibility with several ATs, working well with a broad range of GNOME apps and Open Office and so on. We have in GNOME multiple text to speech engines available, and we have a number of important research or development efforts going on including moving from Corba to DBUS.
14:53 < Conference> The things we don't have yet but know we need which do not yet have much organizational structure.
14:54 < Conference> Willie: Mainstream developers are asking what can they do to make this more accessible from the beginning. That's really a huge tipping point that's happening, in the 20 years I've been doing this, it's refreshing. In terms of KDE and GNOME, GNOME is very very far ahead in accessibility. With the Corba and DBUS work that's going on, trying to pull the infrastructure out of just being a Gnome solution and into being a Linux solution.
14:55 < Conference> Trying to make it a standard across Unix and Linux desktops. KDE toolkit known as QT, some work done to make QT talk to the ATK. In terms of the speech platform, doing something similar with speech that we're doing with Corba/Dbus. "Speech dispatcher" be a system service for speech instead of GNOME-specific.
14:56 < Conference> A bit about GNOME project - I was at developer's summit and they are making plans for a big shift to GNOME 3.0. Departing from usual user toolkits and trying new stuff and accessibility is being left behind on that level. Speech dispatcher work - Ubuntu's accessibility situation is trickier, it's a downstream project. THey don't directly contribute to GNOME.
14:56 < Conference> Ubuntu is integrators, distribution, they have a 6-month cycle that's a sinus - 6 months it'll be good, 6 months later it won't be.
14:57 < Conference> Generally the case of whatever Linux distribution you pick right now. Not sure it's going in a good direction. Ubuntu is the only one with someone hired specifically for accessibility.
14:57 < Conference> Nobody's responsible at Red Hat for well integrated accessibility, and so forth. Volunteers in some cases.
14:57 < Conference> Audio environment very much a concern.
14:59 < Conference> One thing I have to say about audio integration - making sure the integrators do a responsible and good job. What we've seen with Ubuntu is yes, audio is a problem. What we've had over the past several months is people relying on them to provide it out of the box. That has been failing. Users have been looking elsewhere. A huge problem across the whole system. People who were really behind the OS accessibility started looking elsewhere, doi
14:59 < Conference> Responsible integration very important.
14:59 < Conference> Victor: Are we editing the wiki at this point? Just the point that it's difficult to update or upgrade, to get a fixed version of a screenreader you have to upgrade the whole desktop sometimes.
15:00 < Conference> You shouldn't have to. It depends - should not be the way most users try to approach this. Users should rely on package management provided by their distributions.
15:00 < Conference> Presumes that packages has tested and not just run the build, which can be a problem.
15:01 < Conference> Victor: If you want to shift to the next version of a screenreader, you actually have to shift to the next version of the desktop.
15:01 < Conference> On other platforms, you can just upgrade.
15:01 < Conference> You don't necessarily have to upgrade the whole thing. I've seen users struggle with that.
15:02 < Conference> Louis: This seems to be getting back to the point of distinguishing between the browser and operating system and proliferating operating systems. It's going to get worse (or better depending on your perspective). Increasingly people are using cloud environments. If we envision the success of the cloud, people are using the browser a lot, and the interesting result is people using a variety of operating systems.
15:03 < richardschwerdtfeger> How do we raise our hand?
15:04 < Conference> Janina: It's like the building that has two steps to get in, but once you get in, it's accessible. If someone has to come in and make it run for the user - now in some examples, we're going to need a technician. On the other hand, there are a number of basic things users should be able to do and rely on and we're having threshold problems that fester and linger, like audio in Linux.
15:04 < Conference> richard - noted!
15:04 < Conference> Jutta: Richard, you raised your hand?
15:06 < Conference> Richard: What I think we need - I have to agree, most applications are moving to web-based. I'm seeing it all across IBM, just one company, but our customers say it's too expensive to do rich client apps across different platforms. We can focus on developing ARIA as part of the infrastructure. That we're doing, I also think we need to spend our time on personalized interfaces. GUIs aren't as easy to morph. How do we simplify it? Not easy to
15:06 < Conference> Those areas should be stabilized, considering delivering apps over the web is more where the industry is going today.
15:07 < Conference> Jutta: Thanks, Rich. Were there other comments from the teleconference?
15:07 < Conference> Jutta; Great, okay. In this area of desktops and graphical environments, any further comments on status? And we'll be getting to gaps.
15:07 < Conference> Rich: Peter, Blackberry is one of your target clients. What's being done in terms of browsers supporting accessibility and infrastructure?
15:08 < Conference> Peter: I'm kind of concerned we're already behind and moving further away from moving through status and so on. I'm going to look to Jutta as to whether I should answer and go on a further tangent now, or defer it.
15:08 < Conference> Jutta: We'll defer this to later.
15:08 < Conference> Janina: There is a lot more accessibility in the Linux/Unix environment than there was years ago. Just want to make sure that I say that after all the complaining I do.
15:09 < Conference> Peter: One other thing - some enumeration of what is in any given OS or desktop, and some notion of what the broad gaps are, links into the lower parts of the documents. Here are the disabilities being worked on but not ready yet, here no activity is happening. Also to look at application areas, Louis was looking at this. Finally, missing entirely is media types like PDF.
15:10 < Conference> Jutta: Clearly this is more of an umbrella category, we didn't want to get too complex. Yes, to really reflect what is possible it needs to be more complex. I am going to skip AT and we'll get back to that. Moving down to UI Libraries, SDKs and Other Developer Supports.
15:11 < Conference> Talking about Dojo, jQuery, etc. Peter is going to comment, right?
15:11 < Conference> Peter: Yeah, so first I would break this into domain areas, are these web toolkits, desktop toolkits. Developer supports in a separate section on developer tools. When we move out of the web and into desktop toolkits, is this connected to a particular desktop, so GTK connected to Gnome, and capture that relationship as opposed to Uno or Zuul or Java Swing. I should probably wait for Jan to catch up.
15:12 < Conference> More detail, Java Swing not just Java broadly.
15:12 < Conference> Jutta: While Jan is catching up - maybe just make a note and catch up later. Can I call on Rich and Becky to start this off? What do you see as the status of Dojo, jQuery, ARIA?
15:13 < Conference> Becky: Dojo: the core widget, we have an accessibility statement in the Dojo documentation. Ever since 1.0 the core widget set ("Didgets") have all been fully enabled for low vision assistive technology, keyboard support, we've also made sure we work with high contrast mode and changing font sizes. Its status would be that a core widget set has been fully accessible since 1.0, and yet it's ongoing.
15:14 < Conference> There is constant work to keep the widgets updated, but no deadline for making them all accessible, only the core widget set.
15:14 < Conference> Jutta: As further homework before October, we'll ask a number of questions, as Peter pointed out with Dojo, what particular functionality is and isn't addressed?
15:14 < Conference> Any comments on jQuery - COlin?
15:15 < korn> Becky - question for you: what AT have you tested with DoJo's ARIA implementation, on what platforms?
15:15 < korn> We're working with Czech Technical University, whose students did testing with Dojo and two other UI component sets, and found a number of problems when used with AT.
15:15 < Conference> Colin: The effort around jQuery has been community-driven - getting the widget developers to have some awareness of how accessibility will affect their widget, have them contribute. About half of the small suite of widgets in jQuery UI has got keyboard navigation and AT support through Aria. Continuing to work on it one by one.
15:16 < Conference> Sat down with Jaws users to get a feel for what the experience was like.
15:16 < becka11y> korn: we have focused on Firefox 3/3.5 with JAWS 10 on Windows XP, we have done some testing with IE8 and JAWS, we test keyboard on IE6/7/8 on windows; Firefox on win and Mac, and are working on keyboard for safari 4 mac & win
15:16 < Conference> GTK is a relatively mature toolkit with few things being added, underlying accessibility supported. Few new things come in from time to time, pretty much status quo, accessible.
15:17 < Conference> With Orca with have a regression test, we run again other toolkits and they're all pretty solid.
15:17 < Conference> Jutta: Thanks everyone. David, do you want to talk about Xul?
15:18 < davidb> not really, except that the idea behind it is neat. a declaritive syntax for widgetry
15:18 < davidb> x-platform
15:18 < Conference> The ARIA specification is in "last call", typical W3C consortium, there are usually two last calls, one for people to review the spec, one for cleanup work. 70% through the first last call, it's gone very well. While we're targeting HTML4, you also have hTML5 coming out, and they have additional requirements we've had to deal with. Because ARIA has been so successful, groups are also making use of it. Aria was used in enable of Xul componen
15:19 < davidb> xul is sort of like dojo or jquery for the desktop
15:19 < Conference> Making an extension to Firefox to address ? - producing an implementation guide. It would be great to do things like that for the browsers on the blackberry, iPhone and so forth.
15:19 < Conference> Two gaps on the web: there aren't a lot of tools out there, we're creating a javascript rules library that can be used be open & closed-source ... I didn't put it in the list of repositories because I haven't put it up yet.
15:19 < davidb> would be nice to be allowed to put gecko/firefox on iphone and bberry
15:20 < Conference> Our biggest challenge in this space is education. I was just at the IEEE conference in Boston, and one of thebiggest challenges is getting people to understand that accessibility isn't just putting alt tags in images and headings on tables, it's about interoperability. A lot of people are having this problem because they don't have that education.
15:21 < Conference> I've actually seen a lot less pushback than I have in 20 years, so that's exciting. We are taking ARIA and integrating it into HTML 5, that has just started. There is an opportunity for a cross-platform API layer for Canvas components, something we've been able to avoid in ARIA.
15:21 < Conference> Jutta; Thanks Rich. Victor, do you want to talk about Yahoo?
15:22 < Conference> Victor: Yahoo User Interface library allows a developer to build a website quickly with a bunch of widgets. Lots of underlying elements, not just widgets. Keyboard access, focus management critical to making sure these widgets play together. A lot of underlying elements to manage focus, build scalable keyboard support, resizing properly, things like that. So currently we're at YUI 3.
15:23 < Conference> Beta is coming out soon. Final release will be fully accessible and anyone can do what they want with it. We chose not to build ARIA directly into it because of performance issues. It can get very heavy and the user doesn't take advantage of ARIA on the web, you're only adding more weight to the page. We build a framework of ARIA plugins.
15:24 < Conference> Little plugins allow you to turn ARIA on or off. Scalable framework built around widgets. If you go to developer.yahoo.com/yui you will see some of the widgets already there and try them out.
15:25 < Conference> For a lot of the open source projects we need more live examples so the developer can see the widget in action before they get to integration details.
15:25 < Conference> David responded on the IRC channel to your question earlier. Just wanted to summarize.
15:26 < Conference> For Orca, we have Xul tests, and regression tests for Xul. A number of bugs open for it, but generally it works out.
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15:26 < Conference> Peter: I think we need to know not only what is the accessibility status, but what is the developer support? As we look at the maturity status, if this is a document that might be used in India, that additional meta information is going to be helpful.
