OSA Toronto IRC Logs

Log for Wednesday October 28, 2009

Note that all times are EST. The full log for the day follows:

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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 UNESCO may be relevant and should be targeted.
16:03:17  <TranscriptKirsten> If Louis heard that, he should speak up...
16:03:36  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Frank, do you have any comments on either of those two?
16:03:41  <louis_to> my audio is defunct right now
16:03:53  <louis_to> I did hear it, though, and can comment on this tomorrow, when I am there
16:04:23  <korn> Perhaps we have a problem with low batteries...
16:04:46  <TranscriptKirsten> ... dealing with some feedback issues here....
16:05:02  <louis_to> easier to type :-)
16:05:23  <TranscriptKirsten> Rich: Lost what was being said, heard something about funding.
16:05:29  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Talking about different options for grants.
16:05:42  <TranscriptKirsten> Might be better to look at the IRC channel.
16:05:48  <louis_to> yes
16:05:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Rich also mentioned that ARIA is going into 130 IBM programs.
16:06:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Congratulations, Rich. Thanks both groups, I'm not sure if we have a winner.
16:06:15  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Were we competing?!
16:06:29  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: No, no. Multiple proposals. We believe in diversifying and diversity.
16:06:38  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Actually I thought you nominated Will to write the proposal?
16:06:47  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: We have a number of people to write it.
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16:07:05  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: We'll put a number sign on a piece of paper, followed by a bunch of zeroes and "Please send".
16:07:46  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: We want to cover what many of us will admit is a critical area, called "Beyond the Code". An issue in every one of our projects - even if we achieve all our technical goals, we won't have implementation and success unless we have maintenance, setup, installation, training and so on.
16:08:07  <TranscriptKirsten> We know the list and enumerated it quite extensively in Vancouver. If you look at the list of gaps that we have in the documents we created collectively there, you'll see all of these things we don't presently have.
16:08:33  <TranscriptKirsten> In some open-source software projects it goes further, we have absolutely no way of installing, documentation is missing. All the things that should accompany the code if you're implementing something isn't happening.
16:09:03  <louis_to> what human resources do we have to do this sort of thing? and are there grants for this?
16:09:11  <TranscriptKirsten> In our communities we haven't recruited people who are talented, skilled or interested in that and haven't created a mechanism to reward that part of work, because the meritocracy rewards how much code you commit. I can go on and on. There's lots of reasons, but I'd love to hear from you what some of those might be.
16:10:04  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: There's a couple of problems. Another issue is that especially in the GNOME market but in technology in general, things change rapidly. You document how things work on Ubuntu Porcupine, and a few months later you have a ratchety rocket, senile squid, and things have changed and your documentation is out of date.
16:10:32  <TranscriptKirsten> Not only do we need to look at funding documentation,but it needs to be an ongoing, updated program. One-offs, help, because a fair amount stays the same. But enough changes that you need ongoing funding.
16:11:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: I can personally testify to how things change having maintained an installation for Fedora that you could install using a screenreader. It got very difficult to keep that up. In addition to that, there is the complexity of so many ways you can do that, it's a rich environment with lots of options.
16:11:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Example of installing the distribution - you might get a DVD, you might download it, and Windows users will have no idea what an ISA image is. You can do it from a stick, over the net. And the decisions you have to make during the process, the if/then situations become quite entangled, and it can be hard to maintain that.
16:12:41  <TranscriptKirsten> Useful would be targeted help in applications that people who aren't used to using it might find useful. Spreadsheets - the help available in traditional places has you looking for things you might not see if you're a blind user. Translating the application-specific help would be valuable, not likely to change as quickly, though that's going to change too.
16:12:54  <TranscriptKirsten> The installation thing needs to happen, but that's something people only do once in a rare while and you can usually find help.
16:13:09  <TranscriptKirsten> The day-to-day tasks could stand some attention from an accessibility point of view.
16:13:36  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: On that front, I approached the Ubuntu folks about something in the community, get a wiki going where we have active techno-geeks out there to try the latest releases.
16:13:54  <TranscriptKirsten> It doesn't address the documentation issue per se, but at least gives people a realtime feel of what they're talking about.
16:14:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Feels like we're slum lords when we should be gardeners. Slum lords rent their building and let it rot, don't do any maintenance, just collect rent.
16:14:29  <TranscriptKirsten> Gardeners plant something and have to constantly care for it, pull out weeds, help things grow.
16:14:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Make the technology, easy to do, but we have to maintain it and get that documentation up to date. Track the new technologies. Train the people writing the applications.
16:15:23  <TranscriptKirsten> Jamon: Louis suggested a meeting in countries that need this technology.
16:15:46  <louis_to> :-)
16:16:05  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: If you go up on our wiki you'll see the next forum is actually in Japan, in March. It's co-sponsored by Kobayi University and ISO, so that's one where we will be dealing with super aging and accessibility as well.
16:16:20  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: A structural thing to think about, superfunding sources as opposed to run of the mill funding sources like NPII.
16:16:22  <louis_to> likewise, IPA
16:17:03  <TranscriptKirsten> A lot of this "hardening" or making it commercially viable. I look at the commercial companies participating in GNOME accessibility. The drivers I've seen for their work, Section 508 etc, never talk to end-user documentation. The things pushing the commercial companies to do so much of the great work they've done don't really include that.
16:17:26  <TranscriptKirsten> Technical writing is a profession, it's not a hobbyist. Not to say you don't have professional-quality writers volunteering, but it's rare. You have more professional hackers.
16:17:43  <TranscriptKirsten> Should we be looking at some quasi-professional company receiving grant funding and doing this kind of caretaking?
16:18:09  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Is there something we should do with our development process so it's more naturally integrated, we don't need someone to track?
16:18:25  <TranscriptKirsten> User testing, user evaluation and all that more integrated?
16:19:08  <TranscriptKirsten> Colin: I think this speaks to an issue around open source culture and incentives. You say there are more professional-grade hobbyist hackers, but I suspect the vast majority go to work and write code, and come home and write code because they love it. We need a similar culture of people who love explaining things, love making sure code doesn't suck.
16:19:46  <TranscriptKirsten> That they have the incentives to come in to our community, feel like they're equally important. The QA people need to be recognized so there's an incentive. We've struggled with this issue for a few years now in Fluid in trying to build an OS culture inclusive of non-nerds.
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16:20:24  <TranscriptKirsten> Some of it involves paying people, the people in between design and development, who become the most essential contributors in terms of the quality. I hope this isn't too controversial to say, but OS software can have a real quality issue.
16:20:41  <TranscriptKirsten> We can pay a company or write some documentation, but it's not going to provide incentive for testers and documenters to be equal participants.
16:21:23  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I may have not been as clear based on your reaction. I think the commercial companies care about quality. We have usability experts at Sun, and RedHat has them and Novell has them in the usability labs, and we bring that to the open source stuff that we put into our flagship releases.
