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 participate in design forums, structures and discussion groups that are part of distributing open source.
09:56:55  <TranscriptKirsten> The chats, the versioning systems, the bug tracking systems, wikis, tools, many of them are still not accessible. Not inviting, not easy to participate in.
09:57:37  <TranscriptKirsten> This is one of the main critical things that needs to be addressed and would have a systemic effect - the more individuals with disabilities that can participate, the more it increases participation in the software development
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09:58:08  <TranscriptKirsten> Need to be able to communicate across languages and work across languages. The language challenge is very similar to sensory modality challenge, must be able to leverage the work between them.
09:58:17  <TranscriptKirsten> This area came well out at the top.
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09:58:53  <TranscriptKirsten> The other ones were fairly equal in terms of votes. Challenge of there not being a critical mass within any one OS platform. When a country or university or college wishes to adopt open source, not enough accessibility coverage for anyone to safely do that.
09:59:08  <TranscriptKirsten> If you want to adopt Linux, or set of OS file formats, we haven't done enough to ensure a jurisdiction can do that.
09:59:32  <TranscriptKirsten> This is a barrier to the adoption of open source. So many compelling reasons why OS is a good solution for accessibility, monetary access, harmonization reasons.
09:59:59  <TranscriptKirsten> Accessibility and open source go hand in hand. Need to address this, have cross-platform approach so whatever platform we choose to use, we need to be able to use that work in other platforms as well.
10:00:20  <TranscriptKirsten> As if this isn't hard enough, we need to address underserved requirements such as cognitive access. Look at personalization approach in these systems.
10:00:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Will is going to be leading that.
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10:01:08  <TranscriptKirsten> Mobile accessibility. It's an area that is not yet settled, still a lot of standards, conventions, habits that are not yet hardened, and we have the opportunity to make sure these systems are inclusively designed.
10:01:29  <TranscriptKirsten> More people in the world connected by mobile networks than any other type of network. Need to address this to address accessibility globally.
10:01:51  <TranscriptKirsten> Individuals rely upon mobile networks to connect to the world. Disjointed standards & methods of mobile access. How can we find a way to infuse accessibility into all of these?
10:02:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Location-based and context-aware services have huge potential for addressing accessibility needs like wayfinding.
10:02:49  <TranscriptKirsten> Last but not least, beyond the code. This is all the stuff we need to do to make this work. Even if we have completely accessible code and well-rounded accessible applications, software systems etc, if we don't have the support structures it's not going to be used and we won't achieve our goals.
10:03:05  <TranscriptKirsten> Precarious values beyond accessibility: training, user support, maintenance, setup, documentation, user testing, evaluation.
10:03:18  <TranscriptKirsten> The non-sexy things the accessibility community doesn't pay attention to, volunteers don't volunteer for.
10:03:26  <TranscriptKirsten> That's going to be our wrap-up plenary session today.
10:03:27  <TranscriptKirsten> Any questions?
10:03:51  <TranscriptKirsten> We will have a quick coffee break while we work out the Skype issue.
10:04:09  <TranscriptKirsten> After the break we'll have a presentation/pitch by the Fluid team and by Will. Start thinking during the break about which session you'd like to attend.
10:04:24  <TranscriptKirsten> Q: Is it possible to record the sessions? A lot of us will be schizophrenic about picking one of the two areas.
10:04:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: We're working on that.
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10:04:39  <TranscriptKirsten> Coffee & refreshments - think about what you want to do.
10:05:11  <TranscriptKirsten> (hands out virtual coffee to IRC channel)
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10:19:55  <TranscriptKirsten> We're going to be using Breeze. We're also trying to capture the sound or the audio through Breeze and use that as a recording of the session you're not in.
10:19:58  <jamon> http://connect.yorku.ca/fluidoverflow
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10:20:17  <TranscriptKirsten> To pitch the two sessions that are going to be happening, I'm going to call on Will and Jess and Colin. We'll start with Jess and Colin.
10:20:25  <TranscriptKirsten> They're going to do a fireside chat.
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10:20:55  <TranscriptKirsten> Jess: Fireside chat means no Powerpoint slides. Colin and I had a conversation about collaboration tools.
10:21:22  <TranscriptKirsten> We are particularly well versed in their challenges and the limitations we have been experiencing.
10:21:38  <TranscriptKirsten> Get a sense of what's working and what hurts with collaboration tools, esp. multimedia.
10:22:07  <TranscriptKirsten> One of the things that came up was we have this temptation, a feeling of what could be different. Envision new tools and come up with sketches and plans on how people in this room might help make these tools happen.
10:22:09  <TranscriptKirsten> Cozy chat.
10:22:33  <TranscriptKirsten> Maybe a bit about what we do. We have daily meetings in Breeze, we're very distributed & international team, Barcelona, Bulgaria, Vancouver, Toronto.
10:22:46  <TranscriptKirsten> These daily meetings allow us to touch base, find out what people have been doing, depending on their time zones.
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10:22:59  <TranscriptKirsten> Some of the limitations are the usability of the tool and there isn't an alternative that we can accomplish the same thing with.
10:23:07  <TranscriptKirsten> Breeze gives us audio, video, chat channel, notes.
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10:23:33  <TranscriptKirsten> Interface has its own limitations, new people face a learning curve. Difficulty of one person talking and everybody else listening. You want to have open conversation but it cuts into the ease of chatting.
10:23:49  <TranscriptKirsten> Then there's the issue of video. High-bandwidth activity, we wind up turning it off altogether and using audio only.
10:23:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Then you have the equivalent of raising your hand.
10:24:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Colin: Isn't this supposed to be a pitch?
10:24:04  <TranscriptKirsten> Jess: Good point.
10:24:20  <TranscriptKirsten> Colin: We'll talk about audio, video, note trackers, other tools.
10:24:29  * davidb wonders what the breeze coords are... jamon?
10:24:29  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: You want to talk about how exciting it is and challenging but not too challenging.
10:24:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Jess: Interested in talking about accessibility and usability of all these tools.
10:25:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Technical, social practices to engage people.
10:25:32  <TranscriptKirsten> Will: Alright, so THIS is a PITCH. The best way to get people to come to their thing would be provoke them, make them mad, make them want to prove you're wrong.
10:25:43  <jsilva> davidb: maybe http://connect.yorku.ca/fluidwork ?
10:25:59  <TranscriptKirsten> I will provoke you by saying we've reinvented the same API and AT several times. What happens is the space remains fragmented, everyone wants to promote their individual thing. I'm promoting my individual thing.
10:26:18  <TranscriptKirsten> We take the few resources we have, split them across multiple projects, make some headway in some spaces but never really far enough, and we flounder and don't get a lot done.
10:26:52  <TranscriptKirsten> I propose that what we've done with Gnome is create a project that has had good successes, an API that works, screenreader that works, magnifier that works. We suffer from the same thing other projects do: We don't have money, people, critical mass.
10:26:58  * caldwell davidb: http://connect.yorku.ca/fluidoverflow
10:26:59  <TranscriptKirsten> By keeping things fragmented, we won't get critical mass.
10:27:12  * davidb thanks caldwell
10:27:34  <TranscriptKirsten> What I want to discuss: where are we with Gnome today? Why is it a good solution? What are the gaps? Can we get some people around these gaps, prioritize them, get more money and people sent to the project?
10:28:17  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: We will split into these two sections. Communication will be right across the hall and Gnome end-to-end will be here. What you're going to be doing before the break this afternoon is come up with a number of documents. The most important of these is a road map for how we're moving forward and to arrive at that, you will look at what is out there, revie
10:28:31  <WillieWalker> http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/End-to-End+Open+Source+Accessibility
10:28:35  <TranscriptKirsten> review the gaps, identify the priorities and work out the road map. We have a wiki set up for each group and the facilitator will handle what goes up on the wiki.
10:28:55  <TranscriptKirsten> You may be asked to volunteer as a scribe. We hope to share the documents you produce on Friday to the greater community or those presently home with the flu.
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10:29:20  <TranscriptKirsten> We leave it up to you to decide whether you're in here with Will and Gnome or across the way in Accessible Collaboration Tools with Fluid.
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10:29:26  <TranscriptKirsten> Jess: Don't let "across the hall" deter you.
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10:33:57  <TranscriptKirsten> (This is the Gnome session).
10:33:58  <WillieWalker> http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/End-to-End+Open+Source+Accessibility
10:34:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Will: I'm going to post the text form of the slides I'm going to go over. We are on tera.
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10:34:45  <TranscriptKirsten> On the wiki are the text forms, a straight text form of what I'm going to talk about. Then I'll have some very fancy slides.
10:35:14  <TranscriptKirsten> What I want to do is go over where we are with Gnome, what's good about it, what's bad about it, and just let me run through that. After that, I'll talk about some of the strengths we've seen and some of the gaps.
10:35:21  <TranscriptKirsten> We just hear about the gaps and don't have resources to address them.
10:35:32  <TranscriptKirsten> Talk about if we can get critical mass behind GNOME, what's this going to take.
10:35:48  <TranscriptKirsten> I'm Willie Walker, I lead the GNOME Accessibility Project. Thanks to the organizations for helping fund this.
10:35:54  <TranscriptKirsten> What is needed for an end-to-end solution?
10:36:17  <TranscriptKirsten> Compelling access to modern systems. We all want to provide good access to modern technology - desktop, mobile phone, whatever.
10:36:35  <TranscriptKirsten> What do we need to help make that happen? Supporting technology, a good audio system, braille support, magnification, auxiliary input.
10:36:53  <TranscriptKirsten> Support in the base platform, and an accessibility infrastructure. System technologies created to provide access to the same applications.
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10:37:19  <TranscriptKirsten> Assistive technologies, screenreaders, on-screen keyboards, alternative input. Reforming the way we interact with a graphic desktop.
10:37:38  <TranscriptKirsten> Localization - a global project, not just something built in Canada for English-speaking Canadians, but something that can be used around the world.
10:38:06  <TranscriptKirsten> It is a difficult problem. GNOME's been translated into 160 languages. Someone comes up with a brand-new infrastructure, may forget this.
10:38:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Models for deployment, education, support and maintenance.
10:38:47  <TranscriptKirsten> It's beyond the code problem. People forget about the Beyond the Code problem.
10:38:56  <TranscriptKirsten> I purposefully left off some things like mobility, that'll be talked about.
10:39:09  <TranscriptKirsten> So now let's talk about where GNOME is, where it exists today, different solutions it provides.
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10:39:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Not just an idea - anybody can come up with an idea - the hard part is executing it.
10:39:40  <TranscriptKirsten> It exists today, is open source, has a thriving developer & user community. Not dependent on any single entity for survival.
10:40:01  <TranscriptKirsten> If somebody decided to completely disinvest, GNOME doesn't die. If a single person goes away, it won't die.
10:40:24  <TranscriptKirsten> To be fair, I'm talking not just about GNOME, but the base operating system and GNOME itself.
10:40:42  <TranscriptKirsten> Base operating system: Ubunto, OpenSolaris, Debian, openSUSE, Fedora, RedHat, etc.
10:41:04  <TranscriptKirsten> These systems provide operating system "stuff", device I/O, keyboard I/O, graphics drivers, support for keyboards and mice and external devices.