15:28 < Conference> Peter: All the Javas and then some. Java Accessibility API has not been updated in a while, a number of additions in GNOME and ARIA over the years that have not migrated back to Java. Since most people don't live in 100% Java world except Blackberry, we need AT that runs native and can reach into the Java platform. Need to capture status of various bridges, so Java bridge to Gnome is in the process of being rewritten. Java bridge to Windows
15:29 < Conference> Macintosh bridge is the responsibility of Apple and I can't give enough detail there. Java Swing implemented by two UI toolkits from Oracle. Not as critical to capture since Oracle doesn't release them to the world, just internal to them, Oracle suites that aren't using Swing are using the toolkit downstream.
15:30 < Conference> There are a bunch of UI toolkits not on this list. Uno, used in Star Office, Open Office. That is supported on Gnome iwth a direct bridge, Macintosh with a direct bridge to Apple Accessibility framework, poorly supported on Windows through Java, no announced plans to change that on Windows but a strong desire to see it change.
15:30 < Conference> AXS is a web UI kit from AOL. Don't know about status, but add it to the list.
15:30 < walterbender> jutta: I need to disappear for an hour or so. When I return, I would love to chat a bit about accessibility for systems admins... that is a real issue in Massachusetts in terms of the legal adoption of Linux
15:31 < Conference> I don't know whether these are worth capturing, but EXTjs and ICEspaces. Neither are particularily accessible but work is happening.
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15:31 < Conference> Sun has an open source web UI toolkit called Woodstock which has some but not a lot of accessibility.
15:32 < Conference> Victor: I think there's a Google toolkit, GWT, should add some information. Peter, when you say Uno API is supported on Mac, it would be great to say to what extent you think it's supported.
15:34 < Conference> Peter: Another category: platform accessibility APIs. Ties in to legislation: at the Section 508 rewrite we are trying to bake in as a formal accessibility requirement that applications implement an accessibility API that does this long list of things and a platform if you acquire it has to have this etc. So looking into which platform APIs implement that. Coming back to your question, it is not clear whether the problems with OpenOffice ta
15:34 < Conference> There's also SWT, native and used by Eclipse, pretty accessible. Pretty in the Unix/Linux side of the house have a pretty good experience with Orca. Also the QT toolkit from KDE, migrating from Corba to Dbus.
15:35 < Conference> QT is the graphical toolkit for KDE. QT accessibility is dependent on the migration from Corba to Dbus.
15:36 < Conference> Jutta: Thanks. I think one of the things we will need to do is to create three versions, technical version, implementer/policy makers' version, and the version for people requiring alternative access, and include the appropriate perspective on the status and readiness of these things. Any last quick comments on these sections before lunch?
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15:36 < Conference> Okay. Lunch is provided outside in the lobby, and if we could come back here and come back in a half-hour break, and then after half an hour if you could bring it back in here, can we continue or is that a horrible idea? A half working lunch and half chatting lunch?
15:37 < Conference> Okay, we'll begin at 1:06.
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16:11 < Conference> Hello everybody, we're back.
16:12 < Conference> If you have very technical bits of information, please contribute them to the IRC channel so Kirsten can focus on the more general conversation.
16:12 < Conference> Because we're crunched for time, we're going to add to the remaining sections a column that says "Gaps", so we can cover that section while we're talking about the status. The gaps seem to come up as we're talking about the status.
16:12 < Conference> We will have an opportunity for those things that we've missed.
16:12 < eeejay> i just saved a transcript, btw. not sure if anyone is doing that
16:13 < Conference> The other question - there were two specific sets of delegates who couldn't make it, and should we compress the tables or are people comfortable?
16:13 < Conference> I welcome you to move to the empty seats, but we'll leave it as is. If you feel isolated feel free to move.
16:14 < Conference> If you've done a quick scan over the number of categories we have to cover, you'll see there's quite a few. We'll move at a faster pace and not cover the specific projects so much as the general area.
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16:14 < Conference> So the next area that we want to talk about, following the theme of library toolkits and supports for developers, is general libraries intended for people creating AT or other access means.
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16:14 < Conference> At the moment we have listed eSpeak and Liblouis.
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16:15 < Conference> Will: Espeak is an OS performance-based speech engine being developed primarily by Jonathan ? in the UK. Small, fast, supports a number of languages. People can provide lamguage support for it without knowing a ton about it.
16:16 < Conference> It's not being developed crazy actively, but there's still releases.
16:16 < Conference> Liblouis is based on Braille QTY. Originally funded by View+ (?) and they're still funding it one way or another. The most used Braille translation library out there. Using it in Orca, Nvda hopefully. It's very good at document preparation and publishing, which I'd like to talk about later.
16:18 < eeejay> s/Braille QTY/brltty/
16:18 < Conference> Peter: One of the things I'd like to highlight specifically is that both of these are particularily powerful leverage points for worldwide dissemination. Liblouis will bring text into contracted Braille in a huge number of languages, but not all. A book whose title I've forgotten, Sabria ?, a blind woman in Germany who wanted to study Tibetan, but she couldn't because there was no Tibetan Braille, so she up and invented one. We could potent
16:19 < Conference> There are two different types of text-to-speech approaches, format based, that are fast and not necessarily human sounding but don't take a lot of processing power. Other esoterica that I will get wrong if I go any further than I already have, that sound more human like but take tremendous RAM.
16:19 < WillieWalker> http://espeak.sourceforge.net/
16:19 < WillieWalker> http://mielke.cc/brltty/
16:20 < Conference> Since you brought it up: I've been working with an Israeli-Palestinian organization to develop NVDA. We got stuck at the point where we needed to localize it to Arabic. The speech part is very hard.
16:20 < WillieWalker> http://code.google.com/p/liblouis/
16:20 < Conference> Since we don't have an eSpeak Arabic TTS or any other Semitic TTS for that matter it would have cost $600 to get Arabic on an open-source screenreader. Huge huge gap that hopefully we could address.
16:20 < Conference> Jutta: This seems to be a strategy where OS has a lot of advantages, and if we created these libraries to share, it would jumpstart some of the gaps. ANyone know of any existing speech to text libraries in the OS domain?
16:21 < Conference> Will: Sphinx has a number of variations, Sphinx 3 and 4, 3 in C and 4 in Java. Also HDK toolkit out of University of Cambridge. Something out of Colorado, Mississippi. The hard part is the integration with the desktop. Do command and control of the desktop, dictate email. The work that Dragon and IBM have done is pretty good.
16:22 < Conference> It's doing the integration with the desktop. But they're not open source. And Sphinx does not have that integration. Some people are working on it, but I call it speech buttons at the moment.
16:22 < Conference> Jutta: Any other gaps in this domain?
16:22 * becka11y is back on the phone
16:22 < WillieWalker> http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/html/cmusphinx.php
16:22 < Conference> Greg: To add to the importance of text to speech, aside from our blind friends and folks, independents with cognitive impairments for whom AT will require open, extensible text to speech.
16:23 < WillieWalker> http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk/
16:23 < Conference> Peter: I want to circle back to this distinction between formant engines and concatenated engines. I want the engine to be intelligible at a high rate of speed, but someone with a cognitive impairment is more interested in something comfortable to listen to generally.
16:23 < WillieWalker> http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/ (speech synthesis)
16:23 < Conference> Distinction between a text-to-speech engine that works well for a blind person or a cognitively impaired person with a reading problem.
16:24 < Conference> Space for both formant-based engines that speak very very fast, and concatenative, more human-like text to speech - in all languages. I do see them as different domains. If I had to choose one, I would go for formant, because they tend to run in more platforms and less processing power.
16:24 < WillieWalker> http://www.isip.msstate.edu/project/speech/
16:25 < Conference> Peter, you said there were two focus things, the voice and the TTY. The voice is very broad, probably one of the broadest. Talk about translating our technology from one language to another, the voice, the synthesis really stops. And it stops it for literacy.
16:26 < Conference> In RTF I've been focusing on that area, what can be done to get resources. People tell me it's hard to get support for that area - "we already did it in one language, so it's not science any more, it's just work". As soon as you hear that you know you've lost 98% of your funding base. I really want to triple exclamation mark on that one (!!!).
16:26 < Conference> And then for Braille, we have people who are deaf blind or blind. On speech, the concatenative is most important for people who cannot speak and want this to be their voice.
16:27 < Conference> People who always will and never will be able to read visually learn to read it faster and faster. Again, I would fall on the side of a really intelligible one that goes very fast in terms of access.
16:27 < WillieWalker> http://www.bltek.com/virtual-teacher-side-menu/sonic.html
16:27 < Conference> Those are two important areas, and RTF is interested because these are the kinds of things that fall off the table for researchers.
16:27 < richardschwerdtfeger> raise hand
16:27 < WillieWalker> http://julius.sourceforge.jp/en_index.php
16:28 < Conference> Peter: One last related comment, a cultural preservation aspect when you think of this as well. Having computers that can speak these languages is a way of preserving those languages.
16:28 < Conference> Nothing to do with disability access, but connected.
16:28 < Conference> Rich: I imagine people are frustrated, a general move away from mainstream speech vendors from working on formants. They've been working on higher quality concatenative. Are we seeing that as an issue?
16:29 < Conference> Victor: Quick comment about awareness, we do have text-to-speech from Microsoft that speak English or Chinese, that you can buy relatively cheap. Cheap depends on what you're talking about of course.
16:29 < WillieWalker> A non-open source, but relatively inexpensive TTS engine: http://cepstral.com/
16:29 < Conference> Janina: If you're thinking of the elephant/ibm/tty based ones they're going to work less and less, because they haven't been compiled
16:30 < korn> Rich - I don't think that's such an issue. State of the art in commercial format engines (e.g. eloquence) seem pretty good, so not seeing more investment there isn't surprising or I think much of a problem.
16:30 < Conference> Victor: Mac has wonderful TTS built in. Windows is not the best TTS is the world, but better sounding than formant based speech. But more and more operating systems make TTS part of the offering.
16:30 < Conference> Jutta: A few people want to comment. On the wiki, let's create a language support section and specifically address the languages.
16:31 < Conference> Greg: Very quick point. One of the things we originally talked about building access into the internet. As our basic operating systems have TTS on them, we can take advantage of them in that we don't have to build speech synthesizers. We do have to worry about languages.
16:31 < Conference> Also if anyone knows any research on speeding up the concatenative and learning how to do that better, I'd be interested in hearing.
16:32 < Conference> Will: Are there speech to text available for mobile devices? Are there trends towards open source on a mobile?
16:32 < WillieWalker> s/Will/Louis/
16:33 < Conference> Victor: There's definitely modern TTS built into phones. All of the other TTS engines are pretty good for Nokia phones, usually license screen readers, license to Eloquence and also something, starts with V.
16:33 < Conference> Those are closed-license products.
16:33 < Conference> (sorry Will!)