16:22:06  <TranscriptKirsten> And we care about accessibility, and we are doing accessibility - I'm paid by Sun, Will's paid by Sun - but I don't see the overlap, because I don't see the drivers the way Section 508 is a driver. I don't see that overlap for accessibility documentation. ANd that's the gap I'm trying to identify.
16:22:27  <TranscriptKirsten> Firefox crashes less than IE. There's not a quality problem there when it's finally released. Linux stays up longer than Windows XP or Vista. There's not that kind of quality problem there.
16:22:39  <TranscriptKirsten> What I'm talking about is the documentation of accessibility, I don't see the commercial drivers that I do for the other pieces.
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16:23:09  <TranscriptKirsten> Maybe an update to Section 508 that says "you have to have well-documented accessibility" would push that, or line items for paying quality technical writers. I'm not sure.
16:23:41  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: When we talk about accessibility policies, in ATAG 2.0 we have included that accessibility documentation be created, and that would include software toolkits.
16:24:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: I think this is as good a time to say it, I don't think any of the companies that distribute have anything other than somebody part-time who does the documentation, and it shows. Everybody has other responsibilities, and with the exception of Ubuntu, every distribution the people shift fairly frequently, and there are all kinds of integration issues
16:24:40  <TranscriptKirsten> . There needs to be somebody that takes responsibility, not just builds & runs.
16:25:25  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: There is one other piece moving away from the packaging and distro. I'm not sure if it fully qualifies as "Beyond the Code", and that is automated software testing for accessibility, and that is on the AEGIS roadmap. One of the big headaches in open source is when you have a deadline, subtract 5-10 days, and the open source repository gets slammed with
16:25:40  <TranscriptKirsten> new code, and there's not much time for testing. You never want the first code of a cycle, you want the .1, .2, .3 and so on.
16:25:52  <TranscriptKirsten> We definitely want and need and appreciate help beyond what AEGIS is funding.
16:26:49  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: I had a meeting with Ubuntu about the quality issues. Issues with audio integration, accessibility integration, it hurts the project overall. Maybe Sun has a person full-time on this, and Ubuntu doesn't. I'm not sure IBM has anyone at all.
16:27:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Okay, it's hard to find money from a corporation to invest in accessibility. So let's find creative ways to flush these things out sooner. Maybe you need stability every day, but there's people who are geeks willing to bring their system down and crash. Get them actively involved in testing accessibility integration and get feedback back sooner than later.
16:28:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: That helps but it's more than that. Having submitted bugs, participated in the development list, sometimes when I report things, the feedback is "that's not really important". Somebody doesn't understand the use case, the requirements.
16:28:25  <TranscriptKirsten> The arch example is Pulse Audio. Not enough use cases, not enough requirements generated. Audio continues to be a problem.
16:28:55  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: If it's possible for you to vote with your feet and say "Sorry, I'm abandoning you guys and say I'm going with someone who takes accessibility seriously."
16:29:40  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: With your help and a few other people, we got the first ever open source free software organization to do a strongly worded accessibility statement. So Project GNU is with us now. I think we might be able to leverage that to get Apache and others to sign on to things similar to that.
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16:30:05  <TranscriptKirsten> Especially using statistics like 650 million people with disabilities on the planet, and we're the single most oppressed minority on earth (Kofi Annan).
16:30:47  <TranscriptKirsten> This software is the whites-only sign of the 21st century. When you phrase things that way. A lot of hackers are libertarians, into diversity and a lot of things. When you bring things to their attention, you have all these educated people who can't work because the tools aren't there.
16:31:10  <TranscriptKirsten> Open source gives us more opportunity to go in and fix these things. I don't think that would be a tremendously difficult climb uphill, but that's just my opinion.
16:31:18  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: What about Drupal?
16:31:32  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: Drupal hasn't made their accessibility statement, but their next rev has some super features.
16:31:48  <TranscriptKirsten> Jamon: (?) said that he's worried that approach might segregate audiences.
16:32:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Dawn, could you comment on open source education and whether there's a way to address some of these issues there? Is there any in the courses offered?
16:32:49  <TranscriptKirsten> Dawn: Well, at Seneca the answer is no. It is totally computer studies and computer software developers involved in that. There needs to be a broader group, but that's where the emphasis is at this point.
16:33:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: What would it take to get accessibility into the curriculum?
16:34:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Frank: There were two initiatives I thought of, the first is (?) focused on southern California but branching out. Also HFOS, which is a National Science Foundation initiative, out of Trinity College and others, around applying open source to humanitarian projects and have students participate in that.
16:34:53  <TranscriptKirsten> These people are a part of the open source movement and will be here tomorrow at the summit. Based on our experience with Mozilla and education, the key is to find students and/or faculty interested in trying something new.
16:35:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Not going to be a top-down effort. It doesn't have to be faculty. Advanced students take on a project, and in some cases they've persuaded their professors to teach Mozilla-related stuff as part of a course, and I can see that happening with accessibility as well.
16:35:36  <TranscriptKirsten> Otherwise it's really difficult to get adopted.
16:36:31  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: That was a loaded question, I worked with the HFOS folks. The point is it has to come from the faculty, they have to take an interest in open source. At Trinity College they chose some projects in accessibility. I'd be happy to chat with faculty. Frank's going to be here? Sorry, Ralph, Ralph Morelli?
16:36:39  <TranscriptKirsten> If they're here they'd be great people to hook up with as well.
16:36:45  <TranscriptKirsten> Dawn: Dave is going to be in that session tomorrow.
16:37:32  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: From the inclusive design perspective, here in Ontario we're trying to launch a professional Master's in inclusive design. It includes Seneca and Sheridan and George Brown College, all of whom have a design perspective in addition to the computer perspective.
16:38:20  <TranscriptKirsten> Also, taking advantage of a university like York, cross-disciplinary nature, I was in a critical disabilities' study as my graduate work, and it was difficult even here to find a faculty member outside of Arts who could understand the work with both a technical and disability perspective.
16:39:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Justin: Just to tie in what we talked about before and now, one of the things is to get a community focus, community base. It's true because you can never have enough testing in any area. With the accessibility focus, how can we make it more diverse across all fields, should we be bringing these issues up at the high school level? Then when people are looking
16:39:33  <TranscriptKirsten> into their post-secondary education what they want to do, they can tie that in to what they want to do?
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16:40:29  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Well, one of the questions several people have raised is how to get an interdisciplinary perspective, bring together various groups. Whether our funding proposal, a research & development project that would interest faculty from a number of disciplines... Faculty members want to participate in research and this might appeal.
16:40:32  <TranscriptKirsten> Any other thoughts?
16:40:41  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: To answer your question, Justin, it'll never be too late.
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16:41:06  <TranscriptKirsten> It seems like evangelism is kind of necessary. Look at jquery, for example. I could scream.