10:41:12  <TranscriptKirsten> GNOME is not an operating system, it is a graphical desktop.
10:41:46  <TranscriptKirsten> It uses X Windows System, support for compositing graphics, keyboard enhancements, input device abstraction.
10:41:52  <TranscriptKirsten> Connect alternative input devices.
10:42:23  <TranscriptKirsten> Another thing it uses is speech synthesis. E-speak, translated to 50+ languages. Festival, free and open source. Will also work with commercial engines, but we're talking about open source.
10:42:43  <TranscriptKirsten> Also talks to Braille software. BrlTTY drives almost every refreshable Braille display known to man.
10:42:46  <TranscriptKirsten> LibLouis.
10:43:20  <TranscriptKirsten> GNOME has an accessibility infrastructure built-in, part of GNOME, not tacked on. AT-SPI Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface.
10:43:45  <TranscriptKirsten> API-based solution. One of the first API-based solutions was done 15 or 16 years ago. The ideas have remained much the same from a 50,000 foot point of view.
10:44:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Supported by GDK, Java toolkit, Firefox browser, OpenOffice, etc. Existing infrastructure supported by real-world apps, not just demoware.
10:44:18  <TranscriptKirsten> Graphic desktop called KDE/QT support coming soon.
10:44:33  <TranscriptKirsten> 160 different languages, not all complete coverage, but claim 160 languages around the world.
10:45:01  <TranscriptKirsten> GNOME already has huge worldwide deployment. It is reaching the world's population already. We don't have to invent a brand-new deployment model.
10:45:15  <TranscriptKirsten> Spain, Brazil, Portugal, India, Germany, UK, US. Used around the world with success.
10:45:33  <TranscriptKirsten> Mobility impairments: focuses on people having trouble with keyboard and mouse.
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10:45:48  <TranscriptKirsten> Keyboard navigation is a core value in GNOME. Should be able to do everything without needing mouse or touchpad.
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10:46:16  <TranscriptKirsten> AccessX, sticky keys etc. MouseTweaks is for people with a disability that allows them to move the mouse but they can't use the keyboard.
10:46:30  <TranscriptKirsten> You can move the mouse, let it sit, a time-out occurs, and then you can perform a click or drag operation.
10:46:49  <TranscriptKirsten> MouseTrap does image recognition, facial recognition, finds a spot between your eyebrows and uses a low-cost web camera to move the spot on the display.
10:47:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Combining MouseTweaks and MouseTrap allows people to use the mouse. Not perfect but under development.
10:47:28  <TranscriptKirsten> GOK provides access for people who can't use the keyboard itself. Switch-based access, scan by row, column.
10:47:52  <TranscriptKirsten> Dasher is another alternative keyboard or text entry mechanism that has word prediction, completion, people can claim 35 words per minute. I won't go into demos of these things.
10:48:04  <TranscriptKirsten> On the visual impairment side, we have theming, to combine icons, colours and fonts.
10:48:28  <TranscriptKirsten> High-contrast, inverse, large print. Magnification is built in. Magnifier works stand-alone or as a service, so a screenreader like Orca can talk to it.
10:48:35  <TranscriptKirsten> Orca provides speech and braille output,.
10:49:07  <TranscriptKirsten> Under hearing impairments, VisAudio provides indication that noise is being sent to the system. Describes themes and audio themes, not just a visual flash. Provides that text for you if it's available.
10:49:17  <TranscriptKirsten> These are no good unless you have the applications.
10:49:40  <TranscriptKirsten> Web apps - Firefox browser. Web applications are the "new black", very popular.
10:49:51  <TranscriptKirsten> Web applications that support the ARIA standard.
10:50:05  <TranscriptKirsten> Evolution and Thunderbird email clients. Evolution provides contacts, calendars, email access.
10:50:18  <TranscriptKirsten> Instant messaging: Pidgin, compelling access. Document content generation, OpenOffice.
10:50:28  <TranscriptKirsten> For Audio/video support, Rhythmbox does MP3, Totem allows video.
10:50:37  <TranscriptKirsten> System  administration apps.
10:50:46  <TranscriptKirsten> All the things a user expects in order to do their job.
10:51:02  <TranscriptKirsten> So I've painted a nice picture, we have a nice platform, but we do have gaps.
10:51:17  <TranscriptKirsten> In no particular order, these are things that came to my head as I've been working for people with quite a few years with GNOME.
10:51:34  <TranscriptKirsten> We don't do well with PDF accessibility. Adobe Acrobat Reader leaves a lot to be desired. Evince needs work.
10:52:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Speech recognition is not integrated well. Dragon/IBM guys don't ship a product for limit. Some open source software, like Sphinx. Other people are looking at taking a Windows emulator and running it with Dragon.
10:52:27  <TranscriptKirsten> Hardware input is currently spotty. Our ability to configure and set up switches is a little rough. Multitouch displays aren't really supported yet.
10:52:53  <TranscriptKirsten> Daisy, no native DAISY reader for GNOME. One that reads audio DAISY only, doesn't do text-based. We do have a DAISY plugin emerging for Firefox.
10:53:04  <TranscriptKirsten> A better way to go than having a native reader.
10:53:31  <TranscriptKirsten> Closed captioning - hearing impairment support is slim. We don't have good native support for closed captioning. This stuff is emerging, and people are pressing stuff in this space, but we don't have full solutions.
10:53:43  <TranscriptKirsten> OCR, some solutions are emerging but it's kind of rough to get it going, I don't think it's a complete solution.
10:53:59  <TranscriptKirsten> A lot of solutions are based for sighted people so they can drag and select a section of text and recognize it.
10:54:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Augmented communications, no good solutions now.
10:54:26  <TranscriptKirsten> More gaps: people with learning disabilities, we don't do a great job. Could enhance Orca, concept coding framework in OOo (AEGIS).
10:54:58  <TranscriptKirsten> High quality TTS - the eSpeak synthesis engine is okay, you can understand it but it's kind of harsh. Only covers about 50-55 of the world's languages. Need to increase locale coverage and make more tolerable.
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10:55:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Braille translation software - Orca can drive a Braille display, but Braille translation talking about printed braille that can be embossed. No good support, but AEGIS funding a project for OpenOffice.
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10:55:48  <TranscriptKirsten> No support for Braille embossers right now. Spain has 4 CUPS drivers to port.
10:56:19  <TranscriptKirsten> Education - we have a gap. ONCE wants to work on some training programs. Ubuntu Community creating education materials.
10:56:49  <TranscriptKirsten> Out of box experience, getting GNOME accessibility up and running is a bootstrap process. You have to click a button to enable accessibility for GNOME, log out, log back in. Trivial to fix, but we haven't done it.
10:57:18  <TranscriptKirsten> Our #1 gap is people and money. We're fragmented in this space. The GNOME platform, I'm sorry to go into a spiel, but I needed to show you what the coverage was.
10:57:38  <TranscriptKirsten> We are constantly pushing a rock up a hill. No matter what I've done in accessibility forever and ever, it's always been pushing a rock up a hill.
10:57:55  <TranscriptKirsten> We've got to get together, and get together behind something. I'm proposing we get together behind GNOME, and work as a community to develop GNOME.
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10:58:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Not to say that other peoples' ideas are bad.
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10:58:19  <TranscriptKirsten> Some of the solutions are cross-platform.
10:58:25  <TranscriptKirsten> Let's try to get behind this and make it happen.
10:58:40  <TranscriptKirsten> My overview of GNOME accessibility. Thank you for holding your comments. Let's talk now - how long do we have?
10:58:51  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Until lunch and then an hour and a half after lunch.
10:58:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Will: Let's have some comments about this.
10:59:39  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I just want to add one other piece to the argument about building this rich and complete stack in GNOME. A lot of the ideas that have come from Java Accessibility, GNOME accessibility, OpenOffice accessibility have filtered their way into proprietary areas.
11:00:03  <TranscriptKirsten> I am convinced that there is a powerful link to be made between research community and open-source GNOME, where we can push the envelope in an environment where everything we touch is open source.
11:00:24  <TranscriptKirsten> We can experiment and build great stuff. When we're done, we will have an end-to-end solution that's powerful, free, localized, and be leading the way for the rest of the industry to follow.
11:00:34  <TranscriptKirsten> Do it and prove it in GNOME, because we've seen that others adopt it.
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11:01:07  <TranscriptKirsten> (name?): If we develop the perfect accessibility solution, are there other solutions involved that will make it difficult to pursue?
11:01:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Have you done the gap analysis between Windows and GNOME to help point out where you might need additional (?)
11:01:55  <TranscriptKirsten> Will: Other external forces that may make it difficult. We'll never have a perfect accessibility solution. Or perfect mobile phone or graphical desktop.
11:02:04  <TranscriptKirsten> The reason I said that was that to get there, you have to have change. To improve, you change.
11:02:27  <TranscriptKirsten> The hard things you have in the space - things are constantly changing, nothing stays the same. We stay insular, the world changes around us, we're always playing catch-up.
11:02:56  <TranscriptKirsten> To get accessibility design in the mindset of the mainstream application developer. As they think about change, they think about change in terms of "I've got this new whizzbang feature, I need to design it for accessibility or localization".
11:03:07  <TranscriptKirsten> I think the biggest problem is all this change, and try to address that and the mindset of the mainstream developer.
11:03:27  <TranscriptKirsten> In the GNOME community, I've seen the tipping point start to happen. Graphic application developers are now approaching accessibility teams saying "Is this okay?"
11:03:47  <TranscriptKirsten> They're curious. They're actually thinking about how to make it accessible. The next step is to have that already built into their design.
11:04:21  <TranscriptKirsten> (?): When I was working at IBM the last year I saw the same thing happening, the development community wanted to do this, but were being beaten up by their managers to develop other priorities so money could come in.
11:04:33  <TranscriptKirsten> We're trying to reach into different markets and countries.
11:04:55  <TranscriptKirsten> Will: I think open source helps a lot in this space, because people contribute out of a passion, not because they're concerned about the dollars and the bottom line.
11:05:09  <TranscriptKirsten> What we're seeing in Spain is it's a low-cost solution.
11:05:27  <TranscriptKirsten> It gets it in the hands of educational institutions that can't afford other things. We see this in India for the same reason, and it's going very well over there.
11:05:41  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Brazil is thinking about it.
11:05:52  <TranscriptKirsten> Will: I think open source ends up opening more doors than are shut.
11:06:40  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: It wasn't what I was planning to say, but it fits in nicely, and deserves being marked. One of the advantages of open source is this point that if a particular set of developers start down this path and due to client needs don't finish this job, the source is there.
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11:07:08  <TranscriptKirsten> If they used GDK, if they used a good toolkit, most of the resources are there. It's not like that if you're developing on a proprietary platform. It can't possibly be that way. The first stop is the lawyers' office.
11:07:26  <TranscriptKirsten> In open source, if it's accepted upstream, yes, there can be problems, but no other environment offers this possibility.
11:07:57  <TranscriptKirsten> As Will has heard me say, I'm concerned about focusing on GNOME desktop end-to-end. I am fully in favour of focusing on GNOME as the platform to build a robust accessibility solution. We can leverage on it, so much is in place and it works.