16:33 < Conference> What about Blackberry?
16:34 < Conference> Greg: There isn't at this point open source TTS on mobile. So one of the gaps is that as we start looking at other areas of the world where mobile is dominant, the fact there isn't a non-proprietary TTS is a huge gap.
16:35 < Conference> Peter: Just to come back to Victor, the idea that we're seeing more TTS built in so do we need open-source? It's great if it's built in on a $200 operating system but that's still a lot of money in a lot of the world. Okay, so it's built in to that $200 OS for the top 8 languages, the top 20 languages? We have over 100 or 200 languages in the world.
16:35 < Conference> Now mobile is the way we go forward. If eSpeak on the desktop was getting more languages worldwide, and somebody ported it to mobile, we'd have all those languages on mobile. A lot of benefits to do it open source. Oh, we want to put it in the cloud - I can depend on my desktop if it's that desktop, but if it's open source I can place it in the cloud and have it everywhere. I think that's important.
16:36 -!- Jutta [80bd43dd@atrc-CC4ADA36.atrc.utoronto.ca] has joined #OSA
16:36 < Conference> Janina: There are only 2 TTS open-source, one is Festival, maybe there is an issue around that in languages other than English, but the other is eSpeak. I heard a rumour about Google that I haven't been able to chase down.
16:36 < Conference> There are more, but those are the two predominant ones.
16:37 < Conference> There's FreeTTY which is kind of a Java-based version of Flight. But you're right, those are the dominant ones.
16:37 < Conference> I think there's still some accessibility issues with the voice. Greg's right, there's different reasons for having a different kind of voice.
16:37 < Conference> IBM, if formant engines aren't going to be popular any more, could they open source their code?
16:38 < Conference> Gregg: I'm just going to jump in to say, at breaktime, could people jump in to me on that topic?
16:38 < Conference> Sometimes somebody can't let go of something like that for free, but if we had the resources to pull it out, it'd be a lot cheaper than rebuilding it.
16:39 < Conference> If we need to get to the other side of the hill, we just need to get a little more power behind us to get just over the hill where we need to be.
16:39 < Conference> I'd like to put together a group to talk about what it is that really should be done, not just what we think we can do with the resources we have right now.
16:40 < Conference> Jutta: Moving on to the next category. Hopefully today is showing us where we need to document further. Next area is accessibility testing tools, included not only web accessibility test tools but also other testing tools. We'll start quickly with the web accessibility test tools.
16:40 < Conference> This does seem to be an area where we're doing quite well, and we have a number of offerings. We have so many Gregs in this room. Greg, do you want to talk about it?
16:41 < Conference> Recently released checker based on the ATRC checker. Wanted to open it up and make it available to everybody to see and work on. FOr instance, a guideline authoring tool includes by default several of the standards that are available. But it also opens up the possibility of creating new guidelines, so within a government or closed environment there's a particular set of technologies available, you can create a guideline to accommodate that.
16:42 < Conference> Also a check creating tool. About 275 checks, certainly a need for many more. Primary gap is the checks around multimedia, and being able to determine whether or not it is accessible. About 15 more checks needed to determine accessibility of multimedia on the web.
16:42 < Conference> Another check is the evaluation of the language, for example if linked text is meaningful enough. "Click here" is easy enough, but the technology isn't there to determine anything beyond that.
16:42 < Conference> A lot of other work going on with AChecker.
16:43 < Conference> Monitoring websites to ensure that new content remains accessible.
16:43 < Conference> Jutta: AChecker wasn't intended to be an alternative to the existing tools, but a collection of checks. There are a lot of things that require human checking. Just so that an organization doesn't use Wave and find it's accessible and then use Bobby and determine it isn't.
16:43 < eeejay> list of liblouis translation tables: http://code.google.com/p/liblouis/source/browse/#svn/trunk/tables
16:44 < Conference> That will continue to be a large function of AChecker, to make available the best in checks at the moment. DOes someone want to cover Firebug or Wave?
16:44 < WillieWalker> http://monotonous.org/2008/09/19/speclenium-easy-setup/
16:45 < Conference> A while back I worked on Speclenium, based on Selenium, meant to be an acid test for web accessibility clients, between different browsers. Basic ARIA tests on browsers to make sure they comply to certain rules, see how ARIA implementations are different on Gecko or any other browser.
16:45 < Conference> It's going to be important to see a certain amount of consistency so AT can keep up.
16:45 < Conference> Jutta: Cross-platform and new Linux test tools, does anyone want to talk about the status?
16:46 < Conference> Peter: Another essential change is which test tools are built into developer tools. IBM work around Eclipse.
16:46 < Conference> Also content checking, and again IBM's general tool has this aspect to it. Rich, I'm sure you've got the name on the tip of your tongue.
16:46 < Conference> Rich: We're doing an architecture review of it this week, in fact.
16:46 < Conference> Jan: Those things are broken out.
16:47 < Conference> Peter: Jan, I'm talking about a section for tools that are built into developer IDE, to developer tools, as one thing. If we already have one for content checking that's great.
16:47 < becka11y> perhaps we should add Accessiblity Tools Framework (ACTF) http://www.eclipse.org/actf/
16:47 < Conference> Since Accersizer isn't really Linus I would call that Gnome.
16:48 < Conference> Rich: Should I talk more about the task force? I think the rules and best practices is somewhat important to this topic.
16:48 < Conference> Jutta: If you want to quickly, that would be good.
16:48 < Conference> Rich: essentially the Accessibility Tools Task Force is creating a set of Javascript rules to be absorbed into most test tools for rich internet applications, so they can meet WCAG.
16:49 < Conference> Companies don't know how to meet WCAG rules for being "robust". We're creating a library to allow people to pull this into their applications. Important things like looking at widgets that are ARIA enabled, what structure do they have, the developer knows what needs to be done.
16:49 < Conference> The other aspect is, like the desktop, when we look at web applications, you can do a sniff test of static content, but real accessibility testing requires you to test the page as you're operating it.
16:50 < Conference> This is a fundamental shift in the way these compliance rules address accessibility. It's more like running your test suite on your web app, functional verification testing, doing reporting based on that.
16:50 < Conference> We're also producing those best practices, not just limited to OS projects, but any type of tool that can make use of these rules.
16:50 < WillieWalker> http://firefox.cita.uiuc.edu/
16:51 < Jan> Rich look for: "Accessibility Test Rules "
16:51 < Conference> Jutta: That's great. If you could add that to the wiki, that would be great, with a pointer to any information online. At the moment it's under Current Work, but closer to the bottom we have more functional - you can determine whether to put it there or in line with the accessibility testing tools section.
16:51 < eeejay> *Mike Paciello
16:52 < Conference> Mike Paciello was compiling a list - contact him to see if he can get us that.
16:52 < Conference> Jutta: Any other comments here on accessibility testing.
16:52 < WillieWalker> http://www.paciellogroup.com/about/contact.htm - ask Mike about a list of the open source web accessibility tools
16:52 < Conference> If you think of further ones, please add them to the wiki. On to Accessible Content Authoring Support. So instructional design, accessible media
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16:53 < Conference> Jan: We've got listed here some tools that would be plugged into other IDEs like Peter mentioned, but that are for creating certain types of content.
16:55 < Conference> Jutta: To comment further on that, what we want to address is authoring tools that are open source and support accessibility or support the creation of accessible content of various types. Generally there are not a large number of authoring tools that are open source, just a few. Do those in fact, are they compliant with ATAG? Anyone want to comment?
16:55 < Conference> Greg: Add TinyMCE to this list. It's used in all sorts of systems, Drupal, Sakai was looking at it.
16:55 < Conference> It's a fairly rudimentary Javascript plugin type authoring tool.
16:55 < Conference> Jutta: Probably we need to add Magpie. Others?
16:56 < bcaldwell> FCKEditor also has done some work on accessibility
16:56 < Conference> OpenOffice - it's going rather quickly, celebrating development of AT support, not just an office suite but a set of productivity tools. Support for free desktops, open source desktops, is better than for Windows - not a surprise to anyone, I think.
16:57 < Conference> I'd be interested in hearing more on the status of (?)
16:57 < Jan> rich - pls send me your edits in an email else I will lose some work on this end
16:57 < Conference> What I find really important is that as we move into the developing world, the issue of accessibility is becoming greater and language support is a great issue.
16:58 < Conference> Everyone wants to use the cloud as a productive space, not just an entertainment locale.
16:58 < Conference> Peter: Using OpenOffice with the ODT to ? plugin. Naturally has the ability to create tagged PDF, to the extent that we care about PDF, which has other issues we will hopefully get to.
16:58 < Conference> AEGIS also looking at research on combining this with Liblouis.
16:58 < WillieWalker> s/?/DAISY/
16:59 < Conference> Interested in the extent to which OpenOffice can be a Braille authoring environment.
16:59 < WillieWalker> http://www.daisy.org/
16:59 < Conference> The primary Braille researcher is addressing this - issues with localization again, since French Braille is different from EnglishBraille.
17:00 < Conference> Jutta: This is a critical area. The content will be more accessible if we build it into the authoring tools. Moving on to file formats.
17:00 < Conference> We were talking about Braille authoring - I started a proof of concept called Dots - very rudimentary, written in Python, not very portable yet. Might be interesting to look at that too.
17:01 < Conference> Jutta: Okay. Desktop document formats. We have listed there ODF, OOXML, and probably want to add PDF there as well.
17:01 < Conference> Louis, do you want to talk about, or Peter, talk about ODF?
17:02 < Conference> Peter: Again, first a structural comment: divide it into two pieces, the accessibility support within the format itself, and then the accessibility of that format through apps on the various platforms. Nowhere else is that distinction more critical. I would defer to Steve for a discussion of the accessibility of OOXML. For ODF, both Rich and I co-chaired the accessibility subcommittee and the format we think is extremely accessible has virt
17:02 < Conference> There's some question arising out of the ODT to DT book whether there's something missing for full Braille translation.
17:03 < Conference> As far as the accessibility of the format through AT on platforms, I would just point you to my various blog entries because it's kind of complex depending on whether you're using the ODF plugin or Microsoft Office. Leave a section and I can fill it in later.
17:03 < Conference> Jan: It seems like that's three sections of the same.
17:04 < Conference> Peter: It's either three or it's its own section that links back. The main PDF reader isn't a PDF authoring tool, and then OpenOffice can author accessible PDF and Daisy books and potentially accessible Braille. Easier to say authoring tools for accessible media type, and then relist.
17:04 < Conference> Jutta: Steve, do you want to comment on OOXML?
17:05 < Conference> Steve: I haven't been following it for several months, but maybe Rich has some things to do. Looked at OOXML as it was being standardized; it left a lot to be desired. We had an effect and there were some improvements made, but it still falls short in several areas.