16:41:47  <TranscriptKirsten> Evangelism sounds like it's a key issue. Coming from the private sector, and only recently involved in heavy-duty open source development, I never heard much chatter from certain sectors of the world. It was only once I became in the culture that I became aware of certain things.
16:42:26  <TranscriptKirsten> Certain communities just spoke louder. But few and far between. Leaders have to be positioned strategically at every level to really get the word out about what's needed. There's a bit of a cultural paradigm shift you need to take when going from quiet development to a real community.
16:42:31  <TranscriptKirsten> Evangelism seems like a key area that's lacking.
16:42:41  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: So you're talking not just in terms of accessibility, but generally?
16:43:07  <TranscriptKirsten> Jacob: Specifically in accessibility, because if you're not an expert, how do I make a suggestion? Are people going to shoot this down because I don't know how this works?
16:43:26  <TranscriptKirsten> It's a very awkward space. So specifically with accessibility, skilled leadership needs to be an important focus.
16:44:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: This cycles us back to the collaborative tools, which is participation of everyone in the OS community, whether it's a personal or general interest in accessibility. And perhaps part of our collaboration tools need to be like a welcome truck when you move into a new community.
16:44:30  <TranscriptKirsten> A welcome wagon.
16:45:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Pina: It takes us back to our discussion, and one of the things that is lacking in light of what we just discussed is that awareness. For those of us engaged, it's there, but outside it's not. We have to create that awareness, that marketing to get out there to a broader audience.
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16:46:04  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: We have to be out of here by 5. So what I'd like to do is we want to do some planning for tonight and tomorrow. In terms of capturing this Beyond the Code, we'll thread through the discussions tomorrow, and at the end of the day tomorrow I'd like to have some definite concrete plans for what we're going to do with the last 45 minutes.
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16:46:20  <TranscriptKirsten> We've actually accomplished quite an amazing amount in the few hours we've been here today, and we have a lot more to go through tomorrow.
16:46:50  <TranscriptKirsten> Dinner plans tonight: a number of suggestions. We don't have a formal organized dinner, but we are going to help making suggestions and hopefully people will get together and continue these discussions informally at the restaurant.
16:47:04  <TranscriptKirsten> Iris: The wiki started crashing on me when I put it up, the rest I forwarded to you.
16:47:29  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: One on the wiki is Subabba Foods, it's close by and there's a Google Map.
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16:47:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Another one suggested by Chris Tyler is the Mandarin east of here on Finch. Several options at Westin & Highway 7 - let's just post that entire thread on the wiki. Chris has a number of suggestions as well.
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16:48:28  <TranscriptKirsten> What we have in store for tomorrow is to begin with two presentations, one on mobile accessibility and Greg is going to talk about the NPII, and then we'll be breaking into two groups again and coming up with a roadmap for each of those areas.
16:48:44  <TranscriptKirsten> Does anyone have any concerns, problems, questions, requests for tomorrow? Anything we should change in the food, room, sound, equipment?
16:48:49  <TranscriptKirsten> - Coffee here longer.
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16:49:09  <TranscriptKirsten> We'll make sure there's water here tomorrow as well. Diet soda? And you wanted flip charts with stickies on the back?
16:49:50  <TranscriptKirsten> Batteries for the mics.
16:50:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Dawn: Is this Seneca equipment? I can get them to replace the batteries in the morning.
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16:50:23  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Okay, great, thanks everyone and we'll see you at 9:00 in the morning. Don't forget about dinner tomorrow night, details are up on the wiki.

Log for Thursday October 29, 2009

09:17:07  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: I think we'll get going as we have a fair number of things to accomplish today. Skype seems to be working... almost.
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09:17:26  <TranscriptKirsten> Over Skype: Sounds really great today.
09:17:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: And we can hear you well.
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09:18:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Just a reminder, we have a Twitter channel, a wiki where things are being recorded. I heard from a lot of people who've been following the IRC, the wiki, various other things, and they all send greetings and hope to be there the next time.
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09:18:29  <TranscriptKirsten> We have a number of new people that have arrived, and perhaps rather than going through an introduction of everyone, we'll introduce the new people and then sometime the new people will be introduced to others during the break.
09:18:53  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg Fields, Research in Motion. An hour away without traffic, with traffic quite a trip. Accessibility manager at RIM, trying to make Blackberries more accessible.
09:19:25  <TranscriptKirsten> Antonio working with ATRC in captioning. Interested in e-learning, glad to be here.
09:19:45  <clown> http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Draft+Agenda+Toronto
09:19:50  <clown> agenda ^
09:20:05  <TranscriptKirsten> If you recall, the agenda is to have two presentations on the two break-out sessions that we'll have for the majority of the day. These are the mobile accessibility, which includes pervasive computing, smart environments, location-based services.
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09:20:20  <TranscriptKirsten> That will be lead by Greg Fields and ? Silva. Greg will be presenting on the NPII.
09:20:46  <TranscriptKirsten> Then we'll be breaking out into the two rooms. NPII here, mobile sessions across the hall. A number of people have asked to attend both remotely so we're working that out.
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09:21:19  <TranscriptKirsten> I'll turn it over to Greg Fields and Jorge Silva.
09:21:28  <ctyler> notes on the Teaching Open Source Summit in freenode:#teachingopensource
09:21:45  <TranscriptKirsten> Jorge: So hi. I am Jorge Silva and I work at the ATRC on mobile accessibility research. What we have prepared for you today is summarized in the wiki, so we can pull up the wiki.
09:22:10  <TranscriptKirsten> It's number four, Mobile Accessibility.
09:22:24  <clown> Wiki page for Mobile A11y:  http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Mobile+Accessibility
09:22:39  <TranscriptKirsten> We're going to try to discuss what's the state of the art, what is the current status on mobile accessibility. Have a look at the wiki page. We have already started to populate that from last meeting in Vancouver, which I wasn't able to attend.
09:23:05  <TranscriptKirsten> There were some good ideas coming from there. If you go further down on the wiki page you can see a little bit more, Critical Gaps, the second part of the discussion.
09:23:35  <TranscriptKirsten> Complete our understanding of the current status, we'll move into Critical Gaps. Some information already posted by Greg Fields and Rich Schwerdtfeger.
09:23:58  <ctyler> correction: notes on the Teaching Open Source Summit in freenode:#teachingopensource-posse
09:24:04  <TranscriptKirsten> Last but not least, we'll look  at the resources needed, things not viable according to the gaps identified, and finally a roadmap.
09:24:34  <TranscriptKirsten> Yesterday there was a lot of discussion in the end-to-end session about this context in which we have to keep chasing, an uphill battle, always having to go uphill.
09:25:08  <TranscriptKirsten> There's a particular opportunity in the mobile space - we still have a few years, maybe less, to actually become the group to follow, to really do great things in accessibility, then others will have to catch up.
09:25:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Many manufacturers like RIM, I assume, have learned it's a new space in which things can be done differently. We're able to not make the same mistakes that we did on the desktop.