11:08:14  <TranscriptKirsten> No other environment comes close. But one can add to the gaps, such as the ability to test and configure for developers to write software.
11:08:41  <TranscriptKirsten> If you develop, do you have reasonable expectation that what you've done will be accessible. The ability to fix things that break. What if your computer doesn't boot far enough, what happens?
11:09:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Quite a few people with disabilities are very good at it, but what if it doesn't boot that far? You've got to be able to fix that and there's a lot that can break before then.
11:09:11  <TranscriptKirsten> End-to-end starts at the power switch and builds up piece-by-piece from there.
11:09:29  <TranscriptKirsten> A few things we still need some more work on, and some applications that haven't been talked about in the community.
11:10:14  <TranscriptKirsten> I think we still have a problem with the login, in the audio environment, it's a bit of a hand-wave what audio device will be used for any particular application. On the side of good applications, we have Digital Audio Workstation now, very powerful. We don't have MIDI editing, might get it when we make the link with QT, hard to say.
11:10:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Other things that go with music environment, maybe not the key point today.
11:10:46  <TranscriptKirsten> Will: I'm going to try to, since nobody's really provoking, say "Why don't we just do open source on Windows?"
11:10:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: We still have Chris.
11:11:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: I'll happily tell you why we don't, and that's all the countries just listed. Brazil, China, India are moving towards open-source platforms primarily because they're paranoid that Microsoft and Apple are spying for the United States.
11:11:41  <TranscriptKirsten> The fact people are sitting in jail because Yahoo spied for the Chinese government gives some credibility to that.
11:12:04  <TranscriptKirsten> History of accessibility APIs so people can understand why GNOME is the most comprehensive. Way back in the Paleolithic period we had MSAA.
11:12:37  <TranscriptKirsten> Followed by ATIA created the working group, people from Apple, Microsoft, IBM. It was the Bits & Bytes committee, our objective was to come up with a universal API.
11:13:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Microsoft pulled out because they had deadlines. Apple people pulled out because they had to ship Tiger. Only people stuck around were me, IBM, Sun.
11:13:23  <TranscriptKirsten> GNOME API twice as comprehensive as Microsoft one and a third more than Apple as a result.
11:14:04  <TranscriptKirsten> If you can make it easier and easier and easier for a developer, he doesn't even need to know about accessibility, just has an extra field in a dialogue in his program.
11:14:36  <TranscriptKirsten> Much, much more likely to do the accessible part than someone who has to go in, like in MSAA, and hand-code accessibility, which is a nightmare. Ten different programmers, ten different interfaces in ten different features.
11:15:12  <TranscriptKirsten> That exists all over windows, some parts are accessible, some aren't, even WIndows 7 still does a lot of funky stuff. People are drawing things instead of printing them as text. Hard to do things automatically in Windows.
11:15:43  <TranscriptKirsten> Why do it just in Windows? 80% of people who use screenreaders use Jaws, we can't throw that away, but the quality that's even possible on Windows is considerably less than Apple and profoundly less than GNOME.
11:15:48  <TranscriptKirsten> Will: Who was next in line?
11:16:27  <TranscriptKirsten> David: A potential gap, or something to keep on the radar, is the webspace. On the desktop you have nice little self-contained widgets, and we sort of know what to expect. On the web we have Javascript operating with CSS and creating crazy stuff.
11:17:00  <TranscriptKirsten> (?) is approaching last call, and we've had to create some new rules that we're not used to on the desktop. I think it could have a relook in terms of extensibility. We might not be doing it the best way.
11:17:10  <TranscriptKirsten> Will: Why not Android?
11:17:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: Because Google has a real lot of money and they can do it themselves.
11:17:48  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Whether it's Android or Windows or iPhone or anything else, I want to riff on David Bolter's direction. When you have a community like GNOME, you already have an infrastructure in place for extending the APi.
11:18:05  <TranscriptKirsten> We certainly don't have that in Apple or iPhone. We don't exactly really have it in Android, much as Android is open-source.
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11:18:43  <TranscriptKirsten> As we realize we need new things, whether for UI sets on the web or some other new app that comes along, we can build that into our infrastructure and AT. I come back to my earlier comment, the accessibility that started and was realized in GNOME has now come out in the commercial world.
11:19:07  <TranscriptKirsten> There because of open source accessibility framework from Java, OpenOffice.
11:19:44  <TranscriptKirsten> To me the other reason besides "let's have an end-to-end solution" is the fact that because we control everything, because everything is open source, we can learn, experiment, improve and there is a history of the commercial world picking up and incorporating our ideas.
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11:20:04  <TranscriptKirsten> A lot of the stuff we need to fill out the GNOME environment - that means every commercial environment that supports ARIA gets it too.
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11:20:20  <TranscriptKirsten> Much of it is useful and will run on other platforms, but when we're done we also have an end-to-end solution.
11:20:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: Yes, it is showing up in the commercial world, but Apple funded its own AT development and should be applauded for such. My former employer, the great big shark, have both paid really large amounts of money to support Accessible2 and UIA.
11:21:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Microsoft is going with a bulldozer of dollars and saying "Can you guys support UIA?" and those guys look at the money and say "Yes."
11:21:51  <TranscriptKirsten> Microsoft specifically is cherry-picking which companies. They're not going to the other 4, 5 screenreaders for Windows, just the biggest and the free-est. It's not happening because the companies see value, but because the consulting branch sees dollars.
11:22:04  <TranscriptKirsten> There's no clamour from the community, primarily because the Windows community knows the least about this stuff.
11:22:51  <TranscriptKirsten> Will: I think I came into this with a foregone conclusion that we should rally behind GNOME. What I'm hearing is that we're all behind open-source accessibility solutions, and then I'm also saying maybe my foregone conclusion may have been a good one. I'm poking you to say is that a good conclusion to have, and if not, please speak up.
11:23:07  <TranscriptKirsten> If we can discuss that and still come back to the conclusion, how can we achieve that, how can we get critical mass.
11:23:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Why is this not a good solution?
11:23:36  <TranscriptKirsten> Dave: It's sort of a meta-thing. If you say how can we create OS accessibility, then GNOME makes sense. If you say where do the users want access, the answer may not be GNOME.
11:23:48  <TranscriptKirsten> Accessibility in the mobility space is an example.
11:24:49  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: My own question here is we're coming from a very West-centric view, and there are much more compelling reasons to adopt open-source in other countries. Talking to colleagues in India, Africa, the overwhelming, compelling reasons to want to go with Windows and Apple are not there. There is the financial impediment, and more individuals who wish to
11:25:31  <TranscriptKirsten> volunteer and contribute. You're not just handed whatever you want on a platter, you have to work at it, the culture there. If we do pick something like GNOME, rally around one particular platform such that a jurisdiction can adopt it as the platform of choice and support it, there's a threshold of where it becomes attractive or useful.
11:25:53  <TranscriptKirsten> Perhaps it's not so much end-to-end, but how do we cross that threshold so a free & open solution becomes an alternative for the majority?
11:25:58  <TranscriptKirsten> But the mobile space is something yet to be developed.
11:26:45  <TranscriptKirsten> Pina: When I listen to the list of gaps, when you look at a Western environment, you want to look at a project that's about equal to, and we still have a lot of gaps. I'm not compelled to go to a GNOME solution if I have to compromise quality of what I'm getting.
11:27:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Will: That's a fair comment. Some of the aspects of GNOME accessibility don't set the bar, the commercial state-of-the-art systems do. Zoomtext, for example, the best magnifier on the market. We don't have the equivalent.
11:27:46  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: I wanted to just add to that one. I think it's useful to note that not only is that true, there's the corollary problem that just because it's free, it might be perceived as less good, even when it's better.
11:28:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Will: I think another definition of better is not that you have a wheelbarrow of features that you dump on somebody's doorstop, but is the user able to be successful or more successful than in the past?
11:28:42  <TranscriptKirsten> Has somebody done a gap analysis between Windows and Linux? I don't know. But if it's to be done, it should be done from the standpoint of compelling access for the user versus this wheelbarrow full of features.
11:28:59  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: I think the challenge at the moment is, this looks quite overwhelming, this list of gaps.
11:29:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Will: I think almost every one I put up there is addressable. They're discrete problems, that could be done over many years or months. Some of them are what everyone has, education, Beyond the Code. Those have recurring costs.
11:29:37  <TranscriptKirsten> The others, you could allocate someone for six months.
11:30:31  <TranscriptKirsten> We gotta go with something and see if we can continue to make these toolkits work in this model. Through extensions, we're able to make it work, so we're not reaching the conclusion that the API_based approach doesn't work.
11:31:09  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Given that we have this overwhelming list and few resources and little money, I'm harping on this notion of critical mass. A focal area where people start to become attracted and we recruit additional help in particular things. The one thing is say we have to meet all of these gaps in some large generic way.
11:31:44  <TranscriptKirsten> The way to approach this is address all of them all at once. One of the things we've been experimenting with in Fluid is rather than trying to address all of the problems is to have a modular, extensible approach, and find pockets of functionality that are small and achievable.
11:32:18  <TranscriptKirsten> Put them out there so there's some enthusiasm and success, they become used broadly and attract other individuals to say that this is good. Small, digestible chunks that are successful.
11:32:51  <TranscriptKirsten> We have a huge list of problems. Is there an area in this space that a lot of people are concerned about, that a lot of people are demanding a solution, that can be seen as a success story and will bring people to the GNOME space that weren't there before?
11:33:33  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Thinking about that, I think there are a couple of ways to partition the space of early successes. I'm thinking about the crossing the chasm challenge as well. Maybe by disability. GNOME is pretty mature for blind, not as mature for low vision, nowhere mature for speech recognition. You might say, let's pick a disability and get
11:33:38  <TranscriptKirsten> everything that disability needs.
11:34:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Another way of partitioning it is geographically. Here are parts of the world where Windows is too expensive, less important. And those two are orthogonal, you could pick blindness in India, for example.
11:34:26  <TranscriptKirsten> The third partition is environment, is this a home or school setting, what do those people need?
11:35:08  <TranscriptKirsten> One thing I don't see on here is the Long Tail of applications. I'll recruit Chris to help with that given his experience: what I need to be successful as an individual blind hacker, versus what I need as a blind sixth-grader in school versus what I need as a blind employee at a Fortune 100 company are different.
11:35:23  <TranscriptKirsten> When you talk about the idea of picking an area, have it as a beachhead and expand from there, those come to mind.
11:35:58  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: I'm reluctant to go with geographic or disability area because we need a larger community. We need to recruit more developers, more investment, some other associated benefits or priority areas that someone can invest in.
11:36:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina was talking about difficulties in the music area, is there some equivalent to that where GNOME has excelled beyond, that the larger community can see GNOME go to the forefront, excel beyond Mac and Windows?
11:36:47  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: As I turn it over to Chris, walking very slowly in that direction, I'd say there are definitely some and I'm not going to rattle them all off now.