17:06 < Conference> Rich: I haven't looked at it in a while. They had lots of problems at the beginning. The spec was incomplete, so you really couldn't address all the areas. They may have made some changes, I don't know. I thought the serious changes - no ability to set the navigation order. They had a notion of a title attribute for elements, but it's important not to have just the name but a long description, and that has to do with full interoperability.
17:06 < Conference> I don't think prior to OEF that any work has been done on looking at a document format that really addressed interoperability from top to bottom.
17:07 < Conference> Steve: Another fairly large area where OOXML falls short is the fact it doesn't play well with other standards. They have incorporated semi-proprietary standards into OOXML rather than using more open standardized versions such as Xforms and Xlinks and MathML and there will be interoperability issues going forward.
17:08 < Conference> Rich: I'm not sure OOXML has really taken off, despite all of this. Did I miss something?
17:08 < Conference> One of the things they had a problem with, to give you a good example, just things like being able to copy to the clipboard. They'd say "do it like we did it in Windows 95" and you look at it on Linux and say "what does that mean?"
17:09 < Conference> For example, if an alternate input device wanted to put that in the clipboard, what format would you follow? Just a whole host of issues.
17:09 < Conference> Jutta: Great, thanks. I'm going to speed us up a little bit. I'm not sure why the APIs are here in this order, but if there's anyone that wants to comment on the application AT APIs, do that now.
17:10 < Conference> Microsoft has their automation thing, and ATA is doing their thing. That's all I'm saying. I'll leave it at that.
17:10 < Conference> Jutta: I'd like to jump down - we're going to call on you to update -
17:10 < Conference> Jan: Please don't anyone edit the wiki right now, other than me.
17:11 < steveh> Document by Jutta and me -- probably out-of-date -- about OOXML accessibility: http://atrc.utoronto.ca/index.php?option=com_content§ionid=14&task=view&hidemainmenu=1&id=371
17:11 < Conference> Jutta: Just that page; you can edit anything else. Can we jump down to mobile applications?
17:11 < jamon> this is the page that jan is editing: http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Current+Work+OSA
17:11 < Conference> Are there people that would like to comment, and this of course needs to be divided up. Under mobile we have developer toolkits, developer supports, accessibility libraries, actual applications that work on mobile platforms - this requires quite a bit of restructuring.
17:12 < Conference> Maybe we could get Greg Fields to comment and Steve, if you want to comment on iPhones and Apple accessibility, and Colin, too, and if anyone wants to comment on Android?
17:12 < Conference> A comment on developer supports for accessibility, a comment on accessible applications, and a comment on AT on each of them.
17:12 < Conference> Jan: Can we just take a break - someone was editing as well, and I need help from Jess or Colin to un-mess it.
17:13 < Conference> Greg: We're looking at tools, APIs, and apps?
17:13 < Conference> Jutta; Developer tools, apps, alternative access means...
17:13 < Conference> Greg: I can answer for Blackberry. Plugin tools for visual studio and Eclipse to allow developers to target these devices. Through these tools, ability to access Blackberry API, which provides UI level access. So that's tools.
17:14 < Conference> On API there's Blackberry accessibility API. NOt a huge departure from other platforms, or for the iPhone.
17:14 < Conference> There's also now a web extension for Javascript, so that developers can develop web apps that include accessibility API. A little bit of attention as to the ongoing need for ARIA support. And then we've implemented JavaSpeech, JSR113 API
17:15 < Conference> In terms of UI components, on Blackberry already accessible. 3 components hidden to users that are all accessible.
17:15 < Conference> In terms of third-party applications, there are few right now, because the API is new. THe first is from Humanware. Enable access on multiple devices that run Java including Blackberry.
17:15 < Conference> Jutta: That covers Blackberries. Anyone want to add to that?
17:15 < Conference> Let's move on to the iPHone.
17:16 < Conference> Steve: I've done some work retrofitting some apps. With the addition of VoiceOver, there are other accessibility features on the iPhone, zoom, white on black, speak autotext, predictive completion, voice control. The main area that's new, VoiceOver, given that you have a multitouch interface you can tap different items on the screen and it will read what's under your finger - assuming developers have annotated it with descriptive text.
17:17 < Conference> They have an interface builder, so any control in your app can have a descriptive label and traits.
17:17 < Jan> Rich - are you still editing the wiki page? I need to be the only editor or bad things happen. Sorry.
17:17 < Conference> They also added an accessibility simulator to interrogate any particular traits in the labeling. Programmatic APIs you can call similar to on a Mac. They're not very well documented.
17:18 < jamon> richardschwerdtfeger: ping
17:18 < Conference> They do have some attempts at explaining it to developers who are coming in out of the cold, but I found it fell short. There are a lot of unimplemented things that should be coming in the future. They have bugs in the APIs and some traits don't seem to be right.
17:19 < Conference> Also question as to whether transient items are accessible, user has to be notified if they popped up, then find and tap them on the screen before they disappear. This is not accessible and can't be found, needs some thought.
17:19 < Conference> Their approach seems to be that it's about providing more information to the user, as opposed to more structural, deeper changes, inclusive design.
17:19 < Conference> There's no place to find people to test it. I have tried to make my apps accessible, and who do I ask to try these things out?
17:20 < Conference> A registry for other apps to use as models, best practices. What do you do when your app is heavily gesture-based? When do you use certain notifications? The help messages aren't there.
17:20 < Conference> They've come a long way in just a few months, bowing to pressure, and not all these problems are insurmountable.
17:20 < Conference> Consistency across multi-touch devices in general is something I'm looking for.
17:21 < Conference> Greg: From a Tools API Apps perspective, xcode is supposed through voiceover for just about everything, developing natively on Mac for Mac or on Mac for iPhone does work.
17:21 < Conference> Teaching developers how to develop accessibly for iPhone is available, tools copying ones I did a few weeks ago, it's out there.
17:21 < Conference> Accessible apps are being tracked, by Marco at Mozilla. Documentation guide is starting and I can provide that information. Not that I work for Apple, but there's a lot they're doing.
17:22 < Conference> Steve: So far, interface code has been inaccessible. There's a major barrier. Very hard to find accessible apps, no way of searching for them or characterizing them. So if you're looking for accessible apps to buy, not a good way to find them.
17:22 < Conference> Jutta: Greg, Louis and Colin.
17:23 < Conference> Greg: One of the things on the iPhone, it does have a flick mode that'll step you through the elements one at a time, rotator to select what you want to jump on by title. If you use their iPhone app builder to construct the interface, it will work with their system.
17:23 < Conference> All their apps, of course, work with it. A lot of 3rd party apps that didn't care about accessibility at all work with it, because of the power of toolkits.
17:23 < Conference> If we can make it so that accessibility comes with the mainstream toolkits, the accessibility will come.
17:24 < Conference> Getting back to Apple about things that are missing - precede them with comments about how nice it is and how accessible it is, and then tell them more. They've gotten so much feedback that this is really the right time. They've got a crew in there that's really proud, that took the least accessible thing in the world and now the community is buzzing about it.
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17:24 < Conference> The other cell phone manufacturers have been sitting back and this took the wind out of their sails, they always had to say "we're not as bad as Apple" and now they are.
17:25 < Conference> Louis: Do we have anyone here who can speak to how netbooks are treating accessibility? Any insight to Mobilin (sp)?
17:26 < Conference> I've been working for Canonical for the last 6 months and they have the Ubuntu netbook remix. It's basically Gnome, the one component that's not Gnome is the main shell, application launcher. It's low level, not accessible.
17:26 < Conference> Every netbook uses Clutter out there.
17:26 < Conference> Mobilin and UNR and they're not accessible.
17:26 < Conference> Jutta: We had a category that seems to have disappeared for accessible laptops and netbooks. Walter from Sugar and previously of OLPC can make some comments there.
17:27 < Conference> Can we continue with the mobile first - COlin?
17:27 < Conference> Colin: Nothing else to say on iPhone, don't know a lot about Android.
17:27 < Conference> We were doing a little bit of websearching and read about screenreader for the Android phone.
17:28 < Conference> The trend that's happening now is major manufacturers go away from the original Android interface to build their own on top of that. There is no clear sense of what the accessibility standards would look like for the variety of all these interfaces that's going to appear pretty soon.
17:28 < Conference> Colin: I think that what we're looking at is the opposite of Steve's vision of consistency across devices.
17:29 < Conference> That's going to keep us busy from an accessibility perspective.
17:29 < Conference> Jutta: Any other things or major gaps?
17:30 < Conference> Peter: Similar to in the desktop world, with the exception of Blackberry, Java on Mobile is a place that you can run apps that is not the phone. We don't yet have a mobile Java accessibility framework, but separate from that gap, we should point out that Java in mobile is a runtime in which some things run but not all of the phone.
17:30 < Conference> We need to add Clutter to the list of Desktop UI toolkits. That's going to be more of a gap than a current work. There is a project for it, it's not very far along, but we need to pay attention to it.
17:31 < Conference> Finally, under mobile apps we've got AEGIS sample apps and AEGIS infrastructure. My personal sense, I would be hesitant to call that current work and put it in the same category of mature desktop framework. A whole other page that talks about research work.
17:32 < Conference> Jutta: These are all good structural comments. It would be good to do a quick sweep of the gaps and then look at strategic road maps, which is our task for today. Are there current areas where it would be worthwhile to have the whole group agree on the status?
17:32 < Conference> There are many areas we haven't addressed, including AT, desktop applications, etc. Are there priorities where it is critical that we have the entire group to discuss it?
17:33 < Conference> Peter: I was right up there until you said entire group, but I do think it's important enough that we need to capture it. If this slight diversion is seen as worthwhile. There are gaps in what is accessible in the Open Desktop that prevent adoption by people with disabilities, and I think that's a useful exercise. I think PDF accessibility floats at the top of that list.
17:33 < Conference> What are the barriers between what we have today on the desktop, and what do people need to use it in Fiji or India?
17:34 < Conference> Jutta: I think that's a great framing of the question. What is needed for individuals who require access to adopt an alternative desktop? Maybe we can start a list of that? Jan's nodding. What are some of the major gaps?
17:35 < Conference> Peter: I would suggest maybe even a structure to the gaps. What media is missing? PDF. What kinds of tasks are missing? Is the Office suite sufficiently accessible, email, I would say yes, is the ability to browse the web there, I would say yes. Are all the AT bases covered, I would say no, and that touches on the gaps. We don't have voice recognition.
17:35 < Conference> Gregg: I think first priority ought to be on the apps side rather than the AT side. If the app isn't there, nobody can use it. In terms of prioritization, what is it that people say "That's really nice but I can't go there and do my job"?
17:36 < Conference> For example, you said "You can browse the web except Web 2.0". That's a pretty big gap.
17:36 < Conference> Peter: Is the problem that we don't have an accessible web browser? No, Firefox is there. Where is the gap, because there isn't an accessible app or because we don't have adoption of ARIA toolkits? That was the description I was trying to make and why.
