OSA Toronto IRC Logs

Log for Wednesday October 28, 2009

Note that all times are EST. The full logs for both days follow:

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09:07:08  <louis_to> hi all
09:07:39  <clown> hi louis_to
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09:12:30  <davidb> hi all!
09:12:46  <davidb> louis_to: are you here in person?
09:12:54  <louis_to> no
09:12:57  <davidb> aww
09:12:59  <davidb> ok
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09:13:10  <louis_to> I have a call I have to attend to important, related to ODF in a few minutes
09:13:17  <louis_to> then another; by then should be able to leave
09:13:28  <davidb> cool
09:13:32  <louis_to> but I think I can doubletime the two and listen minimally
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09:13:52  * louis_to was emergency planning call...
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09:15:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Check check, one two one two
09:15:27  <louis_to> is the skype connection working?
09:28:46  <davidb> tweet hashcode is #OSAForum
09:28:51  <davidb> (that's not a channel)
09:29:04  <davidb> louis_to: not sure
09:31:13  <louis_to> no good sound...
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09:31:23  <louis_to> or is anyone hearing anything?
09:31:36  * louis_to is going aphasic?
09:32:11  <TranscriptKirsten> I think they're still working on it...
09:32:26  <louis_to> oh good; was concerned there'd be a final exam...
09:32:43  <louis_to> btw, I'm Louis Suarez-Potts of Sun and OpenOffice.org
09:33:54  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: It's not that the phone lines are cut this time, there ARE no phone lines.
09:34:07  <TranscriptKirsten> We're using Skype, and everyone can speak to us very well, but can't hear as well.
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09:34:16  <TranscriptKirsten> Kirsten is just as essential as last time.
09:34:34  <TranscriptKirsten> Welcome to the first Accessibility Forum, and thank you all for coming here despite H1N1 and the rain and difficulty finding the room.
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09:34:55  <TranscriptKirsten> We've had six regrets due to flu, I'm hoping that's just overreaction. The last thing this community needs given how busy we are is to have a lot of people having the flu.
09:35:07  <TranscriptKirsten> Just to orient you, we have quite a number of methods of communicating today.
09:35:26  <TranscriptKirsten> We have an IRC channel up, and for those of you here viewing using the displays it's to our left.
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09:35:45  <TranscriptKirsten> Kirsten, who did an amazing job in our first session in Vancouver, will be creating a transcript of what we are talking about.
09:36:07  <TranscriptKirsten> We have a wiki setup in each of the groups who will be meeting to complete the work items. This is not a conference, it's not a set of presentations, it's a working group.
09:36:20  <TranscriptKirsten> So we're going to achieve a fairly large body of work in four areas and a fifth in plenary format.
09:36:31  <TranscriptKirsten> To get the word out a bit more we've created a Twitter hashcode #OSAForum
09:36:51  <TranscriptKirsten> FOr any of you who are tweeting at the moment, that would be great. We'll link it to the #fsoss as well.
09:37:13  <TranscriptKirsten> We have Breeze that we'll use as a last resort if we don't get Skype working. We may try to find a volunteer to monitor Breeze and see that people are doing okay.
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09:37:43  <TranscriptKirsten> So those are many modes of communication. In terms of location of essential things, you passed the washroom when you came in. There are washrooms in both directions in the hallway.
09:38:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Our meetings will take place two days, all day today and tomorrow 9-5. We don't have a formal dinner planned tonight, but we will set up a number of informal gatherings for dinner. If you're interested please talk to Iris and we'll organize some outings.
09:38:41  <TranscriptKirsten> There is also some talk of taking people downtown. You will have noticed this is nowhere near the center of the city, but in the northwest corner close to the airport.
09:38:48  <TranscriptKirsten> Again, speak to Iris and we'll organize a trip downtown.
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09:39:20  <TranscriptKirsten> Dinner will be tomorrow night, together with our FSOSS conference organizers. All of the presenters and academic open source workshops from yesterday will be there as well, so we can discuss the issues from these meetings.
09:39:45  <TranscriptKirsten> Friday is the FSOSS conference, many of you have registered, if you want to attend talk to us, we will be presenting four papers on topics related to accessibility.
09:39:51  <TranscriptKirsten> Q: Do you know when those sessions are yet?
09:40:01  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Yes, the schedule is up there.
09:40:36  <TranscriptKirsten> So let's do a quick round of introductions. I was just in Barcelona and they used the convention of a two-breath introduction, so you only have two breaths in which to introduce yourself, who you're affiliated and what your interests are in open source.
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09:40:50  <TranscriptKirsten> Those of you who are horn players have an advantage and those who have asthma don't.
09:41:03  <TranscriptKirsten> Monica Ackerman: Currently working with Tina at Scotiabank in the accessibility team.
09:41:22  <TranscriptKirsten> (sorry, missed name)
09:41:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Dan Shire
09:42:19  <TranscriptKirsten> Stian Horcleb - Master student in higher education in TO, part of peer-to-peer university
09:42:44  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina Sajka - open source development standards particularly Linux Foundation open accessibility workgroup & W3C