11:37:35  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: The economics of moving the primary accessibility to the GNOME API sort of cuts both ways. You can get a better API, people in my neighbourhood in Cambridge at the end of the year throw away computers on the sidewalk that are powerful enough for Ubuntu, but slow for the bloatware of Windows.
11:37:47  <TranscriptKirsten> You can get a ten dollar computer that can do a pretty good job with one of the Linux distributions.
11:38:29  <TranscriptKirsten> Laundry list of commercial applications out there that have done some work on accessibility have invested a lot of money in MSAA or the Java API, and they are not prepared to a large extent to switch API. All they want is to fill out their VPAT and say "We're accessible".
11:38:39  <TranscriptKirsten> Their definition of accessible is they work with JAWS, and nothing else matters.
11:39:01  <TranscriptKirsten> They just care that they can get by.
11:39:37  <TranscriptKirsten> Oracle's put money into their peculiar version of Java that doesn't work with anything else, but sort of works with JAWS. You can keep on going down that list, but now you have to convince a VP of Engineering or a marketing guy that they have to do more than the minimum for the VPAT.
11:39:51  <TranscriptKirsten> Then they have to go to the CEO and convinced him.
11:40:26  <TranscriptKirsten> With open source, if someone does a half-assed job, someone else can go in and improve it, but proprietary software builds an unbreakable wall. But they have invested a lot of money, and they're not going to want to invest it again.
11:41:08  <TranscriptKirsten> Will: What makes you WANT to jump into GNOME? The top two are open source philosophy, money, cost-effective. Peter said I have some idea of where GNOME is excelling, why don't you say what those were?
11:41:44  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: This was a short-lived place where GNOME was better, but we can see it again - ARIA. Firefox on all platforms is excelling for ARIA over everything else. Why? Because you can get in and fix it. You don't have to knock on the door in Redmond.
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11:42:09  <TranscriptKirsten> Web is an area where GNOME can excel, in part because of where I believe but it hasn't been improved Open(?) is going.
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11:42:57  <TranscriptKirsten> OpenOffice on Mac implements all this stuff, you could have some very powerful scanning in OpenOffice. "Yeah, but if I do it in OpenOffice, it only is going to work with OpenOffice and one or two other places and users are going to ask 'why doesn't it work everywhere?'"
11:43:03  <TranscriptKirsten> Users blame the AT when the AT doesn't work everywhere.
11:43:23  <TranscriptKirsten> The fact that we have an accessibility API that's across so much of the desktop, I do believe physical impairments is one of the places we can go.
11:43:39  <TranscriptKirsten> If we can invest in Sphinx, in voice recognition, we can do stuff across the desktop that Dragon only does in the apps that they support.
11:43:58  <TranscriptKirsten> I also have high, high hopes around magnification and what a magnification infrastructure can give us for cognitive impairments.
11:44:29  <TranscriptKirsten> A university near here took the GNOME API and custom window manager and re-lay out the GIMP and create an entirely new UI that's magnified without redoing the app.
11:44:51  <TranscriptKirsten> We can do stuff like that that you can't do on Mac and Windows. This is going to take investment, it's not a small task. But we can go beyond anywhere else for cognitive impairment.
11:45:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: I'm going to continue this devil's advocate. There isn't a great demand for ARIA. The public are not - everyone knows how supportive I am of ARIA, but as for some compelling thing that's going to attract somebody to it, it's not the things we are advocating so hard to try to get interest in.
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11:45:55  <TranscriptKirsten> What will get the interest of the pool of developers and volunteers in the open source community to flood to GNOME or donate additional time. Not people we've already sold on it, but others.
11:46:38  <TranscriptKirsten> I'm thinking in the class of things like really compelling music program, really compelling social network that will be very sexy and bring people to it, but a coordinated, collaborative effort to make it accessible. A whiteboard, a design environment, music environment, arts environment.
11:47:07  <TranscriptKirsten> Something that has a large attraction that people are thinking they want. Some of the pain points out there - the aging demographic. There are all sorts of cognitive access issues related to that.
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11:47:35  <TranscriptKirsten> I'm just using that as an example, not saying GNOME is the answer for that. But those are the types of areas where there is a lot of interest, and we could move into those areas and create an open source area for that.
11:48:13  <TranscriptKirsten> A lot of us have aging parents, there are lots of ways where we can use the computer and net to act as reminders, smart environments. A space that is not very well developed but needs to be developed.
11:49:08  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: One thing that comes to mind is Zoobuntu, where you take and customize a GNOME desktop that is a simplified GNOME desktop. The directions that GNOME shell is going but yet still further customized and simplified. A simplified web browser that doesn't have all the features but maybe has some hot keys or automagnifies.
11:49:15  <TranscriptKirsten> Because it's all open source, you can composite this, but somebody has to do it.
11:50:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Open source is not good at commercial exploitation. Somebody has to come up with the idea of "Boy, it would be great if we took the Unix Mach kernel, took a better UI on it, and look, it's Macintosh!" Or Nokia with the Internet tablet series. IBM isn't a consumer products company, SUN isn't a consumer products company.
11:50:42  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Taking the example of what has worked, what has attracted people to the open source community, I think it's the operating environment, the toolkits. If you give people toolkits with which they can do really creative things, great flexibility, great extensibility, neat new things you can do.
11:51:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Google knows this with the Android toolkit, iPhone knows this. One is somewhat open source, one isn't. Can we learn from that, and think about a pervasive computing toolkit where we attract people who are enthusiastic about playing with stuff?
11:52:04  <TranscriptKirsten> Will: We have ten minutes until lunch, and I think we've had a great discussion. We've talked about places where GNOME can focus. We also mentioned web accessibility as a place where GNOME needs to excel, and still does pretty well.
11:52:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I think NVDA and the latest version of JAWS are closing that gap.
11:52:16  <TranscriptKirsten> Will: NVDA has a lot of funding.
11:52:26  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: Not any more, since Mozilla Foundation cut them off.
11:52:33  <TranscriptKirsten> Will: Peter, you also focused on speech recognition.
11:52:46  <TranscriptKirsten> And specific environments for GNOME, specific areas.
11:53:02  <TranscriptKirsten> All controversial in their own right, but specific environments are good.
11:53:57  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: One other just came to mind. A lot of the push in the commercial AT industry has been "Here's a USB stick that will launch my AT within Windows". But we've got Unix/Linux distros that boot from USB, and instead of saying "I'm going to bring my AT to a public device", "I'm going to bring my computer". All of my files are on that USB stick as well.
11:54:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Maybe that custom stick is based on a cognitive impairment, or physical impairment one, and I'm just using the keyboard, CPU, screen of the terminal I walk up to.
11:54:37  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: If we do personalization on Unix and Linux, that would be a compelling reason, less to overcome.
11:55:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Will: I have a USB key I ripped apart, I carry it in my wallet. I have an operating system I can boot from, and a file system I carry all my files on, encrypted, so don't try to steal it, it'll get you nowhere.
11:55:52  <TranscriptKirsten> What I hate to have us fall into is where these discussion often leave, all pie-in-the-sky, this is how the world should be. We've got some good concrete ideas. I propose we have lunch, and when we come back, address the ways we can deal with these concrete things.
11:56:18  <TranscriptKirsten> ARIA support for Firefox, OpenGazer and how that might be a better solution. GOK , being rewritten at the moment. Jutta, you mentioned new toolkits, environment-aware or user-ability-aware.
11:56:37  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Just to clarify, a smart environment toolkit and user personalization separately.
11:57:07  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I just realized one more, Jutta talked about authoring. With OpenOffice and the ODT to Daisy extension, GNOME can be a fabulous accessible Daisy authoring, Braille creation environment.
11:57:17  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: That links in so well with the developing country applications.
11:57:55  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I look at eSpeak and the quality of the voice isn't where we want it to be, but it supports so many languages. There is no commercial Catalan text-to-speech engine. As that gets improved, you have a way to author Daisy books, complete end-to-end solutions in GNOME.
11:58:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Pina: I want to add that the authoring tools aren't as mature as we want them to be, testing and remediation, there are still opportunities there.
11:59:07  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: That's the very next step in AEGIS ODT to Daisy. Helping a document author figure out what they have done wrong in their authoring and adding better markup for Daisy books and HTML export from a Writer document, creating Braille output from a Writer document, tagged PDF from a Writer document.
11:59:35  <TranscriptKirsten> Will: Come up with some ideas we want to execute it on a concrete plan. How do we fund it, get people to work on it, not just as a sophomore project, but something that's designed well?
12:00:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: I think part of the answer will be in the discussion that Gregg is going to have on the NPII. I think we need a top-down and bottom-down approach. The top-down approach is when we go to the people who have the money and create a compelling reason why we should.
12:00:43  <TranscriptKirsten> We don't link it only to accessibility, bring other related interests into it. Accessibility linked to other pain points, that's what's happened with Fluid and other projects. Benefit others who may have more resources available.
12:01:10  <TranscriptKirsten> The bottom-up approach is we need to create a community interested in this. There is a huge pool of volunteers out there. What will spark their interest, persuade them that this is an exciting area to spend their time in?
12:01:57  <TranscriptKirsten> The open source community is a huge pool of possibilities, how do we attract those individuals and bring them into this field? That's why a smart development toolkit, a social networking system is the way to go.
12:02:23  <TranscriptKirsten> (?): Using AEGIS as a model - can you see this as a prototype for areas like China, India, and so on?
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12:02:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Will: If you've got a crapload of money to throw towards something, big pool of money you invest in things that succeed and things that are risky and may or may not succeed.
12:03:07  <TranscriptKirsten> One thing we did with GNOME was some outreach to the universities.
12:03:15  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Seneca has an open-source program.
12:03:33  <TranscriptKirsten> Will: They have a thing about open source in their curriculum (Connecticut?)
12:04:07  <TranscriptKirsten> Having students learn about the open-source culture, completely different from commercial development. A whole different culture. You work with people you've never met before, some are wonderful, some are idiots.
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12:04:25  <TranscriptKirsten> So at Trinity College, they had this project. That's where our VisAudio project came out of. They also worked with MouseTrap.
12:04:46  <TranscriptKirsten> As a result of this project, we have at least two students that are continuing to invest in this space, not just in open source but in GNOME accessibility.
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12:05:08  <TranscriptKirsten> Just getting people to make it part of their curriculum. I think at Trinity the professors made it part of their curriculum.
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12:05:35  <TranscriptKirsten> Pina: Just to tie back in to your question, where do we get funding, how do we get more critical mass? Focus on working with universities, how about specific industries as well, like banking, it's across the world
12:05:52  <TranscriptKirsten> There are common tools, common products by all these financial institutions. Might be able to get some strong momentum.
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12:06:45  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: I have a million things to say about this but we have to break for lunch. Remind me to tell you about a project involving banks, but yes I agree. And given that we are here at Seneca, we should probably talk to Chris Tyler and David Humphrey who are two faculty members doing exactly what you say.
12:07:04  <TranscriptKirsten> We have scheduled an hour for lunch, we'll be back at 1 and now need to come up with a road map.
12:07:57  <louis_to> ok
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12:40:18  <korn> Testing...
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13:05:07  <TranscriptKirsten> We're going to resume our two groups. Our break is in an hour and a half, so in that time we need to come up with our road map document.