09:26:09  <TranscriptKirsten> There's some space for innovation. An example, from an accessibility point of view. This is kind of a personal pitch of some of the ATRC's work. I'm going to ask Jamon to install the tagin extension,.
09:26:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Providing inner context awareness for people with visual impairments, but in the process we realize -
09:26:55  <TranscriptKirsten> It's useful in all sorts of cultures and contexts. This is a Firefox plugin called Tagin, for Windows and Mac. Adds a sidebar to Firefox.
09:27:11  <TranscriptKirsten> It adds an icon on the menu bar -
09:27:15  <TranscriptKirsten> Some problems with Skype, one moment.
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09:27:49  <TranscriptKirsten> The icon is a little g. If you click on it, a sidebar comes up - it isn't working - oh, the wifi is off.
09:28:06  <TranscriptKirsten> It's now saying we're at Seneca, room 2168, 2nd floor. That links to a map.
09:28:37  <TranscriptKirsten> This is a very simple interface. It provides awareness indoors. If we end up making it really accessible for people with visual impairments it'll be really accessible for everyone.
09:28:54  <TranscriptKirsten> Nokia's disadvantage is trying to solve a graphical problem, not focusing on the context.
09:29:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Do people have questions about it and understand the significance?
09:29:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: In addition to Nokia there's a group in Paris working on this.
09:29:50  <TranscriptKirsten> Jorge: I know there's 10-15 different groups, I may have heard of them. Most work with triangulation and need to know the access points. Now you can install the extension, add tags.
09:30:05  <TranscriptKirsten> One of the limitations with graphical systems, you need to go and map the place, figure out where things are -
09:30:09  <TranscriptKirsten> Skype user: Hello?
09:30:34  <TranscriptKirsten> Jorge: You want to add something about the French group?
09:30:48  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: You mentioned Nokia, just wanted to make sure you were aware. I'll try to dredge up the name.
09:31:03  <TranscriptKirsten> Jorge: Are they wifi as well?
09:31:09  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Siggy?
09:31:15  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: This is tagging with stuff that's already in place.
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09:31:44  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: There was an effort in the transportation as well, and the challenge is, they can do it with Bluetooth, but the range is very short. If you do it with wifi, significant power requirement, most couldn't do it all the time without draining the battery.
09:32:00  <TranscriptKirsten> SigB is an interesting combination of the two. Bluetooth to SigB (sp?) dongle.
09:32:19  <TranscriptKirsten> Interesting hybrid approach installable in places like a building, airport, etc.
09:32:32  <TranscriptKirsten> Jorge: Thank you. There's quite a bit of projects on context-awareness.
09:33:04  <TranscriptKirsten> Just an example that has potential to solve a lot of accessibility, true inclusive design, push forward the boundaries for everyone.
09:33:08  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Exploiting social networks.
09:33:42  <TranscriptKirsten> Jorge: Right. If we go back to the wiki, there's work on alternative access, trying to figure out how to connect alternative input devices to mobile phones given they're more portable and ubiquitous than common laptop/desktop computers.
09:34:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Also work on accessibility features in different operating systems.
09:34:23  <TranscriptKirsten> Really interesting work on Symbian as well, maybe port to other platforms, make more usable and feature-rich.
09:34:44  <TranscriptKirsten> Project Possibility Applications, simple apps like barcode reader, color reader.
09:35:09  <TranscriptKirsten> Down to the second table, just starting to populate cross-platform development such as Phone Gap, allows development support for iPhone, Blackberry and Android.
09:35:23  <TranscriptKirsten> Fluid team has been doing primarily just now, so mabe you're better to describe that.
09:35:48  <TranscriptKirsten> Trying to transfer all the principles of Fluid into the mobile space, and you're working on Engage (?) which has lots of potential as well.
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09:35:57  <TranscriptKirsten> Wide availability of Python.
09:36:25  <TranscriptKirsten> They have product information on the Nokia tablet as well. You probably have more examples of development kits that are available.
09:36:50  <TranscriptKirsten> That's about it. So hopefully we'll be able to talk about a particular plan or set of plans that we can focus on in terms of mobile accessibility for the next few years. That's about it for my pitch.
09:37:18  <TranscriptKirsten> (?): That was interesting, but I'm curious, who do you see as your primary market, and what has been the reception so far?
09:37:23  <TranscriptKirsten> Jorge: Which of these things?
09:37:46  <TranscriptKirsten> (?): Primarily who is interested in picking this up and using these tools, are other companies interested in selling it and making it available.
09:38:44  <TranscriptKirsten> Jorge: I can't really talk about all of them, but there's a lot of interest and it's going to be significantly more. There's a big dynamic business context really aggressively pursuing opportunities in mobile development.
09:38:49  <TranscriptKirsten> The more accessible-
09:39:01  <TranscriptKirsten> (?): Are you doing this because you see a need, or are those who are needy asking to do this?
09:39:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Jorge: I wouldn't call people needy-
09:39:09  <TranscriptKirsten> (?): People who want this.
09:39:17  <TranscriptKirsten> Jorge: In some cases there will be people who want this-
09:39:44  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: I don't think there's a global response to this. Each of these have a specific market. Galleries and museums around the world are very interested in having a mobile experience that draws in their visitors.
09:40:06  <TranscriptKirsten> They're obligated to have it accessible. Links to partners of Engage, museums, vendors who wish to further develop and incorporate this.
09:40:36  <TranscriptKirsten> Tagin comes out of a large location-based project or number of projects looking at finding ways to help wayfinding, provide location-based services. Largely the user group working on it were a number of individuals who were blind,
09:40:46  <TranscriptKirsten> but also someone who is blind who has his own company looking at location-based services.
09:41:10  <TranscriptKirsten> The challenge yet unaddressed is the fact that GPS is other for outside, so what do we do with inside spaces? Looking at U of T campus, what happens going outside to inside.
09:41:15  <TranscriptKirsten> When you're trying to find a classroom or event.
09:41:31  <TranscriptKirsten> There was a prior project looking at indoor positioning.
09:41:58  <TranscriptKirsten> We've had discussions with a number of different vendors. When the indoor positioning system before Tagin was created, it was the accuracy, and Jamon and Yura are the primary developers of that.
09:42:26  <TranscriptKirsten> The accuracy was astounding given the type of technology, equal or better than things commercially available. U of T surprised it was in open source.
09:43:00  <TranscriptKirsten> (?): Sustainability of maintaining technology with these groups, formation of coalition. Sustainability point and how we can make something like this sustainable and how we can coalesce these groups.
09:43:32  <TranscriptKirsten> Jorge: That's a good point. In terms of ensuring the sustainability, some talk about it at the accessibility forum. Need to find solutions that are self-containable and solve accessibility needs but commercial needs, and can survive.
09:43:58  <TranscriptKirsten> I just wanted to add, we have these two rooms, for the people in the other room you'll be able to see how accurate it actually is. In some cases you can tell the difference between different regions of the same room.