09:42:57  <TranscriptKirsten> Pete Brunet - Java Access Bridge
09:43:13  <TranscriptKirsten> David Bolter - long time at ATRC, working on Firefox accessibility
09:43:33  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg Vanderheiden - Uni of Wisconsin. Primarily Raising the Floor & infrastructure
09:43:42  <davidb> (David Bolter - now at Mozilla Corp)
09:44:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris ? - free & open source software, GNU since before GPL1 was published, on behalf of RTF, NPII
09:44:20  <TranscriptKirsten> James - Interaction designer at ATRC
09:44:48  <TranscriptKirsten> Willy Walker - Sun Microsystems, Linux & Unix accessibility 20 years, leads Gnome accessibility project, end-to-end working group
09:45:18  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter Korn - Sun Microsystems. Same amount of time as Will and Chris, Mac & Windows and then at Sun in Java & Unix. Leads Aegis project.
09:45:44  <TranscriptKirsten> Saulo Barretto - Brazil - research centre in remote area of northeast Brazil - help education.
09:46:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Colin Clarke, technical lead for Fluid Project, at ATRC for over a decade. Community of designers & developers helping other open-source projects with accessibility.
09:46:28  <davidb> (Clark, no e ;) )
09:46:34  <TranscriptKirsten> Jess Mitchell - project manager for Fluid. Interesting perspectives.
09:46:50  <TranscriptKirsten> Armin Krauss - student - interested in Jutta's class
09:47:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Alison - research student as well
09:47:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Laurel Williams - ATRC for 6 or 7 years, accessibility first in hardware, now in software
09:47:42  <TranscriptKirsten> Anastasia Cheetham - at ATRC
09:48:16  <TranscriptKirsten> Yura Zenevich - ATRC
09:48:26  <TranscriptKirsten> Pina D'Intino
09:48:35  <TranscriptKirsten> Justin Obara - ATRC
09:48:39  <TranscriptKirsten> Michelle D'souza - ATRC
09:48:50  <TranscriptKirsten> Jacob Farber - ATRC
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09:48:57  <TranscriptKirsten> another ATRC - missed name
09:49:05  <colin> Joseph Scheuhammer
09:49:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Joseph Scheuhammer - ATRC
09:49:18  <TranscriptKirsten> thanks Colin -before Joseph though?
09:49:20  <colin> And Iris Neher was the other ATRCer
09:49:34  <TranscriptKirsten> Oh of course, I know Iris and didn't hear her name
09:49:39  <colin> :)
09:49:40  <TranscriptKirsten> Jamon, tech support & audio
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09:49:52  <TranscriptKirsten> Introducing Ben & Louis on Skype. They can't hear us but we can hear them.
09:50:01  <TranscriptKirsten> I'm going to get them to go first.
09:50:19  <TranscriptKirsten> Hi, this is Ben Caldwell. At Trace for 11 years now, primarily on RTF now.
09:50:55  <TranscriptKirsten> Louis Suarez-Potts: OpenOffice.org & Sun Microsystems. Thanks. Sorry I can't be there in person, will be later on.
09:51:23  <TranscriptKirsten> Some of our moderators, Greg Fields and others, will be joining us later. We will have the sound going by then. We'll have quite a number of additional individuals on the Skype bridge, and will call on people to backfill information.
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09:52:03  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: We're going to review what we decided upon in our first meeting in Vancouver, specifically priorities and how we arrived at those. Then we're breaking into 2 parallel working groups today, accessible collaboration tools & end-to-end accessibility in one platform.
09:52:29  <TranscriptKirsten> We're going to let you self-select, but we want a fairly good balance of experts in user requirements, technical requirements and individuals representing accessibility community and standard systems.
09:52:36  <TranscriptKirsten> I might intervene if we have a poor balance in the two groups.
09:53:01  <TranscriptKirsten> Then we have lunch. Then we will continue the parallel groups until afternoon break. Then we will have a report back to the full group, followed by a discussion of Beyond the Code in plenary format.
09:53:08  <TranscriptKirsten> Critical that everyone should be part of that discussion.
09:53:32  <TranscriptKirsten> Tomorrow, two presentations to start off the day. Current State of Mobile Accessibility, cell phones etc, and that will be lead by Jorge and Greg Fields and several others.
09:53:41  <TranscriptKirsten> Most of our moderators today came in at the end, a bit of a nervous moment there.
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09:54:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Presentation on NPII, Greg will be on that. Then we will break out into two groups, NPII and Mobile Accessibility. Those will again continue after lunch and report back after the afternoon break. Then we'll discuss next steps.
09:54:20  <TranscriptKirsten> Any questions or concerns? We can still edit it as well.
09:54:41  <TranscriptKirsten> The major concerns have been the choice of which group to join, but hopefully we'll document each well enough that you'll get a sense of what's happening in the other group.
09:55:22  <TranscriptKirsten> So, we had a one-day session back in August in Vancouver with nicer weather. We went through the exercise of identifying what are the priorities, created a wiki page to identify the gaps, what's missing and needs to be done in resources, actual areas of work. Then we did some prioritization.
09:55:37  <TranscriptKirsten> At the end of that packed day, we did a bunch of voting and discussion and advocacy for certain areas of work.
09:55:56  <TranscriptKirsten> A group of us had the task of synthesizing all of that and figuring out what came up at the top. This is what we arrived at and has been on the wiki for a while.
09:56:33  <TranscriptKirsten> The area that got the most votes and discussion was accessible collaboration tools. We need individuals with disabilities to be able to partici