13:05:18  <TranscriptKirsten> For those of you who are craving coffee, the coffee will be here in an hour and a half.
13:05:51  <TranscriptKirsten> When we come back after the break, we will be presenting to the larger group. It seems like we have similar themes in terms of how to recruit effort in each of these, so I think the two sets of conversations will be interesting.
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13:06:06  <WillieWalker> http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Table+of+Gaps+-+Solutions+for+End-to-End+accessibility
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13:06:10  <TranscriptKirsten> Everyone who was in the Accessible Collaboration Tools go back to your group, and we will proceed here with the GNOME group.
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13:07:27  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: We had a good discussion this morning. A good theme was that open source is something we believe in, we had arguments for why open source is good, I don't think we need to rehash those again.
13:07:30  <louis_to> hi all, glad to see you here
13:07:40  <TranscriptKirsten> We also looked at a number of gaps, a number of spaces, and Peter has taken the task of putting these in a table.
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13:08:21  <TranscriptKirsten> The link to that table is in the IRC channel. If you go to the Fluid URL you go to the End-to-end accessibility page, and then there's a child of that.
13:08:28  <TranscriptKirsten> You can also get it as a newly added item on the wiki.
13:09:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Anastasia is going to create a link off this page.
13:10:26  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: What we have on this page is an attempt to get concrete with next steps. Yeah, we can list all the things we need and agree we need them, but we need to go from "this is what we need" to "this is how we get our needs met".
13:10:54  <TranscriptKirsten> Will's going to play scrolling dolly for me. There are several tables on this page. The first is the master table of everything we need, point by point, for technology. We need PDF viewing, speech recognition, OCR.
13:11:18  <TranscriptKirsten> We have another table lower down to capture the long tail of applications. I don't expect to spend a lot of time on this, but I want to have a place to capture it. I'm going to look to Chris and everybody else to help us with that.
13:11:51  <TranscriptKirsten> The final text is solution domains - book authoring, elderly self-booting what-have-you. This is maybe a PVR, television using accessible Myth TV, an example solution domain built on top of Gnome.
13:12:25  <TranscriptKirsten> I have largely but not completely populated the master table from the gaps document that Willie had. So the question is, how should we proceed in populating this? One last thing, to talk about the columns of the master table.
13:12:44  <TranscriptKirsten> First column is, what's the gap or need? Second column, is there an existing or candidate solution? For PDF viewing, it's Evince.
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13:13:27  <TranscriptKirsten> Then the column for development funding. Mostly it's going to be "needed". Then it's hardening funding - having it product-ready. Then a column that maybe doesn't make sense, deployment. Is this in Solaris, Ubuntu, what has to be built in, where should it be built in? That was my thought for that column.
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13:13:53  <TranscriptKirsten> Pina: I just wondered about a solution. You could put financial solutions in deployment, industry/employment.
13:14:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Banking, employment, software vendors...
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13:14:25  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Critical markets.
13:14:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: One thing I see on here which is hard to figure out - this is a kind of technology based approach. I've always harped on the long-term approach, educating people, how to capture that as a discrete item.
13:15:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I'm going to add another section for non-technology gaps.
13:15:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Let's use the term "Beyond the Code". It's a phrase we're centering on.
13:15:42  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Alright, if you want to refresh. Then under Beyond the Code - so when we think about solution domains, those are going to call back into Beyond the Code.
13:16:01  <TranscriptKirsten> The top-down is I'm a solution, what of the point terms above do I need to be successful?
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13:16:17  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: One point to be made about solution domains is if GNOME needs development in general, as well as accessibility.
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13:16:38  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: So for Beyond the Code, training in the various AT.
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13:16:43  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Installing the application.
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13:17:19  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Let's spend a few minutes seeing if we've captured all the top-level items. Spend a little time on the technology gaps and a little on beyond the code, and then as we go into Solution Domains we will pick up things that we missed in specific Beyond the Code or specific technology items.
13:17:46  <TranscriptKirsten> I will read through the master table and we'll flesh out the columns for the items that we have, and then we'll add more to it. So for PDF viewing, I mentioned eVince, kind of.
13:18:01  <TranscriptKirsten> I would also suggest that Acrobat is a solution that can run on the open desktop.
13:18:04  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: It's not open source.
13:18:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Yes, that's true. And for eVince, PDF and Adobe Acrobat, funding is needed.
13:18:32  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: GNU has funding -
13:18:51  <TranscriptKirsten> Accessibility is part of the feature list for Project GNU. They have money and full-time programmers and all kinds of stuff.
13:18:55  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Do they have ENOUGH funding?
13:19:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: Well, no, nobody has ENOUGH funding. Microsoft doesn't have enough funding, if you ask them.
13:19:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Speech recognition. Sphinx is the obvious one.
13:19:41  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: There's HDK, that'll cover a number of things. There's also Dragon/Wine, or ViaVoice/Wine.
13:19:46  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: That would be not open source.
13:19:54  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Who's funding Sphinx and HDK development?
13:20:15  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: They're in the open-source community. Carnegie-Mellon is Sphinx, and HDK is Cambridge or somewhere in the UK.
13:20:29  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Speech recognition as an AT, as distinct from the engine.
13:20:46  <clown> http://xvoice.sourceforge.net/
13:20:57  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: There's XVoice. There's Speech Buttons type stuff, command and control, really simple brain dead command and control of the UI, not very compelling. It takes a lot more to be a good speech solution.
13:21:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: A real app is needed here. Daisy viewer.
13:21:20  <TranscriptKirsten> Mozilla is funding that through Benetech. And that seems to be in good shape?
13:21:27  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Just got another round of funding, I think.
13:21:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: There's Emerson?
13:22:07  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: Amie is Daisy Consortium funded.
13:22:31  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Daisy Consortium is also involved in these other things. For input drivers, I started breaking those out, because head-tracking is kind of distinct from other things.
13:22:40  <TranscriptKirsten> There's MouseTrap, which is done with HFOSS?
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13:23:08  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: There's head-tracking but also an eye-tracking component - maybe just camera-based mouse. Switch-based access, the Xserver needs to support switches better.
13:23:25  <TranscriptKirsten> It's a big list, but not overwhelming.
13:23:45  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: MouseTrap and NGazer are also doing switch, but what was it we had? Xinput 2? OpenGazer also has a switch mode.
13:24:07  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: We have gesture recognition that allows you to do mouse movement, but then there's a physical switch device.
13:24:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Xinput / Xinput 2, what was the USB...
13:24:31  <TranscriptKirsten> Closed-captioned player. So mplayer -
13:24:39  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Back to the input devices - multitouch.
13:25:24  <TranscriptKirsten> Captioned players.
13:25:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: Definitely MPlayer.
13:25:37  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: We also have VLC.
13:25:43  <TranscriptKirsten> Jamon: It's multiplatform, so it's a good one.
13:25:54  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: The Internet Captioning Forum is sponsoring things.
13:25:58  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Players or formats?
13:26:19  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: In Argentina, he's doing a player for Firefox, web-based prototype.
13:26:36  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: That's interesting too. We use social networking to add these things and associate them.
13:26:54  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: It's an authoring tool too. The industry has to figure out how it's going to handle this.
13:27:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: A W3C meeting on this someday. The question is, is it going to be part of HTML5.
13:27:46  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Are there media formats that don't have what we need to display captions? My understanding was pretty much all the formats had it except for the mobile formats. Flash certainly has it, Helix code has it and Realplayer, Quicktime and Microsoft Windows Media all have the ability to attach captions - in their own unique way.
13:27:48  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Exactly.
13:28:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Totem might be another one up there. I don't think Totem supports it, but it might be a solution.
13:28:05  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Any other authoring?
13:28:17  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: If we're talking captioning, what about transcription.
13:28:25  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: And that's going to have the same list of players.
13:28:43  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: And this is one area where there may be an opportunity for a domain solution and media access, a huge gap and a lot of domain at the moment.
13:28:49  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Just a time check, we have half an hour left.
13:28:58  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: OCR, we have Tesseract, one or two others.
13:29:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: OCR Viewer, I don't know. There's some solutions out there.
13:29:18  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: Tesseract does work.
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13:29:59  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: AAC, something much more focused on mobile, but it looks like the technology they are choosing for mobile should be Java, will run on a desktop as well. Lot to be determined, it's still in the design phase, but hey, they have funding.
13:30:15  <TranscriptKirsten> For LD, there's concept coding framework etc, going into OpenOffice. It is an LD solution, but more is needed.
13:30:29  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Orca is a potential solution, but don't want to turn it into a big Swiss Army knife.
13:30:34  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Other LD solutions?
13:30:47  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: I know Clayton is presenting this stuff next week at the Coleman Institute.
13:31:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Text-to-speech for screenreading, and text-to-speech for book reading. For screenreading, you care about fast, snappy, talks quickly. For book reading, you want something comfortable to listen to for hours and hours.
13:31:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Which is kind of format-based versus concatenative-based.
13:31:46  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: We're not married to one specific TTS engine.
13:31:51  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Just call that Speech API?
13:31:53  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Yeah.
13:32:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Alright, if you want to refresh.
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13:32:35  <TranscriptKirsten> Braille transcription. OpenOffice.org plus a plugin to be developed under AEGIS. There's also DOTS. Any others?
13:32:40  <TranscriptKirsten> NFBtrans?
13:32:58  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: TurboBraille. An old DOS one that's been ported to Linux. Had trouble with NFBtrans recently.
13:33:05  <TranscriptKirsten> Liblouis.
13:33:09  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: Two thumbs up on that one.
13:33:16  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Braille embossing?
13:33:31  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: John Gardner has something that's free, I don't know if it's open source, but it's no cost at least at this point.
13:33:50  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I added accessible presentations, OpenOffice Impress is the obvious starting point as well as PDF Viewer.
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13:34:26  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: I have a big one. People don't know where to start, it's training and education, out-of-the-box experience, a huge component. When you start looking at magnification - what do I do? I have no idea how to turn this thing on.
13:34:57  <TranscriptKirsten> It's the approachability of the thing, is hard enough that only techies can fight their way around. Newbies come in and ask the most benign questions, and you don't want to answer them because you realize it's going to be a long time.
13:35:00  <TranscriptKirsten> That's going to keep people away from this.
13:35:10  <TranscriptKirsten> Pina: You have to develop a marketing strategy.
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13:35:55  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: I don't know why this is true on Macintosh. Some people who support Apple are incredibly religious about it. Since VoiceOver and the iPhone there are people making really good tutorials as volunteers.
13:36:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Let's put that Beyond the Code.
13:36:26  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Also Out of the Box, booting, login, install. It sounds like we're pretty much ready to move on to Beyond the Code. Are there any other point things we want to grab? I added magnification.
13:36:32  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: We're doing a good job, it
13:36:37  <TranscriptKirsten> 's just how we want to do this.
13:37:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: Visual alterations and augmentations for people with the panoply of vision impairment symptoms that are not handled just by magnification. Glare, colour. It's not just highlighting, it's incredibly complex.
13:37:16  <TranscriptKirsten> Alternate presentation.
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13:37:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Personalization.
13:37:33  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Another that came from meetings I had last week is simpler-to-configure GNOME themes.