09:44:07  <TranscriptKirsten> Any other question, comment?
09:44:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Sustainability is on the roadmap. Thank you Jorge.
09:44:51  <TranscriptKirsten> We'll turn it over to Greg to talk about NPII. This was discussed back in Vancouver, amazing job in terms of sustainability and actually operationalizing some of our discussions.
09:45:04  <TranscriptKirsten> NPII is mentioned at the FCC hearings in the US, amazing progress getting the word out, actually making it happen.
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09:46:26  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: We had talked before about the NPII, I'm just going to do a quick catch-up for people who weren't at the previous one.
09:46:45  <TranscriptKirsten> Use of the internet quickly becoming mandatory. Instead of looking at trying to provide accessibility to as many people as we can, we have to get everybody.
09:47:04  <TranscriptKirsten> Developed assistive technology, solutions, but nothing that works across all the platforms. People don't always get to choose the computer they deal with.
09:47:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Not just particular brands, but particular machines. How do we do this in a way to reach everybody in something we can afford as a society?
09:47:31  <TranscriptKirsten> And powerful enough to work with new technologies coming out?
09:47:45  <TranscriptKirsten> Can build access directly into the infrastructure, sit down at a machine and invoke access features.
09:48:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Both commercial and free public access features. People with funding or companies that one AT would be able to use those two, and invoke them all the same way.
09:48:19  <TranscriptKirsten> Cloud computing and broadband access and recent AT advances will give us a chance to do that.
09:48:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Anywhere, anyone, any device accessibility can be done.
09:48:40  <TranscriptKirsten> Stimulate new development, increase the market, open up dissemination to many more people.
09:48:48  <TranscriptKirsten> Make it easier for people to find out - people often aren't aware of what's available.
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09:49:08  <TranscriptKirsten> What we've been proposing is taking traction in the US and elsewhere - national public infrastructures.
09:49:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Combine it with rich commercial, private and open-source development. The NPII itself - some people are aware of Raising the Floor - but the NPII itself is only the basic structure for the delivery of
09:50:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Access Anywhere. The tools, resources, facilititate development. Good way to think of it is the NPII builds the road system and makes sure the components exist for vehicles, and then getting out of the game and letting people create vehicles.
09:50:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Commercial vehicles, non-profit vehicles, free transportation, etc.
09:50:37  <TranscriptKirsten> The NPII would consist of five parts. One, the delivery system. Free to be invoked on any computer.
09:50:53  <TranscriptKirsten> Not just things on servers, the servers and also the software built into operating systems.
09:51:18  <TranscriptKirsten> The second key part is a means for capturing, storing and using personal profiles. A way for a person to have not only their preferences, but permissions as to what they're allowed to have.
09:51:45  <TranscriptKirsten> They could invoke those things that fit them best on this particular system. If they have AT, those could be invoked. If there are special privileges for translation only for this individual, that would be there as well.
09:51:55  <TranscriptKirsten> When they moved around, they could get their privileges, their profile and what they want invoked.
09:52:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Very specific to the individual, but also use generic profile if you don't want to be identified everywhere you login.
09:52:32  <TranscriptKirsten> You could use a generic profile for someone who has your abilities, the same one millions of others are using as well, and use that as a profile for privacy.
09:52:49  <TranscriptKirsten> The third part is a rich set of tools for common services. With the iPhone we have a platform and a set of tools to allow people to develop very easily.
09:53:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Incredible outpouring of creativity, some of it more useful than others. We have expensive commercial, inexpensive commercial, free, and applications for things we never would have thought of.
09:53:29  <TranscriptKirsten> Part of the NPII concept is to do the same kind of thing, make it so we can have the same type of creativity and move the development down the pipe.
09:53:56  <TranscriptKirsten> A fellow at Yahoo wanted to get Yahoo Messenger on the iPhone. Not a programmer. Taught himself in four weeks. Then found out it was inaccessible, someone told him, he sat down and 2-4 days later it was accessible.
09:54:14  <TranscriptKirsten> That kind of ability to move it closer to the people who actually want to use it. Not just large AT companies and research grants.
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09:54:35  <TranscriptKirsten> There are things you think of that you can't write a research grant for because it's so simple nobody would fund it. Easier to fund wacky things, and that's not good.
09:54:49  <TranscriptKirsten> Fourth, an ongoing awareness campaign. Can never get funded from the government. It's wrapped in with other things.
09:55:07  <TranscriptKirsten> All free open-source software is vastly underused, simply because people don't know it exists, don't know to even go look for it.
09:55:46  <TranscriptKirsten> Fifth, we have a bunch of laws that make these things technically illegal. They don't mean to, they just do. Copyright exception for some kinds of things - literary works, but not web pages. Very specific to only apply to literary works. Need to look at some of these things.
09:56:25  <TranscriptKirsten> The NPII therefore wouldn't actually create access features, but it would create all the tools to make it a lot less expensive and add some commonality, get rid of some of the duplication of effort, allow companies to create things quicker, place for IT industry to interact.
09:56:48  <TranscriptKirsten> Allow us to reach out in a lot of different directions. Companies could work with common core and enable access to their products with a wide range of AT for different users.
09:57:17  <TranscriptKirsten> A lot of AT gets focused on the biggest groups of users, the easiest to get it. Focus on screenreaders for people who are blind and also pretty bright - screenreaders are not easy to use.
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09:57:35  <TranscriptKirsten> Not everybody who is blind can use a screenreader. Trying to use a screenreader to access a visual interface is pretty complicated.
09:57:48  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: Lighthouse published a 2/3 dropout of their screenreader training program. Just 1/3 make it.
09:57:57  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Oh, interesting.
09:58:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Is this US wide?
09:58:04  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: Yes.
09:58:18  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: Does that mean the screenreader's so good they don't need the training?
09:58:24  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: Heh, exactly.
09:58:46  <TranscriptKirsten> Every training center only trains on JAWS. Sometimes they'll offer WindowEyes, but very much disparage it.
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09:59:49  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: If anybody else has any more information about this, this is really important. We need really robust screenreaders with a variety of levels of complexity. Robust in the ability to get the information out of webpages, but have to have a variety of complex interfaces.
10:00:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Like searching. You can have searchboxes designed for detailed Boolean searches, but if that was the only way you could do it, nobody would be doing it.
10:00:14  <TranscriptKirsten> You have things that are less effective, but more reachable.
10:00:29  <TranscriptKirsten> This afternoon we'll be walking through some of the different modules, but also ways of simplifying the content.
10:01:21  <TranscriptKirsten> We have in the US and other countries stimulus initiatives to push broadband out. In the US they are recognizing that not only is this a geographic issue, but a lot of people are helping them to realize there's another dimension, you can get the fibre to the house but the people can't use it because of disabilities, etc.
10:01:40  <TranscriptKirsten> We are going to be turning in a proposal to the US and also collaborating with our Canadian colleagues, and I'm also going to be talking about this later.