17:37 < Conference> When we did the user evaluation in AEGIS, the way it surfaced was "I'm blind and I can't use Facebook". It was the thing that they couldn't do - the reason they couldn't wasn't because they couldn't use their screenreader and webbrowser, it was because the site was inaccessible.
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17:38 < Conference> Steve: 99% of blind users use Windows and IE and standard desktop with Jaws. She asked in her survey why this was, and no one's answers had to do with the technology, they had to do with community and friend support, recommendations from CNIB. It wasn't about whether Firefox was more accessible, but IE was recommended to them along with Jaws.
17:38 < richardschwerdtfeger> raise hand
17:39 < Conference> Janina: I would agree with that, that's absolutely key. What people are being driven toward, more than the actual accessibility of the environment. I'm not sure email is there on the graphical desktop.
17:39 < Conference> For those who aren't comfortable with the console environment, email is bigger than PDF.
17:39 < Conference> I think Firefox has been splendidly done, OpenOffice is quite usable. I'm interested in music tools, anything that would double up with MIDI.
17:40 < Conference> Victor, then Rich and Greg.
17:40 < Conference> Victor: Important to think of users with disabilities as any other users, same habits, nothing inherently different. I observed a group of 15 people in India from 9 countries. It all comes down to simple things: "I want to Skype with my friend back home, but I can't use Linux because it's not accessible, so I'm just going to pull up my Windows laptop because I know it works."
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17:42 < Conference> It comes back to how we use it - they don't know about open source, there's no technical support. Two guys in Liberia would love to have Nvda in internet cafes, but people wouldn't even know how to install it. It's simple, you run screens and you're done, but if people haven't done it before, they won't. Training support, a third thing. Provide training to the users so they know that alternatives exist and how to use them.
17:42 < Conference> It was most enlightening to see people who hated Orca after 3 or 4 classes saw that you could do the same thing as Jaws and suddenly the light comes on, things are not as scary any more.
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17:42 < Conference> Rich, you wanted to chime in?
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17:43 < Conference> Rich: There is a shortage of tools out here. I have this problem at IBM. We have 50 tools implementing Aria, and the existing tools don't really work for well. Gregmentioned the whole policy piece, which is also important.
17:44 < Conference> This new UN convention they're supposed to be signing in the US. They're going to sign it and go "Well, I signed it, now what do I do?" When they enforce that, sites like Facebook will have to be accessible. I don't think they've realized the magnitude of what they've just signed. How can we raise awareness and education to help companies make this transition? We live and breathe in this, but I doubt anyone at Facebook has done a lot in acc
17:45 < Conference> Greg: I'm wondering if there isn't a need for something between console and full graphic app and all of the functionality that would provide some of the basic email functionality but is easier to provide access to. An awful lot of people can live in the middle ground.
17:45 < Conference> And is there an overlap between that and the cognitive? How many people want an email client that doesn't do half of what the full-blown clients do? We are trying to look at simple apps. They also could be learner apps, but could be more accessible. There's a gap in there.
17:46 < Conference> Louis: Brief question for Dr. Khan - in cases like Africa, developing nations, perfect for UNESCO to intervene. Educate people as to what is available and propose and draft guidelines for local companies to implement accessible technologies in internet cafes, things like that.
17:47 < Conference> Dr. Khan: I mentioned that awareness is one of the jobs that the UN agencies do. Through our field offices, we could work with you, but the guidelines frankly have to be established in what we call the General Conference, which is something that the member states will accept. Without the members of UNESCO accepting that these are the set of guidelines, they will not implement.
17:47 < Conference> Many of the guidelines are non-binding. If we develop a set of standards and guidelines and have resolutions passed, those are binding on member states.
17:48 < Conference> Janina: On behalf of open-source telephony - it does the job wonderfully well, it's outstanding. The applications are open-source, they're higher quality. They're just not Skype, which is proprietary.
17:49 < Conference> work being done on Asterisk
17:49 < Conference> Steve: Don't introduce regressions in your accessibilities.
17:49 < Conference> Jutta: We'll take a fifteen-minute break, there's coffee out there.
17:50 < Conference> The meat of the matter is how to we move forward, what are some strategic approaches, critical gaps we need to address immediately, etc. Coming back at 5 after the hour, we'll come back - Greg, do you mind giving your discussion of the infrastructure - and move into are there critical gaps we haven't covered in our discussion of the various areas, and look at strategic next steps.
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18:03 < eeejay> saving, again.
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18:12 < Conference> Jutta: We're going to begin again.
18:13 < Conference> I'd like to get us out as close to 5 as possible so people can run to the hotel before we meet for dinner.
18:13 < Conference> Before we end today, Greg is going to talk a bit about his ideas regarding how do we move forward in a way that has the greatest impact, that has sufficient critical mass to have a fundamental profound change in what is available to people.
18:14 < Conference> Greg has proposed one particular strategy, we're going to have him present his ideas. Then we want to move back, very quickly, to the gaps. Then how to create the roadmap or strategic direction. We'll obviously have to continue working on that online between now and October, but if we can agree on just the general outline that would be great.
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18:15 < Conference> Greg: I'd like to propose that it's time to stop working around the edges and separate pieces, and ask our countries to work on public & private basis in a major sustained level in building free public inclusive information and telecommunication infrastructure.
18:16 < Conference> We're talking about changing the order of things. Instead of having open source projects working around the edges. If you look at the title, Building National Public Inclusive Infrastructures, the goal is to build a global infrastructure, but you can't. There is no global funding source.
18:16 < Conference> The goal is to start with national ones and work from those. We have been working with grants and pieces from universities, but you can't run a business that way. Got to be something more sustained.
18:17 < Conference> Have come to conclusion we can't get where we want to go this way. The fear is we build a bunch of tools, and the tools fall. How many things do we already have? It just falls into disrepair.
18:18 < Conference> If we're going to start making tools, wanting real live people to stake their careers, they can't be set up on the whim of a research project. AEGIS is a wonderful step forward, but then you fund it once or twice and they come back and say "you already did that! We don't fund maintenance, training, dissemination"..
18:18 < Conference> The commercial system we have now only serves what it can serve. We need to find something to allow us to serve the other 80% of the population.
18:19 < Conference> Building access into the internet and the ICT structure. The nation decides to do this. It would allow all people to have access, at a fundamental level. You can always have better, but when people are doing basic kinds of communication, they should be able to do it.
18:20 < Conference> Need an ICT system that does not depend on regulating industry into doing it alone. The way we expect UD to be done, but the rest of it isn't, so we just regulate the industry into it. Need a public/private partnership, because industry often resists it, but even they know that when they face the disability community it's one type of interaction, another type when they face back into their own company.
18:20 < Conference> Talking about redefining accessibility. Create a new AT / UD balance. UD wherever possible, and we know we can't do everything. You can design a great chair, but you can't replace this scooter of mine.
18:21 < Conference> This will affect the AT industry. It's like you've got private schools with 15% of the population, and then people switch to a public school after they've given everything to get their kid into a private school.
18:21 < Conference> The net sales of AT may actually go up. Some things may go up, new types may emerge.
18:22 < Conference> We can do it into a way that supports the AT industry. Imagine you build the public school system, but tell the private schools "You can use our gyms, our athletic fields, take some of our courses, and then charge extra at your school for higher math or arts".
18:22 < Conference> The AT can build on top.
18:22 < Conference> This is the only way anybody can think of to reach the 80% we can't reach with the commercial. In some countries it's even higher.
18:22 < Conference> Even the people in the commercial side who don't like the idea because of competition, they also say they can't address that any other way.
18:23 < Conference> Need it soon for ubiquity. Only way to address elder access. Older people will not buy special things for handicapped people so they can use it.
18:23 < Conference> If we can build it in as a natural part of the infrastructure, we'll see quite a different behaviour.
18:24 < Conference> Only way to get access to all disabilities in developing countries. Working off a common code base, instead of having separate pieces of AT, then other countries as they get TTS etc, you can take the whole suite of accessibility across so you don't have to figure out what country to live in based on what disability you habe.
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18:24 < Conference> It's going to be a smaller investment than many already being made around accessibility; potential for large payoff.
18:25 < Conference> We are in a fortunate area - once you figure out how to solve it, easy to replicate. Can't replicate training or support - those have running costs. Software is easy to promulgate into other countries. Training and support can be done in the countries themselves.
18:25 < Conference> They may do a better job of it than we do.
18:26 < Conference> Collections of individual solutions, or packages - like Web For All, where you take individual AT and put them together in a collection, evaluate a person and say "You need this one and that one". You may need features from two different ones, just pick which is closest since you can't run two different screen enlargers at the same time.
18:26 < Conference> At least, I've not figured out how to do that.
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18:27 < Conference> It also raises questions of sustainability and supportability. If you have lots of individuals, every time the web changes you have to change the engines in all the software. You've got little champions - one gets hired somewhere else, no one to support it.
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18:27 < Conference> If you've got lots of different ones and someone has a problem and calls up... how are you going to support that in any reasonable fashion?
18:27 < Conference> The other approach: common core components and infrastructure on which all access features and services are built.
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18:28 < Conference> Mix and match features that work for me; I have learning disability and low vision, for example.
18:29 < Conference> Allows creation of new & better features. Think of how having a common structure on the iPhone, if you tried to build a new iPhone, it'd kill you. But you can just build a feature, and sell the feature. So we'll have micro-AT, where someone can create a piece of AT, sell it for $10 to thousands of people, and people will add it on to whatever their software is. And then someone can come up with a better one, better language correction.
18:29 < Conference> They just get an open source programmer and they have a way to help people with learning disabilities correct their language, and that can spread.
18:29 < Conference> If we have a robust set of features you can just localize it.
18:30 < Conference> When it breaks, it can get fixed in another country and come across to yours, because it's not your language that broke.
18:30 < Conference> The question: is it realistic to do this? It's nice to say one size fits all, but it's hard to talk about having something like that.
18:30 < Conference> And so that you can change the core over time, because your core engine can't just be an engine. Someday we'll challenge it with another.
18:31 < Conference> Jaws and WindowEyes approach is different from Apple approach; which one is better? You can have different philosophies.
18:31 < Conference> Takes a lot of standardization. The more you think about it, the more you realize it is not a trivial task. Screenreaders don't disassemble like a scooter, and even if you could, you can't swap the parts around.
18:32 < Conference> What would be involved in setting this up? Development, security, maintenance, user support, awareness. Has to be a funding base for all of them.
18:32 < Conference> The only one that has any funding is half of the development, only if you're doing something new. But if you want to repair your system, redevelop it to work with new technology, that's not going to be fundable. This is a real problem.
18:32 < Conference> Need a way of getting funding, a commitement for this kind of activity. Needs to be a national activity.
18:33 < Conference> Can be tied together in global efforts. The UN is really good for helping us stitch these things together, but we need core bases.
18:33 < Conference> What would it cost? Not a hypothetical question.