13:37:57  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: Interface personalization.
13:38:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: So we have twenty-two minutes.
13:38:15  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Beyond the Code! We have training, out of the box login & install, TTS localization, still more code.
13:38:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Don't we also have maintenance? Hardening?
13:38:33  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: That's what I've tried to make its own column. Evangelism, getting the word out.
13:39:05  <TranscriptKirsten> We'll add to this during the Beyond the Code (BTC) segment later today. Want to talk more about solution domains? We have book authoring as a domain -
13:39:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: I think that's also curriculum delivery, book delivery, it's that whole challenge of how do you deliver curriculum material, textbooks -
13:39:33  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: Includes multimedia?
13:39:48  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Yes. Industries/employment maybe shouldn't be under Solution Domains, demote that header?
13:39:55  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Let me show you what I'm doing - refresh.
13:40:34  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: All the technology, individual technology at the first level, the one underneath that refers to the ones above it. Bottom-up. Industries/employment could refer to book authoring.
13:41:27  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Mostly, except the last part isn't so Reverse Polish. Under Solution Domains we have education curricula, which is going to include book authoring... which will need Daisy Player, closed-captioning, descriptive video...
13:41:54  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: We have nineteen minutes now. I've done this kind of exercise how many years now. We did it with GNOME, Java, XWindows. We end up having the same kind of tables. We need action.
13:42:32  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: I propose this action. In 19 minutes, let's come up with a research & development proposal to be the beachhead, as Peter was talking about, and we'll prepare it and submit it. That requires choosing a priority area, picking out exactly what we need to do, resources...
13:43:08  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: I think that's great. It's good to have this discussion, get new people to have a common base, but then time starts running out. Here's my problem: I have my biases, I've already introduced a huge bias, which is let's center around GNOME.
13:43:22  <TranscriptKirsten> I have my biases about the disability areas we could work on in a short period of time, but I don't want to cloud this.
13:43:49  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: I have an even greater danger of bias, but I really like what Pina was proposing. Employment and access to employment is something that is globally seen as a compelling area.
13:44:49  <TranscriptKirsten> Legislation going around the world about employment, low-income countries, the spread of open-source systems. If we look at the financial sector as a leader everywhere in equitable employment at least in Canada, from what we were talking about with Saolo it's also in Brazil.
13:45:24  <TranscriptKirsten> Financial sector also usually doesn't recruit open-source pool, but if it's in aid of greater access of employment, but if we offer a potential view of this, it makes it much more appealing to the volunteer pool, and we offer something to the financial sector.
13:46:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: In defense of my bottom-up view, the bottom section is where we are closest to a grant proposal or funding source. Let's say we go to a bank. This bank wants to employ someone in their call centre. So, okay, they go down to the call centre needs and they say "Alright, here are the apps that I need to make that work. I need a web browser, the front end
13:46:46  <TranscriptKirsten> to my Oracle database" - Sun Financial uses JAWS as the front-end to their database and custom scripts for doing that. Go back up to the master list and see what's covered, what's not being covered -
13:47:38  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: But you're not going to the bank with the technical stuff, you're going to the bank with what is needed. If we're looking at low-income countries as well we're looking at micro-credit, using your mobile systems, all sorts of stuff happening in terms of access to financial systems and smaller/medium enterprise companies even here in Canada and the US.
13:47:54  <TranscriptKirsten> I agree completely, we need to come up with a technical piece, but what we sell to the funders is the compelling reason that comes from their perspective.
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13:48:40  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I guess what I'm saying is you go to a domain, see what their needs are, and see what areas are addressed, need to be addressed, or are holes that need to be filled. If all the bank needed to their Java UI was some Orca scripts to make that efficient and productive, then they say "Okay, this is something I can develop in-house."
13:48:52  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: No, there's a lot behind the code.
13:49:27  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: Economic argument. They've invested tens of thousands of dollars in JAWS training and they have ten blind people on the phones, so what would possibly motivate them to put ten Ubuntu boxes in a center filled with 10,000 Windows machines?
13:49:37  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: But they're accessible.
13:50:03  <TranscriptKirsten> Pina: From a legislative perspective, we have to be accessible, not just JAWS, and when we talk about financial industries, it's not so much from an internal application development perspective.
13:50:44  <TranscriptKirsten> From an internal perspective we are making progress but need to adopt open source better. We need to market that to them. Where we really make an impact is dealing with third-party vendors. All financial institutions all have payroll systems, learning systems. Those are the ones you want to bring on board.
13:50:58  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: There are zero professional accounting packages that are accessible at all.
13:51:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Pina: That's exactly the point. You want to invest with those individuals.
13:51:53  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: The top-down approach is going to involve usability studies, personas based on real-world examples, using banking software. Develop that as a very concrete task, and then work on how to address different disability needs. All the stuff at the top ends up coming out of artifacts of specific tasks.
13:52:19  <TranscriptKirsten> Every time I've gone to something like this there's been a representative of the banking industry there. The banking industry is always part of this open source stuff. They are interested. They want to see change happen.
13:52:47  <TranscriptKirsten> I love the idea, and I love the idea of saying let's attack this from the top, find the users, figure out how to make this more compelling, and it'll naturally all the stuff from the top just fall out as an artifact from the project.
13:53:35  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: If we frame it as inclusive banking... So many people looking at microcredit applications, on mobile systems - band together with them, dealing with payment systems for low-income developing economies, we have a much larger pool of individuals to work with as well.
13:53:59  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Before we close the door completely on something, we've got to hear Greg talk tomorrow. Just a thought that I need to spit out. We have six more minutes.
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13:54:23  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Refresh, I've been editing away under solutions. We have a new app called professional accounting packages, that needs to go into the banking stuff.
13:54:54  <TranscriptKirsten> Broadband access from the home is a new solution domain. Under that I put eGovernment, I'm thinking Brazil and its online tax preparation, four companies that you can file taxes online.
13:55:38  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: We also need to think creatively. I was just at an OACD and then an OpenEd conference where there were presentations from Kenya and Ghana. The thought of broadband - they were demonstrating a peer-to-peer network using Bluetooth, a message from Barcelona to London using Bluetooth only.
13:55:52  <TranscriptKirsten> It took less than 48 minutes to travel across, no cell network used at all.
13:56:43  <TranscriptKirsten> Another thing they were using was rather than credit cards, using your cell phone as payment in almost any corner store, etc. The other thing they were looking at was in terms of accounting systems, the small traders on the coffee trade, tracking their particular packet of coffee and what was being paid at the various levels to be able to negotiate a fair
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13:56:44  <TranscriptKirsten> price for themselves.
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13:57:01  <TranscriptKirsten> It's not necessarily broadband, there are really neat new innovative ways in which people are getting around these barriers.
13:57:34  <TranscriptKirsten> This is an area - financial independence, participation in financial markets - that UNESCO, WTO are very interested in funding. If we link to that.
13:58:05  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: It sounds like the industry is interested, wants to hang out, is open to inviting us in usability studies, is aligned with the UN and UNESCO. Sounds like a no-brainer in a way. Who's going to write the proposal?
13:58:19  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: What's going to sell them is not this is easy technically, but what can be done.
13:58:38  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: So it makes more sense to me if it's a public-facing UI, since those legal reasons come to bear a little more strongly, am I wrong about that?
13:59:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Pina: Public always translates to ROI, so there's always an appetite. But there's also an interest in employees, and that too is very powerful. Given the demographics, that's something that should make the business case as well.
13:59:19  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: We're almost out of time.
13:59:24  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: But the coffee isn't here yet.
14:00:05  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Funding can come through for the things at the top - these things aren't mutually exclusive - but I like the idea of overarching tasks.
14:00:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: I'll negotiate another half-hour with the other group.
14:00:38  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: We've identified banking is important, and Pina, your microphone is far away. How much of this professional accounting software is web-delivered and how much runs on Unix?
14:01:05  <TranscriptKirsten> Pina: More and more is on web, and as institutions are replacing and enhancing. But when you look at the back-end, Unix is still very strong.
14:01:17  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Great Plains and all those tend to have Windows GUIs, which are not going to be accessible in Gnome.
14:01:47  <TranscriptKirsten> Pina: So from Canada's perspective, we're all in the same boat. We're all looking at those major applications and whether we're going to redevelop them in-house or go to third-party vendors.
14:02:18  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: It seems to me that this is a great time to say okay, they're going to be web-based and use ARIA, or be Unix-based and use Java, but we're not using Windows or Mac, we want something cross-platform. ARIA is an obvious choice.
14:02:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Maybe this is diving into the weeds, but are we able to do per-page scripting in Orca yet?
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14:03:16  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Web UIs are becoming more and more prevalent, but you still need an OS, speech, all of that. Greg's work, he's also got provisions for assistive technologies being delivered the other way. This is a potential real-world app that we should develop real-world solutions for.
14:03:33  <TranscriptKirsten> If they're based on the web, great, or on GNOME, great. We'll solve a real problem, but then those solutions can be generalized to other domains.
14:03:44  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: While we're picking the financial industry, those can be generalized to other ideas.
14:04:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: Sounds like we should be focusing on the industries that haven't spent tens of thousands of dollars to put ten people to work with JAWS. We've learned we can be more competitive, on-going maintenance will be less.
14:04:40  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: With accounting, there are zero blind accountants and zero blind accounting in colleges since there's no tools, so no one can apply for those jobs today.
14:04:54  <TranscriptKirsten> Pina: But you have customers, if not employees, perhaps.
14:05:04  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: But the customers don't need general ledger software.
14:05:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Do we want to flesh out financial more or find more domains?
14:05:19  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Let's flesh this out as a proposal.
14:05:34  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: Since we're looking at financial, GNUcash is actually not bad.
14:05:59  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Let's go to accessible curricula & education. Similar problem, users have real-world needs, same things apply, a specific solution can be generalized to other people.
14:06:17  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: GNOME and Linux, because of all the laptops, there's an advantage there.
14:06:26  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: It's more prevalent in a university environment.
14:07:03  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: We also have education delivery in low-income countries as well. The descendants of One Laptop Per Child, which didn't go very well, but the Intel Classmate, EEPC where it's being rolled out, but other hardware systems and solutions. But all of them will run Linux.
14:07:25  <TranscriptKirsten> They're intended to be delivered to deliver curriculum. The large rich foundations are all interested in open access, so there's a good funding possibility.
14:07:53  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Also a tipping point of capturing developer mindshare, and attacking that at the university level makes people think about it more as they learn to program.
14:08:31  <TranscriptKirsten> So that domain is just as appealing. You might capture more developer mindshare in terms of making our jobs easier ten years from now, so people make stuff accessible out of normal everyday habit.
14:09:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: The reason I extended the banking to low-income countries is you do get the mindshare there. Small fisherman having access to their own financial systems, access to credit and lending and borrowing, does have a global mindshare similar to education.
14:09:48  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: If it's very definitely part of the finance world, but dovetails with dozens of other professions and education - really good mathematical manipulation and software. Not LaTeX where you can lay it out, but something where you can work on differential equations like Mathematica.