10:02:03  <TranscriptKirsten> We can talk about doing this together at an international level, but the funding is always national. National public infrastructures - the global is to create a public tool.
10:02:26  <TranscriptKirsten> We will be turning a proposal in in the United States to build an NPII. We're going to build it in two phases. Phase 1 is going to look a lot like Web For All, done in Canada.
10:03:02  <TranscriptKirsten> We will be gathering up open source, free public AT, creating personal profiles to activate the right features in the right products for the right person, develop mechanism to figure out, evaluate those profiles, then get them out to all public access points.
10:03:32  <TranscriptKirsten> The key to phase 1 is two factors: one, with the stimulus packages, they want to see stuff happen very quick. Although we can build the NPII there's no way we can have it impacting users in a year or two. It's going to take longer.
10:04:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Two, we have a lot to learn. Building personal preference profiles is still hardening. Need to evaluate full range of abilities, not just the easy ones. We need to have things done that are very, very friendly. We have a lot of work to do on standardization.
10:04:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Two different standards groups working on two different areas, we need to bring those together. Huge privacy issues.
10:04:44  <TranscriptKirsten> Linkages to all the access points. During Phase 1, using an old model, only old because you've got it in Canada and it's been done in England as well.
10:05:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Phase 2 would then be the virtual delivery system, working with mainstream OS vendors to create key functions in operating systems.
10:05:32  <TranscriptKirsten> Right now, you end up using synthesizers on the network, latency issues. People have much better synthesizers on their computers but there's no way to get at it from the outside.
10:05:48  <TranscriptKirsten> Be able to get basic functions to be available at the local level so they can take advantage of them. Not just stuff on the internet.
10:06:16  <TranscriptKirsten> Rich iPhone/Android-like toolset and development kit. Have to create total virtual fallback systems, that assume there's nothing in front of you than a browser that can play audio.
10:06:23  <TranscriptKirsten> Everything has got to exist on the server.
10:06:41  <TranscriptKirsten> Have to work with security, huge security issue. Mass-disseminated software that will watch peoples' every keystroke - potential for abuse is astronomical.
10:07:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Millions of peoples' data could leak. Can't let a hole happen and patch it a few days later.
10:07:42  <TranscriptKirsten> What we will be doing today is going through this. We need to go through and identify, what are all the pieces we will be looking at. Everywhere from toolkits to security to personalization to virtual delivery system, etc.
10:08:01  <TranscriptKirsten> What are all the pieces that need to be done in each of the areas? Who would be the best people to be involved? Tens of millions of dollars here, not just five people involved.
10:08:15  <TranscriptKirsten> Going to be involving mainstream industry, go from zero to fifty engineers in nine months.
10:08:29  <TranscriptKirsten> Involving IT companies, well-versed people who can come to work on this.
10:08:45  <TranscriptKirsten> If we're doing this as a nation, who are we going to involve? What's it going to cost to actually do this?
10:08:52  <TranscriptKirsten> One of the things we can't do is not get there.
10:09:09  <TranscriptKirsten> What are the moving parts that have to be in place? Who do we have to be talking to? What's it going to take?
10:09:32  <TranscriptKirsten> Active session this afternoon. Now, a fourth part of it is to say we're doing one in the United States. What are the opportunities internationally?
10:10:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Because of our fiscal systems, one of the things we're very good at doing is working together within our areas. Tie together resources and activities. We want to hear about how can this effort be paralleled.
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10:10:40  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: We'd like to split into two groups. You can self-select, though I might intervene if we have unequal representation.
10:10:54  <TranscriptKirsten> We'll come back here for lunch and you'll have time after lunch to continue our road maps.
10:11:03  <TranscriptKirsten> The NPII group will be in this room, the mobile access group across the hall.
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10:11:16  <TranscriptKirsten> Going to figure out ways in which we can both scribe and have participation in both of them.
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10:34:04  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Okay, I'm going to start off by having anybody ask any questions about what we're doing before we dive into the more details aspects.
10:34:10  <TranscriptKirsten> Any questions, comments or input before we get started?
10:34:27  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: I have a contextual question. I'm wondering if you see this as something that's part of a larger deployment, or is it standalone?
10:35:10  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Raising the Floor is a broader effort to make sure we have a basic level of free public access. The NPII would be a separate but contained effort in that building an NPII is crucial to having anything like this in the future, but the infrastructure is still going to require the players, the open-source, the developers.
10:35:28  <TranscriptKirsten> If you're going to develop free public then somebody's got to be doing that. Some governments may want to fund one or another piece.
10:35:36  <TranscriptKirsten> Somebody might issue a grant for people who are deaf-blind.
10:35:46  <TranscriptKirsten> The goal is to have the NPII developed or long-term funded.
10:36:09  <TranscriptKirsten> I even think there may be some commercial funders to provide some of the free public. Offer a "lite" version or easy-to-use version, and then power users buy the more expensive one.
10:36:30  <TranscriptKirsten> The same kind of thing we've seen in other environments. The goal of RTF is to make sure everybody can use it.
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10:36:55  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: There's a move in the US where we're looking at committing to a broadband deployment nationwide, and it seems this would be an easy aspect of such a commitment, and highly beneficial in this context.
10:37:19  <TranscriptKirsten> You do have a need for a generic profile, that becomes everybody's problem, not disability-specific. It'd be nice for that to be handled appropriately in a generic way for everybody.
10:37:58  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Yes. The NPII is envisioned of being part of the national broadband rollout. It's meant to put the infrastructure in place, that's what the NPII would do. Software on top of hardware to allow access by everybody.
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10:38:31  <TranscriptKirsten> We still will need efforts made to ensure people have the individual things they need, but as a separate piece. The one thing we didn't want to do was say "The government should fund all our next-generation AT." Doing that centrally is not a good idea.
10:38:46  <TranscriptKirsten> Some things should happen centrally. You can build your own house, and driveway, but not the roadways.
10:39:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Louis: Do you envision this being run out of the Disabilities Office, or some other office?
10:39:20  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: We'll be talking about some development of that. We're advancing the concept and working with the administration trying to figure out what.
10:39:55  <TranscriptKirsten> Initially through an infrastructure program in the United States. This fits the stimulus in another perspective, preserving and creating jobs. Really important to do in accessibility, we're starting to lose talent we cannot afford to lose.
10:40:05  <TranscriptKirsten> Companies are still pulling in belts. Accessibility is not immune to belt-tightening.
10:40:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Louis: Are you working with the Open Source Association of America that was recently formed?
10:40:48  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: "We" is a hard word to say, involves so many people, but the NPII has not yet made contact with OSAA, but they are on the list.
10:41:19  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: That's a connection that I may make, I've spoken with Terry.
10:41:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Louis: Likewise.
10:41:45  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Online question: is this association with the 508 Refresh in the US and are there specific standards or guidelines you'll be applying?
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10:42:05  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: This has involved out of both Wikaa (sp?) and Titak (sp?) efforts.