18:33 < Conference> It may cost a bigger number than we've talked about before, and on an annual basis. In the United States, the cost for telephone relay - anybody want to guess what's spent annually right now?
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18:33 < Conference> $700,000,000 per year.
18:34 < Conference> And this is really important. It's really important that people who are deaf can participate. It works out to a few dollars a person. But a fraction of that could make a huge impact in this field. If countries put up funding to look at this.
18:34 < Conference> What's the cost up front, how long would it take to establish?
18:35 < Conference> We don't get to take a shot at it and if we're wrong, come back again. It's a hard problem. What's the cost to maintain and evolve it?
18:35 < Conference> We know the IT world keeps moving forward.
18:36 < Conference> The world is building out its infrastructure right now, and it is the time to do this. If we wait it won't happen. Our nations are focused on their infrastructure, to say you need to build THIS one with it is a lot easier now than later.
18:36 < Conference> It's always easy to let them say "I'll let the next administration do it".
18:36 < Conference> We can't continue going from project to project with no sustained funding. Our own projects, we're doing it today and hoping we can get the funds tomorrow.
18:37 < Conference> There were 20 people at the Trace and I never had funding for more than half, more than six months out.
18:37 < Conference> One of my centre grants is up for renewal, and if it's not funded that whole activity is suddenly gone.
18:37 < Conference> And that's okay if somebody else is going to pick it up. This has to be not any person or any thing, it's an infrastructure. Any of us can drop out.
18:38 < Conference> We look around the table and go "what if this or that person disappears?" We cannot be set up so things are that fragile. If we are, we can't ask communities and nations to depend on us.
18:38 < Conference> Can't be losing people close to our core due to funding vagaries and things like this. We need to avoid duplicating and restarting programs.
18:39 < Conference> You all know this: we can't attract good talent when there is no future. I've even had students come in and want to study in the area, and I have to tell them "Catch as catch can". If you're really good, we can find places for you. But I can't say for sure that you can find something and keep it.
18:39 < Conference> You can't have your very very best get breezed out so regularly.
18:39 < Conference> People look at us and say "Are you guys nuts? Why would you work in a field with no future?" People say "If they were doing something else, they'd make a lot of money."
18:39 < Conference> We propose that now is the time.
18:40 < Conference> We have a team now we may not have in the future. Uncertain funding, aging. There is an interest in coming together. Go to the RTF website and look at the list of names on there.
18:40 < Conference> The number of people who want to sign on to this; they do think together we can do things we can't do individually.
18:41 < Conference> I think we can find support at this time. I'm hearing it here and in Europe. They want to see something credible. It's like AEGIS; it's good but it's only when you put together the plan.
18:41 < Conference> It would involve change, and we will all have to change. The industries would have to change.
18:41 < Conference> My favourite Machiavelli quote: "Beware he who advocates for change, for he will have as fierce enemies anyone who did well under the old order, and weak allies anyone who might do well under the new."
18:42 < Conference> Here, at the top, you find people like Jutta and Peter. Not kingdom-builders.
18:42 < Conference> There's an article called FOrmin', Stormin', Normin' and Performin'. We're still in the Formin' stage.
18:43 < Conference> It would require our best, but would allow us to go further faster and serve more people for less. Again, everybody here is on that track.
18:43 < Conference> I really think it's the only way to serve any significant proportion of those who need AT and don't have the resources to access it themselves with the funding our society can provide.
18:44 < Conference> Between here and October we have an opportunity for kickstarting this in the US and other countries. The timelines in the US are such that if we decide to do this and dig in, or we just let it go by. It's like trying to ride a wave, if you start too late there's nothing you can do.
18:45 < Conference> We are still in a prime position. I would like to hear from those who are interested in exploring this, both the pro and the con. I won't put together a team that doesn't have friendly devil's advocates on it. Not trying to cut your legs out from under you, completely on your side but no problem teling you when something's not going to work.
18:45 < Conference> So I would like to get people put together looking at this pro and con who think this would be something to do, and sit down and talk.
18:46 < Conference> Some of you know the real costs, what I mean by hardened code, industrial shipping quality code, not experimental demo code. Some of you know issues around support and the other topics.
18:46 < Conference> We need to figure out what this is going to cost, if it's do-able. If somebody has a big hole they'd like to shoot in it, do it now rather than later.
18:46 < Conference> Question: How much infrastructure do we have to build, or else build a specification and talk to manufacturers?
18:47 < Conference> How far, how much, how deep
18:47 < Conference> Gregg: Good question. When I first started talking about it. No point building some things into the internet if they exist on the terminals.
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18:47 < Conference> Most access in developing countries on cell phones. If someone is blind or can't read, they don't need a big display.
18:48 < Conference> How many people have more than one cell phone in a drawer, like collecting Bic pens? We can be repurposing these things and giving people something they can load up with information and use as an e-book reader.
18:49 < Conference> We talked about a public/private partnership. Some big OS companies are interested in how this can be built out. Some functionality, if everything had TTS on it, that's a whole big thing we don't have to worry about providing out of network, latency, etc, because it's right there.
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18:49 < Conference> If we can build captioning off of Wave and some collaborating infrastructure, even if the way the mainstream uses it is not accessible, if we can use it and build off of it.
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18:49 < Conference> That aspect providing a specialized interface not being used by 80% of the population, mainstream industry hasn't been working on it except the people around the table here.
18:50 < Conference> The team needs to include people in industry and outside.
18:50 < Conference> I don't have an exact answer about the percentage, but leverage that which exists and is stable.
18:50 < Conference> Janina: Happy to hear this Greg. Three quick thoughts, we can talk in detail later.
18:51 < Conference> One big difference in accessibility in open source: it's all about the license. What's the license for the code? We'll have to learn to care more.
18:51 < Conference> Requires us to have a better story that we tell to the congress and parliaments and say "Yes, it matters, and you're doing a disservice to the public if you use proprietary, private materials".
18:52 < Conference> Not in someone's proprietary bank accounts' interests. Internet built on public funds, railroads. We need a story that we believe in that says accessibility is not served when we allow public funds to go to proprietary.
18:52 < Conference> Why we believe in the openness of this - not just the cost, or the person who gets it thinks "I got the second-best - someday I'll get the good stuff".
18:52 < Conference> Greg: On the last point, public/private partnerships can speak to some of this.
18:53 < Conference> Peter: The expectation is you're going to be self-sustaining once you've taken research dollars and have a commercial product, primarily purchased by governments and education. More or less the same government as what funded the research.
18:54 < Conference> An awful lot of them fund training and support, but out of a different pocket.
18:54 < Conference> How much does commercial AT cost worldwide? When you state how much this is going to cost to do, how does it compare to what we're already spending to serve less than 20% of the disabled people of the world?
18:55 < Conference> Greg: If you're trying to serve all the people in all the countries, the normal is up in the trillion dollar range.
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18:55 < Conference> Peter: If you're using commercial products. Where I'm headed is, I think we need changes to our policies, to our regulations, whether Section 504 or IDEA to say that at a minimum, to allow schools to use their funds to support students with disabilities through adding features through open source rather than buying commercial.
18:56 < Conference> We need to redirect funding that would have gone to solving one student's problem one time, until the next OS update, and direct it toward improvements in development, hardening, supporting, training the national infrastructure. That to me, Dr. Khan, you said earlier, what are some of the policy changes? This is a key one.
18:57 < Conference> Gregg: Something I call the "wrong pocket problem". If one agency spent $10,000 it would save another one $100,000 but there's no way you can get the $10,000 to the first one.
18:57 < walterbender> I would argue we need to do something slightly different...
18:57 < walterbender> all of this talk is still what we build for them.
18:58 < Conference> That's exactly the kind of thing we need to be thinking creatively about. How can we cause the funding mechanisms to even support this? They have to think about how they will pay for or support accessibility in completely different ways. We may find that other countries do it first. Brazil is starting a new model, may be the first ones to do something reasonable.
18:58 < walterbender> what we should aspire to is a learning-centric approach where we empower the leaves...
18:58 < Conference> Easier to change in places where there aren't already entrenched models.
18:58 < walterbender> a "hardened" approach is just going to fail--as it always has in the past.
18:58 < Conference> Louis: The Machiavelli quote is true. It comes down to people you have to persuade, and that's the people with a vested interest in the old ways.
18:58 < Conference> Similar to energy policy changes around the world - use carrots and sticks interchangeably.
18:59 < walterbender> a centralized approach is just going to fail, just as it has in the past
18:59 < walterbender> how abpout we actually put our trust in people's ability to learn for a change?
18:59 < walterbender> even the "disabled" can learn
18:59 < Conference> Make it so their power is not diminished, they don't lose face, they become administrators of a new system.
18:59 < Conference> Hard to argue against someone with a lot of power and money invested in that power. It's actually impossible.
18:59 < Conference> Jutta: Walter has a lot to say about this.
19:00 < Conference> Walter, do you want to comment? We can read it via IRC.
19:00 < walterbender> but as I mentioned before lunch, we don't give access to systems-level tools
19:00 < walterbender> that is for the able-bodied, I suppose
19:00 < walterbender> I talke issue with the whole top-down, we can do it for them approach
19:00 < Conference> (just read it all out, Walter)
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19:00 < walterbender> seems to still be in thsi discussion too
19:01 < Conference> Gregg: One of the key parts of this is to figure out how to remove all barriers so people with disabilities can participate at all levels.
19:02 < Conference> Jutta: In partial response to Walter, and to give the Canadian perspective, how we tried to get around this problem in Canada was to go for a Canada FUnding for Innovation which was supposed to support research, but we were able to argue we wanted a participatory design infrastructure, individuals with disabilities would have to participate int he design, development, evluation phases of research.
19:02 < Conference> We were able to successfully argue we needed an infrastructure for collaboration, communication & documentation tools that would be completely accessible to the full range of communities. We were successful in getting this funding. Not enough, but it's a start.
19:03 < Conference> The other somewhat devious thing we did was say "there isn't anything commercially available, and this is the structure we have to have" and snuck it into a research grant.
19:03 < walterbender> Let me rephrase...
19:03 < Conference> The hoops we had to go through indicate how somewhat twisted or not very friendly our policies are. To Walter's point, I think to characterize this as requiring people with disabilities to learn something doesn't describe this very well.
19:04 < Conference> We have participants here with disabilities and if anyone here is listening, they get the sense this is very complex problem and there are many barriers to overcome.
19:04 < walterbender> we can approach the problem from two perspectives: a top-down, here are tools for end users approach or a bottom up, let's provide access to the tools that developers use appaorch
19:04 < Conference> We've learned quite a bit, yes there are many people addressing this issue in microlevels, but we're talking about putting in the right plumbing, the right electricity so those issues can be supported.
19:05 < Conference> I completely agree with many of your points.
19:05 < Conference> Greg: One other thing in support of Walter's point - one of the key issues we've talked about is creating a central set of tools where individuals with disabilities create their own set of what it is they would use as tools.