14:10:03  <TranscriptKirsten> There is apparently no accessible system, and blind people need some way of getting Mathematica or Mathlab or those guys-
14:10:09  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: That's definitely fundable-
14:10:19  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: That's also an obvious one you can make a web interface, too.
14:10:42  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Merging education and finance because there's a huge education segment to the financial sector and creative economy.
14:10:49  <TranscriptKirsten> How to run your business, finance your business, and so on.
14:11:10  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: So how to proceed. Do we want to come out of here with a box with a ribbon on it saying this is what we're going to do?
14:11:27  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: We'd like to have some operationable thing moving forward. The beginnings, the outlines of a baby proposal right now, that would be great.
14:11:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: The banking space would also cover the education space as well? The education space is crowded. You'd have to latch on to somebody else. It sounds like the banking space is not as crowded, there's a lot of green pasture?
14:12:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Pina: There is space, I'm certain, but you have a palatable target. You've got a targeted audience, ROI, a couple of things to go after. And to Jutta's point, it does overlap to other industries, education and government.
14:12:35  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: Health industry too.
14:12:42  <TranscriptKirsten> Pina: If they can set a precedent, others will come.
14:12:51  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: And if they can lead, they can sell the service.
14:13:20  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: I bet the same ideas could be shifted to something else. I'm going to turn to you. I'm sorry to turn to you, but you are the grant-writing and winning champion. And Peter is as well.
14:13:32  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Look, I'm one for one, I'm not scores plus.
14:14:03  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Okay, so the strategy for getting money is you look at it from the perspective of the funder. What is bothering them, what is something they want to solve, and if they don't know they want to solve it, show them.
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14:14:36  <TranscriptKirsten> What are the things the financial industry is looking at as a problem to be addressed? One is the applications necessary to engage individuals with disabilities in employment. Public-facing interfaces that are accessible for the financial industry, and
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14:15:01  <TranscriptKirsten> the other piece I've been talking about is ways of making participation in financial transactions available to low-income, creative economy, small/medium enterprise systems, mobile solutions, etc.
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14:15:24  <TranscriptKirsten> So those are the three problems to be addressed. That probably does address the three areas that financial institutions have problems in.
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14:15:58  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: The pain points are accessible employment, accessible public-facing interfaces, and modes of - targeting new markets. Those are the three things we're going to sell to the funders.
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14:16:46  <TranscriptKirsten> Identifying the funders, that's the first thing. I think we have multiple possibilities. The financial institutions themselves, insurance companies, foundations interested in new, creative economies, which we have quite a number. Ford Foundation, Macarthur Foundation, Gates Foundation. OACB, UNESCO, UN, World Bank as well.
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14:17:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: It seems to me that once you have your enumeration of domains, and you have some list of potential funding sources, you can fairly quickly draw lines. Education = Gates... except they don't like Unix.
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14:17:35  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: What we sell to funding organizations is we have creative solutions to problems, we don't have to give them the technical details.
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14:18:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I live around the corner from somebody who worked with Gates Foundation, and there are parts of it, that are web-based, that they'd be happy to fund. Some of them, like Ford Foundation, take a very broad view and can be sold on a wide variety of goods.
14:18:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: EC will be very interested in the mobile financing.
14:18:44  <TranscriptKirsten> Pina: So is Scotia and other Canadian financial industry.
14:19:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: So thinking about mobile, there's Linux on small devices, Linux mobile and all the apps running in that environment.
14:19:38  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: From the problems we're going to solve come the deliverables: applications that allow individuals with disabilities to participate in the employment, customer service, all banking services.
14:20:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Applications for employees, for the public with disabilities to use the banking systems. And we're going to have mobile systems that are accessible to new economies. Those are the three primary.
14:20:55  <TranscriptKirsten> Dawn Mercer has just arrived from Seneca. Remember we were talking about the open source program, talk to Dawn.
14:21:07  <TranscriptKirsten> Dawn: I can help you connect with those people although they're not going to be easy to get hold of this week.
14:21:56  <TranscriptKirsten> David: I have a half-baked or fuzzy part to this. If you're using a mobile device and you're doing something financial on it. Would we entertain the idea that this project might involve not just bolting accessibility to some existing mobile, but saying you've got these apps, you're doing it all wrong?
14:21:57  <TranscriptKirsten> Do it over the web?
14:22:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: Yes, for all kinds of good reasons. Only one UI for a set of data, that's kind of antique.
14:22:25  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: I think most of banking software is stuff you don't see anyway. The UIs are pretty simple.
14:22:31  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: Yes. And the backend's XML.
14:22:51  <TranscriptKirsten> Pina: How do we making imaging acceptable? We have common grounds here. One problem all banks are struggling with.
14:22:57  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: Scan your cheques, OCR.
14:23:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Pina: It's handwriting, it's computerized, it's all of the above. But it's a common problem amongst all financial institution, and the industry is pushing really hard for a solution.
14:23:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: So we may not solve all the problems on the first run.
14:23:42  <TranscriptKirsten> Pina: Right now they're really struggling with it. We can work on a partial solution.
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14:24:25  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Six minutes left. Can I do a summary? For the areas it's employing people in the industry, accessible public interfaces, and then targeting new markets, and the specific markets you mentioned are low-income, low economy.
14:24:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: And people with disabilities can be customers.
14:25:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Yes, they can have accessible interfaces. We'll need to flesh those out some more, I think. I think we have a good idea. Sounds like there's a lot of potential sources of funding.
14:25:37  <TranscriptKirsten> I think any one of these things can feed into the technology that's at the top, so this whole thing being done will feed into all these things at the top.
14:26:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Now, my question: who's going to write this? Should be done with Pina. You want to see this succeed, right?
14:26:20  <TranscriptKirsten> Pina: Absolutely, not only for us here but globally.
14:26:35  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: I assume you'd want to start with something to demonstrate how success can happen when applied more widely.
14:26:43  <davidb> we need COFFEE!
14:26:54  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: The process - talk to potential funders to get direction for where they'd like to take it.
14:27:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Pina: bringing some of the organizations together will be the first step, gauge their appetite.
14:27:41  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: The trick is to find one prominent funder to lure in the other funders. You get a bank interested and tell Gates, well, we have this major bank interested, and then they become a funding partner.
14:27:46  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: So, who's going to start this?
14:27:55  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Well, we already have Pina. *laugh*
14:28:20  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Well, I'm happy to participate... in my copious spare time. At least, coming from the technology I know well.
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14:28:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: We need representatives of the user community as well.
14:28:37  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: I'll give you feedback. I've been promoting this for a while.
14:28:49  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: I read those AEGIS personas. They had some interesting things that could easily apply.
14:29:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Cognitive access is a huge area in the financial area, since they're very worried about misuse of individuals and elderly with fraud and so forth.
14:29:42  <TranscriptKirsten> Systems whereby - and here we get into education - systems that are somewhat fraud-proof in educating customers over what they need to do to not be vulnerable.
14:29:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Just to force things to happen, when is the next time we're going to meet and make this happen?
14:30:26  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Of course we'll have a third forum! One of the things we're going to talk about tomorrow is the next steps. We have an invitation to an OACD event. This will be of great interest to them.
14:30:38  <TranscriptKirsten> The event is a Creative Economies event and this would fit in very well in the theme.
14:30:42  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Wow. We got pretty far.
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14:31:15  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: What I'm wondering is, opening this document up on the wiki for editing. There's a lot more to fill in in the domains, we sort of enumerated some of the industry domains, some of the solution domains, there's a lot more meat to put in there.
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14:31:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Sort of enumerate the points needed that will be links back up.
14:32:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: I propose rather than spending a lot of time filling in this page, fill out the stuff that will be ideas for the proposal. Otherwise we'll spend more time filling out this content, when the real work should be to get partners, get the financial industry engaged, get the meat back into the page.
14:32:26  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I'm not suggested you do the table. I'm inviting the other folks in the room to add more to it.
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14:32:51  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: I just see these things kind of stagnate. I bet if you pull the GNOME one up there'd be a big overlap, because I based my content on it.
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14:33:40  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I'm more talking about the application domain, not the table on top. We said banking, financial industry. I also suggested work in call centres, which is different from other potential employment in the financial industry. Those parts can be directly used in a new proposal. I would also invite people to suggest additional industries.
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14:34:07  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: I'm going to create another child of this page and call it the proposal.
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14:35:14  <TranscriptKirsten> We can break now and wait for the coffee. We want to have at least an hour to talk about Beyond the Code. So we'll break now.
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15:22:22  <korn> ...
15:22:26  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Okay, we need to make some additional introductions. We have several others joining us.
15:22:58  <TranscriptKirsten> Dawn Mercer is with Seneca. If you remember this morning we were talking about students studying open source. Dawn is the person to talk to and she can introduce you to Chris Tyler and David Humphrey here at Seneca. Welcome Dawn.
15:23:04  <TranscriptKirsten> Frank, do you want to introduce yourself?
15:23:28  <TranscriptKirsten> I'm Frank Hecker with the Mozilla Foundation. I've been involved in our Mozilla efforts, and I just wanted to stop by and say hello and check out the forum.
15:23:36  <TranscriptKirsten> I'm (?)
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15:23:51  <TranscriptKirsten> (sorry, could not hear any of that)
15:24:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Alistair Macdonald, working on the processing JS javascript library for visualizing data and creating art in the web browser.
15:24:53  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Okay, so we have a limited amount of time to report back to the group. Each group has approximately 20 minutes to report back to the overall group. I think we each think we have the best proposal, so we might have a vote at the end. We'll start with the collaboration proposal.
15:25:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Following that we'll be talking about Beyond the Code.
15:25:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Jess: I don't know if you can see the tip of this dry-erase marker. Destroyed. We were THAT productive.
15:26:47  <TranscriptKirsten> This is the left side of our board. We started out just brainstorming, and we started to structure our brainstorming for a build project. We pretended we had a team that would take on writing a grant and then building a product that would be an accessible collaboration tool.
15:26:58  <TranscriptKirsten> Vision: Roadmap a project that we could build to solve our biggest issues.
15:27:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Problem statement: Build accessible open collaboration tools that are interoperable, modular, ....
15:27:23  <TranscriptKirsten> O'Cat! Open Collaboration Accessible Tools.
15:27:34  <TranscriptKirsten> Interoperable, modular, adaptable, secure, private, always on, degrades gracefully, scales
15:28:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Colin: We talked about interoperable and modular, how they're kind of the same but we want an all-in-one tool that can weave together layers but also just focus on chat, video, whatever, certain features.
15:28:26  <TranscriptKirsten> Adaptability, graceful degradation, scalability should be obvious to those of us in accessibility
15:28:49  <TranscriptKirsten> "Always on" - the ability to cross distances that make you feel like they're collocated even if they're separate
15:29:03  <TranscriptKirsten> Jess: We started to organize our ideas into these different buckets: Content, Space, Infrastructure
15:29:20  <TranscriptKirsten> Content: text, audio, video, and beyond. Spaces: open, web, desktop. Fundamentally open options.
15:29:34  <TranscriptKirsten> Infrastructure: requiring and depending upon stable, secure, robust network.