10:42:47  <TranscriptKirsten> If there is no AT that will work with the API, it's like a touchdown you threw perfectly but there was no receiver. We went back and forth and got to the end and said "We will agree it's accessible if it works with users' AT, but we won't say which users and which AT."
10:43:14  <TranscriptKirsten> If we said it had to work with all the AT anybody had, you couldn't have HTML. But if you say it only works with the very best, then it can only be accessed by a very small handful of people.
10:43:25  <TranscriptKirsten> It needs to work with AT, and then go and make sure people have sufficient AT.
10:43:46  <TranscriptKirsten> Titech is taken out of WCAG and they're both being done at the same time, but now they're both trying to harmonize.
10:44:17  <TranscriptKirsten> This is set in the infrastructure, so NPII won't meet any of the TITAG (sp?) requirements, but we're building all the pieces from which you can build interfaces.
10:44:48  <TranscriptKirsten> We're going to make sure all the tools are there so people can build solutions. The standards we'll actually be using are more internet standards, personal privacy, those kinds of standards we will be using. But we won't be using any endpoint interface standards.
10:45:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Followup question: Will there be an attempt to harmonize across countries or globally?
10:45:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Absolutely. It started off as global public infrastructure, but there is no global. So now it's national public inclusive infrastructures, plural, that we can tie together.
10:45:42  <TranscriptKirsten> Talking to Canadian and European, Korean and Japanese and Australian counterparts as we're trying to build this.
10:46:04  <TranscriptKirsten> The particular proposal is to the US government, and there's a couple of others in the wings we're collaborating, but the one I'm talking to is to the US government for US stimulus funds.
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10:46:35  <TranscriptKirsten> We hope to be able to share and the US wouldn't be given the whole load. All the work to be done at ATRC, Web for All, these things already used in building this.
10:46:36  <TranscriptKirsten> Other questions?
10:46:44  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Are you going to go through this list in detail? I have specific questions.
10:46:53  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: I am going to go through this in detail. Any generic questions?
10:47:10  <TranscriptKirsten> You can actually go to this URL http://www.raisingthefloor.net/NPII/TaskList
10:47:46  <TranscriptKirsten> I will try to describe how I am expanding and collapsing it as we go along. Designed to be screenreader and keyboard operable, if you have any problems talk to me afterwards.
10:47:49  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: Blame me.
10:48:31  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Chris said it looks like it works well. This is one way of trying to deal with all of this complexity. I'm going to read the high-level topics, then burrow down into each one. What are we missing? Who might we tap to do this? What might it cost?
10:48:57  <TranscriptKirsten> The last one you might not be able to guess well at, but eventually the team will have to cost things. Mostly I want to know what's missing and what companies or individuals might be helpful.
10:49:06  <TranscriptKirsten> The eight areas are the delivery system, getting the stuff to people.
10:49:13  <TranscriptKirsten> The whole area of user profiles, wizards, standards, etc.
10:49:25  <TranscriptKirsten> So that you can use #2 to invoke from #1 that which you need.
10:49:32  <TranscriptKirsten> The third one is security and privacy mechanisms.
10:50:09  <TranscriptKirsten> The next one is mechanisms to provide user support on demand. This means ways for users to get help. We're building the infrastructure.
10:50:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Development tools, components and services - build only - like an iPhone or Android rich development tools.
10:50:30  <TranscriptKirsten> The sixth one is awareness, get information out on all the stuff that's available.
10:50:45  <TranscriptKirsten> Seventh is policy and legal, make sure that internationally we're doing something that's legal or help to inform the legal processes of something.
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10:51:15  <TranscriptKirsten> Want to look at preserving the author rights and property while still providing access. We can't say access trumps all and it doesn't matter if you make it accessible and everything gets given to anybody, authors lose their works.
10:51:31  <TranscriptKirsten> On the other hand we don't want to have "the most important thing is authors keep their works and if nobody gets access, too bad."
10:51:47  <TranscriptKirsten> If we sit only on one side of the problem we're not helping. A whole effort to figure out something that can address both.
10:52:15  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Earlier you mentioned the Android and iPhone environments. You mentioned that a fair amount, and I think it's easily confusing. I would like to suggest you lead with the kind of thing you want to create and then reference "like what has been done here".
10:52:30  <TranscriptKirsten> The first thing I think of is the phone, not the app store. A development tool suite "like what you find in".
10:52:55  <TranscriptKirsten> There are other examples that may be less well known. Many mobile carriers are developing their own "like the App Store".
10:53:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Some are in many ways richer than the Android development tool chain since they've been around a lot longer, are open source, and have a pluggable architecture. But they are less well known.
10:54:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: I've heard people say that once they understood it, it was an example of having something that's not only rich, but really easy to use. Can cause an incredible burst of creativity. But they made the exact same comment, when you start talking about the iPhone, they couldn't get themselves off the phone.
10:54:29  <TranscriptKirsten> Hard time understanding what this had to do with laptops. Need to have concrete examples of exactly how this would happen, and use it as an example at the very end. So thank you, I will asterisk that one.
10:54:49  <TranscriptKirsten> The last part is general operation and that's just the fact that doing something like this is not a project, it's launching an enterprise, so we need to look at that carefully.
10:54:56  <TranscriptKirsten> I threw in examples of common stuff at the end, so come visit that.
10:54:59  <TranscriptKirsten> I'm going to start at the top.
10:55:17  <TranscriptKirsten> A very low-resolution high-tech projector here...
10:56:08  <TranscriptKirsten> When you open up the delivery systems you'll see we have two threads. First, an install package or run from USB package, along the lines of Web For All.
10:56:09  <TranscriptKirsten> The second one is on demand, run without local drive install, we'll get to eventually. Not excluding that ability, but get into it in more detail. Anywhere anytime.
10:56:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Thread 1 is more like what we're doing to get out quickly within 18 months so people can go into a public access point
10:56:20  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: For either thread, how important is local printing?
10:56:54  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Local printing? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. People with disabilities, if they have to look something up, are going to have a hard time taking quick notes. Kind of a problem at the local resource center.
10:57:31  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Thread 1, we can give you something quickly and powerful that looks like thread 1 with a live USB stick that boots in Unix with GNOME, and all the accessibility there. But such a GNOME, which has all your local data, is running your own copy of Orca or theming, isn't going to have a printer driver for a printer that you have near you.
10:57:49  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: It might, with the new direct - well, it won't in 18 months - but with the direct wifi they're coming out with.
10:57:55  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: Local printer should advertise its availability.
10:58:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: But I might not have the driver. Many of these are not network printers. Having a live USB that can reach out to the internet with DHCP is fairly straightforward, but discovering local resources is maybe a bigger headache.
10:58:56  <TranscriptKirsten> That's part of why I was asking. If part of it is rapid early impact, this is rapid early impact with a couple of bumps and I'm trying to understand how big those bumps are.