19:06 < Conference> A set of features, but in a form you don't have to be a programmer to assemble something to match your needs. In addition, consumers who are toolmakers are able to extend this themselves without having to be an entire company.
19:06 < walterbender> Give them access to the machine shop, not just its products.
19:06 < Conference> Will: I don't want to sound anti-Machiavellian, but one of the surest ways to insanity is to try the same thing over and over again and expect results.
19:06 < Conference> What is differing from some of the things we already have in place? How does it differ from GNOME building in rather than bolting on accessibility?
19:07 < Conference> Building ARIA into web content so it can be made accessible?
19:07 < Conference> How is what you're going to do going to be different?
19:07 < Conference> Gregg: I'm not going to do any of this. If you are doing something, and it is working, why do something different? We may find something a little different works even better, so we want to explore.
19:08 < Conference> One part: Produce, Maintain, Support. Also: Think, Talk and Explore.
19:08 < Conference> Always want a balance of the two. The main thing we're talking about is trying to take a lot of similar efforts and see if we can't come together, and provide the funding to do some things beyond just the pieces we're doing. Carry them forward, do things on the list we can't do because we can't get funding.
19:09 < Conference> Part of this isn't about doing something so much as bringing us together to work in a more coordinated fashion with better resources.
19:09 < Conference> See what we can do together.
19:09 < Conference> It's amazing what we've done as little groups or individuals, but what could we do together? We get our funding from little places and don't have a way to come together.
19:10 < Conference> How to create an ecosystem where funding comes from different places, flows to different places. Got to have a meritocracy, so funding can go to an upstart if they're doing something better.
19:10 < Jutta> To Walter's point the Inclusive Design Institute has the goal of giving access to the machine shop not just the products, including design, development, collaborative development and quality assurance tools
19:11 < Conference> Greg: Industry support. I don't think that could be underscored any more. Baking in solutions to commercial products from an AT industry perspective is going to be a challenge.
19:11 < Conference> Glad to hear you're aware that's a huge requirement.
19:11 < Conference> Security - in some areas of this world, the ability to have secure solutions almost precludes open source solutions.
19:11 < Conference> At least understand a roadmap to provide secure solutions.
19:12 < Conference> There are only two phones around the world that could be used in a NATO environment, both Blackberry.
19:12 < Conference> The third would be continuation of service. If people depend on it to communicate, any outage of any kind causes huge upheaval. How do we ensure continuation of services of a global, all-encompassing, open source solution?
19:13 < Conference> Gregg: Security was #2 on our list. Scary to me, if you have the same software and millions of people around the world invoked it live, what quicker way to instantly send malicious code all over the place at the same time? So yes, security is a very big one.
19:13 < Conference> There's a debate as to whether or not open code is more or less secure than closed code.
19:14 < Conference> Greg: What I made by security over & above encryption later, like to have one piece of AT control another remotely, that would fail security tests. Need to be answers for how can that be done.
19:14 < Conference> Like the Kindle - if any screenreader can read the books, then ANYONE can read the books. So you have to put the reader in yourself.
19:14 < Conference> Any door you use to allow that is the same door used for spying, mucking about, roboting.
19:15 < Conference> By having industry work with us on this, we may get more buy-in.
19:15 < Conference> Not a unique problem to accessibility.
19:15 < Conference> Gregg: Without mainstream industry, this can't be done. Jutta, you have to figure out when to call this.
19:15 < Conference> Next step is to contact Jutta and I to tell us you're interested. Doing high-speed rapid-churn discussions to move this forward.
19:16 < Conference> Steve: I am new at this, but it strikes me how categorical this is with respect to disabilities. There's a spectrum of disabilities, everyone is disabled in certain situations. That shifting spectrum is the answer.
19:16 < Conference> Instead of targeting a specialized market, a specialized category that seems very small.
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19:17 < Conference> Seeing the value in building accessible solutions to the start, students have to learn this in school, it's just a way of life, going back to what was said about climate change.
19:17 < Conference> Teachers very actively teaching children about the environment - that has an effect long term.
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19:17 < Conference> Programmers just check memory management, accessibility, as part of good code.
19:18 < Conference> Gregg: You're right, the only reason we talk about accessibility is because we want something special. You can't get the government to fund mainstream usability.
19:18 < Conference> But in the end, it is just usability. Extending it so when people run into the inability and use something, then they can use it.
19:19 * bcaldwell phone participants lost the meeting again
19:19 < Conference> Victor: Many things that work in commercial will never work in open source, it really depends on the context, sometimes a user's story will make someone cry and they say "that's what I'm going to do". Quality of code very important to me, not to others. No one approach.
19:19 < richardschwerdtfeger> ok
19:19 < richardschwerdtfeger> I guess I leave for the day
19:20 < korn> Remote folks: it's being worked on...
19:20 < jamon> checking the phone line now
19:20 < Conference> All the guidelines, all the standards, the rest of it comes from testing, operability. There's no one answer.
19:20 < Jutta> we'll get you back on right now
19:20 < Conference> Not sure we can come up with better policies, in some areas, in other areas we'll have to leave them alone.
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19:20 < Conference> Gregg: We need to support innovation on both ends. Can't assume IT will look like anything. It will undo us if we do that.
19:21 < Conference> People working on architecture will have most interesting & challenging job, must adapt to the wave that's coming along.
19:21 < Conference> The ability for everything to be changing in real time.
19:21 < Conference> Don't think of accessibility as a set of fixed features. Architecture must think of entirely different ways to match people with disabilities with the IT.
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19:22 < Conference> Someone has tripped the wire again for the teleconference, we're trying to deal with that.
19:22 < Conference> Jutta: As I've been watching the IRC, I think the two perspectives are not very apart. From my view a large part of creating this infrastructure would be to create the machine shop, as Walter refers to it.
19:22 < Conference> Want to engage in the type of crowd sourcing and participatory development we're talking about.
19:23 < Conference> We need funding and support to do the boring, unfundable stuff, create the foundation for innovation.
19:23 < Conference> Greg: It seems we're talking a lot of web, a little mobile, but no industrial design of any terminals, physical accessibility. Normally the responsibility of industry, but no groups providing guidance to best practices to netbook design from a physical perspective.
19:24 < Conference> The software is just one part. The physical part is a gap.
19:24 < Conference> Jutta: There is work going on on component-based open-source hardware for mobile systems, and others. Jamon, do you want to talk about that?
19:24 < Conference> Greg: Only thing under hardware on the wiki is Android.
19:25 < richardschwerdtfeger> is the phone line down for good?
19:25 < Conference> (richard: working on it I think)
19:25 < Jutta> no
19:25 < Conference> I have a similar concern: people with arthritis,mobility impairment.
19:25 < Conference> Greg: Spending a lot of time with industrial designers, but I'm just doing it because I think it's important.
19:26 < Conference> Jutta: Greg's group has worked a lot on kiosks, ATMs. An important area.
19:27 < Conference> Greg: We have whole chapters on this, we have the separate 508 from what you "must" do. But we need to have a place, we've find reference designs, you either make them up or if you can find them in the industry, highlight them so people have good examples.
19:27 < Conference> A lot of engineer's education comes from other products, and from your competition.
19:27 < Conference> Greg: Put industrial designers through lab simulating impairments.
19:28 < Conference> Jutta: Thank you for bringing up that point. With the time remaining, less than an hour, possibly less than half an hour, let's begin talking about a roadmap.
19:28 < Conference> This includes priorities for the infrastructure project Greg was talking about, but also what are some of the critical things we need to do in the next little while?
19:29 < Conference> How can we have a more coordinated effort, address the major gaps? Make use of OS systems and applications accessible?
19:29 < Conference> We have three uber-categories, Research, Development, Implementation. Here we have the products but we need the training, maintenance, documentation to make them usable.
19:30 < Conference> Cross-cutting issues: language & developer support.
19:30 < Conference> We'll go around the table and each of you pick two priority areas, the most critical things in this area. If you only had limited dollars or resources, what are the primary things to be worked on?
19:32 < Conference> Peter: for ease of us studying and coming up with categories, could you save that page as-is as link that URL?
19:32 < Conference> Jan: It's called OSA Roadmap, linked from Current Work OSA. Will link from main page.
19:32 < Conference> Everybody take a minute to think about their two.
19:33 < jamon> phone is back up
19:33 < OSA-Pina> anastasiacIf I had limited dollars, the one area I would concentrate is the area of awareness and education. There is lots otout there but if ople don't know about it, it's useless. People all around are asking for tools, resources and training and they don't know how much exists in open source for example where investing in accessibility would be positively impacted.
19:33 * bcaldwell phone folks still don't have audio
19:34 < Conference> Jutta: Those of you on the teleconference, if you can come up with the top two priorities that should be included -
19:34 < Conference> (we are hearing a dial tone - working on it!)
19:35 < davidb> to echo anastasia a bit... i really think we need a way of visualizing what is out there... (like I mentioned when Greg visited the ATRC a short while back)
19:36 < davidb> where visualizing == perceiving
19:36 < Conference> Can people on the teleconference hear us again?
19:36 < Conference> Have you all given up on the phone and gone to IRC?
19:36 * bcaldwell nope
19:37 * davidb is only IRCing
19:37 * bcaldwell still following on IRC
19:37 < Conference> I guess we'll continue. Anyone on teleconference line at the moment?
19:37 < Conference> We'll keep working on it while we go round.
19:37 < OSA-Pina> bcaldwell:
19:38 < Conference> Dr. Khan: Training and language support.
19:38 * bcaldwell Pina and I are still on teleconference line - let us know if we should throw in the towel
19:38 < Conference> Stan: PDF content, pushing for more material to be published in accessible format, raising awareness.
19:39 < Conference> - Mobile environment is very important and such a broad area, could pick up a lot of things. Infrastructure, and to get that you need a development environment that you can create that infrastructure. Maybe it's there, I'm not familiar.
19:39 < Conference> Do the same gap analysis on mobile and see what's missing.
19:39 < Conference> Jutta: what do you mean by infrastructure?
19:39 < Conference> - Is there the same sort of thing where applications can present through an API?
19:39 < Conference> Jutta: So developer infrastructure.
19:40 < Conference> Peter: Under the implementation group, but it isn't a clean fit. A funding shift from purchase toward funding use, maintenance, support and bugfix.
19:40 < Conference> The second one is either or both of development and research categories, and that is speech recognition, engine and application. So that could be funded through research, but eventually also development. Enough needed in both places.
19:41 < Conference> Greg: Pete mentioned infrastructure that we might interpret as accessibility API in development, the other part would be TTS in development, because they exist for mobile.
19:41 < Conference> So my two would be accessibility API in development, and screenreader for mobile.
19:42 < Conference> Dawn: Mine is the dull, boring one: Documentation.
19:42 < Conference> It is under implementation.