15:29:56  <TranscriptKirsten> To break down some of these pieces, we really focused on content. We broke text downinto chat, real time chat, annotations, captioning, equivalents to audio/video, multiple editors.
15:30:21  <TranscriptKirsten> We also found there were a number of cross-cutting concerns, equivalence across different modalities. We're looking at them in these buckets but envisioning a whole experience.
15:30:32  <TranscriptKirsten> These were some of the features that we articulated would be essential to the text mode.
15:31:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Annotations - ability to collaboratively add text to text itself or other media.
15:31:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Multiple users can co-edit.
15:32:04  <TranscriptKirsten> Audio - some of the areas we identified as essential. Signal to noise, eliminate background noise, frequency range & shifting, lag, multi-stream, spatial distributions of person speaking, audio descriptions and support for multiple streams.
15:32:20  <TranscriptKirsten> A lot of this gets to the alternatives to whatever mode we're talking about.
15:32:59  <TranscriptKirsten> Colin: Video - we talked about interesting points for resolution and frame rate. What's the minimum acceptable resolution if a user needs to see the video to lip-read, or sign? How fast does the frame rate have to be for fingerspelling? That needs to scale up or down depending on the device.
15:33:15  <TranscriptKirsten> Ability to manage multiple screens, videoconferencing with a large number of people. How to focus on slides vs. presentation.
15:34:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Jess: Cross-cutting issues - some of those were language, ASL, internationalization, amplication, simplification
15:34:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Colin: Logistical is a big one. As we worked these details out we thought how do we fit these together? What are the logistical concerns?
15:35:32  <TranscriptKirsten> Turn-taking, hand-raising, queuing speakers, lag between modes, voting, private communication, idea catcher, multimodal presentation, pacing and control of time, notifications and errors, setup assistance, auto-configuration & personal preferences
15:35:51  <TranscriptKirsten> Notification and errors - might be an icon in someone's video stream, how do you identify?
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15:36:16  <TranscriptKirsten> Experience of getting set up. If you've got your audio, microphones, speakers, it's painful to be able to take most tools and get them set up so they work. Is it even going to remember your settings when you come back?
15:36:45  <TranscriptKirsten> We talked about all these features, but tried to weave this into something we want to actually build. Do this on the desktop or on the open web.
15:37:19  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Have you done any work to identify what of these technologies exist, rather than doing it all from scratch which is way funner?
15:37:41  <TranscriptKirsten> Jess: Where there are existing tools we wouldn't reinvent them, but where there were political issues we'd bring an expert into this build project.
15:38:17  <TranscriptKirsten> Colin: It's not just about choosing technologies, but recognizing & identifying protocols, formats and standards that are common across them. We did get into some technical details, Java is an obvious candidate, but you'd be insane to build this totally from scratch.
15:38:35  <TranscriptKirsten> We're stuck with a lot of proprietary tools. Adobe is brutal, and I would love to see an open collaborative environment coming out of this.
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15:38:47  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: As far as the platforms it would run on, is that enumerated as well?
15:39:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Jess: It is something we talked about. I'm not sure if we came to a point where we included it. We would need to be able to access the accessibility APIs on the desktop, and that's what we built in here thinking that's probably what you talked about in your group.
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15:39:44  <TranscriptKirsten> We talked about OpenWeb, about HTML5, but the point of the openness and accessible tool was this had to be cross-platform, and easy to use, and with those requirements it would be built out in that way.
15:40:52  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Is the question of building a monolithic app that has all this stuff in it, versus "here I am blind, I'm not going to make a lot of use of the part of the tool that shifts images around, and I'm really happy with this IRC program. So as long as I use my IRC program that hooks into this, so I can use existing components, and hook into whatever
15:41:00  <TranscriptKirsten> collaboration server, which I can't do if it's a monolithic app".
15:41:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Colin: Accommodate users who want to use their own tools, diverse.
15:41:19  <TranscriptKirsten> Jess: Importance of modular system, opt-in/opt-out.
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15:41:50  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Just another thought - provision for moderators and intermediaries. I'm thinking of what we did with having somebody doing caption text. You need a place for that with an input to be injected by a human being.
15:42:15  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg brought up a really great point, one of these cross-cutting pieces we called participant correction. The ability to moderate, and for people to happen to be in the space to correct some of the materials that are happening.
15:42:30  <TranscriptKirsten> You can tell that even in this, if there's a name that didn't get captured, we were able to type that name into the IRC.
15:42:44  <TranscriptKirsten> If somebody doesn't know the acronym, you can not only explain the acronym but link to more information.
15:42:52  <TranscriptKirsten> Colin: Real accommodation, real people.
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15:43:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Assistance on demand, so the mechanism that we built provides for the ability to call up local services, network services, human services. Sometimes you will be in an environment or meeting and there isn't any AT in the world that's going to access it for you, but a human can do it very easily.
15:43:47  <TranscriptKirsten> Ability to buy 10 seconds of a human's time to do that. People can make a living very easily if we set the mechanisms to allow it.
15:43:54  <TranscriptKirsten> Colin: Other comments or questions?
15:43:57  <TranscriptKirsten> Thanks!
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15:44:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Thank you. We don't have Powerpoints from this group. We don't DO Powerpoints.
15:44:16  <TranscriptKirsten> But we do have a wiki.
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15:45:07  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: I created a draft proposal.
15:46:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Okay, you guys got the pitch this morning - but, the idea was this. We have an accessible OS platform that solves a number of problems really well but has some gaps.
15:46:45  <TranscriptKirsten> The first part was spent talking about that solution, why OS is solution, what we're trying to solve here. We went into the gap analysis of the current solution. We made a nice table that included a number of things, very specific technology areas that we had limitations in.
15:46:57  <TranscriptKirsten> High-quality speech synthesis as an example, Braille embossers, accessible PDF.
15:47:26  <TranscriptKirsten> As we started doing this, it became apparent that jeez, I've been down this road before where we go through a proposal, do a gaps analysis, make a table, and then that table sits and rots on the Web forever and nothing is ever done.
15:47:54  <TranscriptKirsten> We tried to find a break through that pattern. Here's that table at the top, just to prove it does exist. Each one of these things on its own, we could go off and say we'll solve it.
15:48:09  <TranscriptKirsten> At the end we'll have a bunch of technology solutions, but at the end we haven't solved the problem of accessibility for end users.
15:48:35  <clown> Jutta's Proposal:  http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Draft+Proposal+for+Inclusive+Economies
15:48:41  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta, or Pina had the idea of coming up with a proposal that we can address a vertical market. The one that came up was the financial industry. You can't get through life without having to do some financial thing, pay bills, credit cards.
15:49:04  <TranscriptKirsten> And also the financial industry employs people with disabilities. So the idea was let's take a look at this vertical market and see what opportunity there is for accessibility in this space.
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15:49:25  <TranscriptKirsten> We came out with three big areas: being able to employ people in the financial industry. What kind of applications do people have to have access to?
15:49:34  <TranscriptKirsten> Also, as a user of these products, how do we make them accessible?
15:49:58  <TranscriptKirsten> And then, let's try to open up new market areas. The example Jutta gave was new economies and small low-income markets.
15:50:32  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Why did we arrive at financial industries? We wanted to address something fairly ubiquitous where there is interest in accessibility, and Will noted that at every one of these meetings there is a representative from a financial institution, so there is interest in this area and an industry to invest in.
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15:51:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Most financial applications are still Unix-based and have poorly developed UIs in non-public-facing employment-related applications. Fairly significant need with a Unix base to it.
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15:51:41  <TranscriptKirsten> In terms of the accessible public-facing interfaces, even there, financial institutions have not gone very far and there are some compelling needs that overlap with accessibility, like increased fraud, insecure transactions because people don't fully understand things, cognitive access.
15:51:52  <TranscriptKirsten> Legal requirements, and we address something that the industry partner sees as an issue.
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15:52:24  <TranscriptKirsten> About new markets - I've been attending quite a few meetings and one of the big concerns is how do we get creative new economies? Saulo can talk to that from Brazil as well. How do we engage employees in new systems?
15:52:36  <TranscriptKirsten> Egrarian systems that allow farmers to track their products through the markets.
15:53:10  <TranscriptKirsten> Entrepreneurial industries in small low-income countries, or even northern Canada or northern Ontario.
15:53:27  <TranscriptKirsten> Something we want to address is accessibility but also of interest to these groups, mobile applications and access.
15:54:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Before you go off and say "Just solving the banking problem, big deal". It's an everyday life feature. By solving these problems, we're solving real problems for real users. But we're going to be solving general problems as well. As these come out, they'll address things higher up in that table that need to be addressed.
15:54:24  <TranscriptKirsten> It'll get done because they have to be done to solve problems for the real users.
15:55:04  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: So we had one fly in the ointment, and people pointed out the volunteers in the open-source community are not interested in banking and financial matters. It isn't in the culture to be compelled by this area. But I wanted to show these things which are cropping up everywhere.
15:55:30  <TranscriptKirsten> In places like Africa and India mobile boot camps, where there are volunteer communities looking at mobile systems, and they are definitely interested in financial systems.
15:56:05  <TranscriptKirsten> This is in Senegal, in Kenya, and through a partnership with a group called Safari they created the system which is a cash alternative to paying for things with mobile phone.
15:56:29  <TranscriptKirsten> (whoops - the screen and projector have shut down)
15:57:17  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Well, there are links there to small agrarian entrepreneurs so they can track the price of their coffee and predict when they should sell and so on. Access to financial markets for customers, consumers, but also small businesses as consumers and customers. Compelling reasons for making sure all that is accessible.
15:57:47  <TranscriptKirsten> We have approx. 15% rate of disability in North America, but in Kenya or Senegal it's much, much higher, and so there's even a greater need to make sure these things are accessible. And there's a massive pool interested in this type of development.
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15:58:08  <TranscriptKirsten> Our argument that we should develop a proposal in this area and merge our interests with these other interests, other funding sources and other participants in our effort.
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15:58:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Just a quick comment, Jutta - you suggested that the OS community might not be as interested, but I really think that depends in part on what tools you use and how you spin it. Certainly an application of individual interests, likely get external hackers involved.
15:59:25  <TranscriptKirsten> One of the things about AEGIS, many of the ways we do funding is you are somewhat creative in how you write, what you pursue to maximize engagement, broad utility, as well as meeting the text of the grant.
15:59:36  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Recruiting the OS community is not so much asking for funding but volunteer time.
15:59:49  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: You might be paying them a little bit, or it might be professionals working on open source.
16:00:03  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: Libraries for exchanging data available in open source.
16:00:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Any comments & questions?
16:00:32  <louis_to> yes, as I wrote...
16:01:26  <TranscriptKirsten> We're going to try to bring together those individuals with other possible funding sources which is looking at new creative economies, and Saulo can speak a little to this area.
16:02:37  <TranscriptKirsten> Saulo: We just started a project funded by Internet Bank of Development (?) - in regions in Brazil, locally there is no income. Important role that people can access external markets. Inside MFF strong interests in ICT.
16:02:59  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: While we had our break, I sent a quick email to someone financing microcredit and training, and they're very interested, so we'll tie that in as well.
16:03:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Louis is on the audio bridge, agrees with Peter, says UNE