19:43 < Conference> Janina: My first one is self-serving, but I want to see Linux audio resolved to something that works. It's embarrassing after 10 years, and it's important. And my second one is to have a good story relating to why it's important to serve accessibility with open source.
19:44 < Conference> Jess: I'd like to put a hash mark under the PDF mention, and email and collaboration tools. That gives us a lot of trouble.
19:44 < Conference> Jutta: That goes under research AND development.
19:45 < Conference> Iris: Endowments, money, funding.
19:45 < jamon> our new phone and new phone line keeps cutting out, to those in the teleconference, please chime in via irc
19:45 < Conference> Greg: I'm not sure where they fit, probably under implementation or development. From e-learning, personalization to the needs of individuals, and the second is interoperability.
19:46 < richardschwerdtfeger> so, I want to talk about personalization and HTML 5
19:46 < richardschwerdtfeger> how do I call in to convey the opportunities?
19:46 < Conference> Steve: Under research, similar to what Greg said, the best ways to empower people to customize without being programmers themselves.
19:46 < richardschwerdtfeger> the phone is still casters up
19:46 < Conference> And the second is collaboration and community tools. I guess that's under development.
19:46 < Conference> Here I'm thinking Facebook, Twitter, clients, things like that.
19:46 < Jutta> i can skype you in rich
19:47 < Conference> - Increased localization in Braille and speech recognition.
19:47 < Conference> ? control and other forms of alternative input.
19:47 < davidb> sorry to drop this in out of nowhere, but my second priority is sort of echoing Greg's point about the wrong pocket. we need to make sure funding makes its way to talent on the ground, like eeejay ... we need to retain our promising "doers" in the FOSS a11y community.
19:47 < Conference> Will: I have a tough time within these bounds, but I'll try. For me, help a platform or set of solutions get critical mass. Can we work together and come up with a common solution?
19:48 < Conference> I'll mention streaming media; we need to understand how to provide textual forms for streaming media. Not sure if it's under research or development, but we need an open solution.
19:48 < Conference> DRM things may prevent us from providing alternatives.
19:48 < Conference> And then maintenance is important.
19:49 < peteb_> A number of people, eg Rich, are trying to call in
19:49 < Conference> - I think as I listen to everyone, I think I'm going to sign off on what Janina was saying, we really don't have a good story. We don't really know who our audience is.
19:49 < Conference> A way to have a branding campaign, almost - who are these people we're trying to help? Once we have these stories, we can do something back. That's vote number 1. I don't know where that fits.
19:49 < jamon> peteb_, richardschwerdtfeger, the phone system isn't working for more than a minute or two
19:50 < Conference> That's my own category. And the second one is mobile phone accessibility, particularily with regard to social applications like widgets. But we can start first with an open source screen reader. But I think saying mobile accessibility is like flying to the moon, there's so much.
19:50 < Conference> Jutta: Rich has been trying for a bit, so I'm going to let him speak. Can you hear me?
19:52 < Conference> We have people looking at HTML5 for a number of reasons, there are a number of other things. We have an opportunity to build things like ARIA into the native host language, but we can also do other things, particularily one of the things we can do is things like video tags and object elements and Canvas, and this is an opportunity for us to put Access For All properties, metadata properties on the resources that we could use to provide the
19:53 < Conference> Another opportunity with HTML5 is local data storage, which we could develop an open source plugin for browsers, standardized user preferences conveyed through the browser through local storage, with Ajax on the server, turn mobile device into something that adapts to the user's environment. As you operate throughout the day, you have a standard vehicle for personalized access. Opportunity with HTML5 to really pull this together.
19:53 < Conference> Really think about personalized experience if we all work together as a team.
19:53 < Conference> If you think about what even Google is doing, very focused on HTML delivery, IBM is, other companies as well. Certainly an important part of a mobile strategy.
19:54 < Conference> Jutta: Rich, if you could add some of that to the wiki, that would be great. Louis?
19:55 < Conference> Louis: Echo the other suggestions and want a narrative & framework to bring people together. ODF vs. OOXML battle taught us that listening to arguments about compatibility is a losing strategy. We have to think fresh, new, in a way that is not merely satisfying vested interests.
19:55 < Conference> Otherwise you'll have a retake of ODF vs. OOXML battle. Key element in narrative gives ground rules to prevent sliding into vested interests.
19:55 < Conference> The other one, to complement this, is education. I've been trying to promote in OpenOffice.org. This is essentially an understanding of how the world works, not an add-on or afterthought.
19:56 < Conference> Gregg: First suggestion, everyone take their lists and write them in an email and send them to Jutta.
19:56 < eeejay> davidb: thanks :)
19:56 < Conference> TTS tool for ease of new foreign languages. So this would be an engine that would facilitate - more than a library, I know there's a whole set of tools for concatenation, you'd have to talk to a linguist.
19:57 < Conference> The second one, core architecture for developing feature-based vs. package-based access.
19:57 < Conference> Common core so you can create new AT off of it.
19:57 < richardschwerdtfeger> is it possible for this person to move closer to the phone Jutta's laptop
19:57 < richardschwerdtfeger> we are listening on Jutta's connection
19:57 < Conference> - I'm not an expert in any of these areas, so my suggestions are high level. I'm strongly voting for media. Instant access to all content is the new literacy.
19:58 < Conference> For people to be literate, all media has to be accessible. Everything new.
19:58 < davidb> eeejay: now don't go letting your head swell :P
19:58 < Conference> My other priority is under research, take an anthropological approach. Infer from behaviours of large user populations. People don't use services in the way their creators imagined they would. Under research, I would say look for behaviours as a clue to what you want to make accessible.
19:59 < Conference> Colin: When we started over there, I had nothing on my list, and now I have to pick and choose. Big-picture issues that strike me.
19:59 < Conference> Rich's point, Canvas. We have an opportunity to put a real challenge to Flash as an open-source standards-based technology for animation and rich media. Some serious thinking about Canvas accessibility will suit us well.
20:00 < Conference> I agree with Greg about the importance of toolkits, frameworks and APIs. One size won't fit all for any given environment.
20:01 < Conference> Growth in frameworks that take accessibility into account from the beginning, and more than just "we have support for ARIA" but taking some of the principles, having flexible presentations, graceful degradation.
20:01 < Conference> Accessibility thought of as complex and obscure - need to create elegant development tools that take flexibility into account. We are sitting on a 1980s legacy.
20:02 < Conference> Griff: To be successful, we need to pick low-hanging fruit that's doable and practical and will make a difference. I would vote for trying to do something in the area of mobile devices, because we might have the most impact because it's still a new frontier.
20:03 < Conference> If you can relate mobile devices in education with assistive devices that's important.
20:03 < Conference> - I'll vote for documentation, partly related to training and developer's code, speaking from perspective of a developer.
20:04 < richardschwerdtfeger> speak up por favor
20:04 < Conference> Jamon: Somebody talked about the Linux audio environment, and just to go off of that, OSS in Linux is coming back into prominence. Technical and low level, but worth researching because there's so many competing ones.
20:04 < Conference> Second thing is to see more research in server-side text-to-speech engines, a way to get access to more mobile platforms where you can't have a standard that's just implemented tomorrow.
20:05 < Conference> It may be a way just in the interim to get a few more people access to content.
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20:06 < Conference> Jan: I don't know if it's good or bad that there's so many. Multi-lingual text to speech, rolling out languages to try to reach users all over the world.
20:06 < Conference> Another is getting critical mass behind particular platforms. Real problem of fragmentation because nobody wants to be dictated to, but winners need to be picked sometimes.
20:07 < bcaldwell> my two priorities: education/awareness (training), common delivery/personalization infrastructure (both R&D)
20:08 < Jutta> we are reading out the priorities on the irc from people on irc
20:08 < Conference> We've come to the end of our time, but obviously this is not ended; we'll continue the discourse online, during dinner.
20:09 < Conference> We'll keep working on the various collaborative documents online, invite you to add to them and find easier ways to add to them as well.
20:09 < Conference> I think this has been quite significant, over the last two weeks and weekend, even.
20:09 < Conference> One last thing we need to do is talk about tomorrow's unconference.
20:09 < Conference> Tomorrow from 1:30 to 3:15 as part of the open education conference, we'll continue this discussion but address it to the Open Ed group.
20:10 < Conference> For people who don't know, it's a community that has been creating open access curriculum, begun in part with efforts like Open Courseware at MIT but larger scope and types of institutions contributing in different subject areas.
20:11 < Conference> Wasn't designed accessibly from the beginning, and they have just dawned to the fact that they need to make it ADA or 508 compliant in various countries, and school boards and universities aren't purchasing it because it isn't accessible.
20:11 < Conference> Now there is a large amazing body of curriculum available we are challenged with figuring out how to make it accessible, or move forward to make accessible content.
20:12 < Conference> Tomorrow between 1:30 and 3:15 we hope to have a discussion with the Open Ed community about the supports available, a strategy to do that, and to take the relevant pieces from today and offer them up to the Open Ed community and invite them to participate in the accessibility efforts.
20:12 < Conference> Griff, do you have any comments?
20:12 < Conference> Griff: I think the toughest part of dealing with the Open Education stuff is it's so grassroots and around the world and incoherent. It suffers from impact, I think, because of its lack of coherence. If the people in Open Ed can do what we did today, they'd be very well served.
20:13 < Conference> How to create that message and give it to them, that's the hard part.
20:13 < Conference> I'd like to thank you for the opportunity, I learned a lot today and it certainly opened my eyes.
20:13 < Conference> - Play up that accessibility is good for everyone, and that material is easy to keep up-to-date, remix and repurpose it, which is the holy grail of Open Ed.
20:14 < Conference> This isn't just a cause for that 1 person, it will increase the value of the project for everyone.
20:14 < Conference> Jutta: The curb cut issue. Actually, I am going to deliver a paper as well on Friday, and I'd love to get input into it.
20:15 < Conference> Was asked to create an accessibility roadmap, I created this quickly, I'll post that on the wiki and if you can criticize and refine it, that would be wonderful.
20:15 < Conference> I just want to give a quick thank-you to everyone, to everyone that's here, or on the teleconference.
20:15 < Conference> Thanks for your patience, for making the trip, for your contributions to the wiki.
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20:15 < Conference> I hope you'll continue to be engaged and help out as well in October Open Source Week, and we'll be sending out information about that.
20:16 < Conference> Now that you've committed to today, you have no choice but to be committed to the rest of the effort!
20:16 -!- eeejay [eitan@1BCC0DA0.DC2756F6.49581133.IP] has quit [Quit: Ex-Chat]
20:16 < Conference> I also want to thank Jurs for the technical support, Jan for his wiki, and Kirsten for her captioning.
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20:17 < Conference> Jutta: Our dinner reservations are at 6:30, and Jurs has a handout for you on how to get there.
20:17 * bcaldwell waves goodbye - thanks everyone!
20:17 < Conference> We hope to see you all at dinner and continue this discussion then and tomorrow. For those of you who have to travel, safe travels!
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