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10:59:25  <TranscriptKirsten> Even with thread 2, if there's something in the cloud, there's the same problem. If the OS is running in the cloud, it won't know about local printers or resources you might want to connect to. A potential stumbling block I realized late last night.
10:59:41  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: One of the interesting things is where we talked about a need for generic text-to-speech. May have a need for generic printing.
11:00:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Right, generic Braille. Anything that you connect locally, even headmounts, there's some interesting challenges for driver discovery.
11:00:39  <TranscriptKirsten> If somebody's disability is severe enough to need headtracking, are they good candidates for public access?
11:01:24  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: We could have webcams, even sip and puff, to provide access, but we need to look at how much of that - I want to pick two parts up - Chris, I see your hand, if I see your hand I'll look at you and nod so you don't have to keep your hands up all day.
11:02:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Thread 1 has two parts to it. One of them is the installed package and the other is run from USB package. The install package, a la Web For All, access would put on their computers and they would have the access you're talking about.
11:02:36  <TranscriptKirsten> The USB is the interesting one. I don't think we're going to solve the issues, but as long as we capture them. Bookmark that if something's getting too deep. I don't want to burrow too deep on something up front and not get through the agenda.
11:03:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Sure. Last quick comment. I'll leave the question on the table. Is there a point at which trying to enable some abilities with the ability to walk up to public systems where they don't carry anything of their own.
11:03:35  <TranscriptKirsten> Sip and puff, mounted to a wheelchair. Just saying let's mount a $300 EPC there that interfaces to a public access sytem.
11:04:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: One of the things we need to remember, to take courses at my university, you need to use particular labs and particular computers, you can't put that software on your computer. But you could bring in your computer and have it act as an alternate keyboard and mouse, just not the same screen access.
11:04:39  <TranscriptKirsten> I don't know if we're going to play those scenarios out. But if all you're trying to do is provide access to the general open web, why kill ourselves trying to patch everything in the world if the person could carry it with them and it would be better?
11:05:26  <TranscriptKirsten> You want to be able to work with what people have. All the way through to the point where people can come up. In a lot of countries where we want to have impact, people aren't going to have anything, or it would get stolen or sold for food.
11:05:47  <TranscriptKirsten> We need to look at the full spectrum as best we can, not making any assumptions. There's not a religion that it has to be everyone is going to walk up with nothing in their hands.
11:06:15  <TranscriptKirsten> Anybody who has a severe disability will take umbrage saying "You just don't understand." We want to understand, but keeping in the back of our minds that people can't just have anything when they come up.
11:06:58  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: In addition to Peter's question of is somebody with a severe, severe disability, might need eye tracking and blow pipes, while they may not need public access they may need public accommodation.
11:07:15  <TranscriptKirsten> Specifically people who are paralyzed and living in a nursing home or hospital and get moved around do need these things to be available to them through a generic interface.
11:07:32  <TranscriptKirsten> Being able to go from the nursing home to the hospital for a few days, back to the nursing home, they need to be able to carry that.
11:07:57  <TranscriptKirsten> Even the most severe disabilities will benefit from this, as it's less stuff to have to cart around. Hospitals don't let you use some things, but do let you use others, and have their own sets of rules and regulations.
11:08:22  <TranscriptKirsten> If the protocols will all work, rather than having some proprietary doohickey attached to their wheelchair.
11:09:23  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: I hate to be a harpie but I keep coming back to this. It seems that what would really help is contextualization. At the moment let's limit it to the US perspective. What would come along with that is a set of assumptions, for instance, of the need to print locally or remotely is not disability-specific, most anybody in that broadband environment will
11:09:39  <TranscriptKirsten> need from time to town. The disability interest is to make sure that whatever that solving mechanism is, it comprehends there's also a need to emboss in Braille.
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11:10:23  <TranscriptKirsten> I think that's going to come up over and over again. Probably most people are going to have some kind of small portable wireless device, and there are occasions that's what they'll want to use, but other times the public station is exactly the thing to use whether you're a person with a disability or not.
11:10:58  <TranscriptKirsten> Maybe you want a full keyboard, or maybe you need your accessibility technology to do the input but you really want the huge monitor rather than the tiny one in your pocket, because pockets aren't going to get any bigger because people aren't going to get any bigger.
11:11:31  <TranscriptKirsten> Use the technology sometimes, your device other times. I would say there's also one missing piece, a big one: the world is rapidly including numerous sensors of various kind. Some will be deployed by nursing homes, hospitals, employers.
11:12:01  <TranscriptKirsten> We want some to collect data about us and do certain things. That's another assumption we can talk about. The bottleneck to be able to do multiple sensors and collect a lot of data.
11:12:15  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: I wrote down "sensors" and as we go through we'll need to figure out where to plug that in or if it's a whole other dimension.
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11:12:38  <TranscriptKirsten> I've opened up Thread 1. The pieces are: building installable packages, determine the capabilities, develop mapping techniques between Features/Functions and Personal Profile elements.
11:12:51  <TranscriptKirsten> If I've got all these packages and all these features, exactly how do I map all those preferences over?
11:13:04  <TranscriptKirsten> That's a big chunk of work. Developing auto-launch and set selected programs.
11:13:16  <TranscriptKirsten> If we try to launch a program and they all have different preference files, how do we do that?
11:13:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Build USB images
11:13:42  <TranscriptKirsten> Develop Distribution Network, get out to libraries, schools, public places.
11:13:45  <TranscriptKirsten> Peer support system for access points
11:14:10  <TranscriptKirsten> Deliver and train, and figure some way of updating the packages that are all out there besides hand-visiting them all again.
11:14:31  <TranscriptKirsten> Those are the main pieces. Does anybody else see anything on the big level? This is like Web for All. Is there some big piece of work we're not listing?
11:14:55  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: It may be fully encompassed. The language that you point out, packages, we want to ensure that includes the whole self-booting OS. The language doesn't make that clear.
11:15:42  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: USB package and also boot from USB. One of the things we talked about also on the USB is the ability to, instead of booting the whole computer, boot a virtual machine. Difficulty is you can still do a control-Tab and throw yourself out of whatever you're in.
11:15:52  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: You could block that out. In fact, you could just boot a virtual machine.
11:15:59  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Can't you alt-tab out of the machine?
11:16:05  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Depends on the configuration of the app you're running.
11:16:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: Whatever the answer today, that is lockable.
11:16:46  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: I'm going to note that and move on.
11:17:38  <TranscriptKirsten> Louis: Quick question. In terms of actually coordinating the development of these things among vendors and other providers, hitting both an existing field as well as an emerging or new one, created through an infrastructure development program.
11:17:57  <TranscriptKirsten> That level of interaction is going to be crucial. In terms of approaching existing vendors, technologies, and also-
11:18:19  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Can you make a note and re-raise your point at the end? Then you can put it in a context saying you seem to have addressed this part, but not the other part. I think we cover it, but not all of it.
11:18:53  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: I'm concerned there may be a hidden implication when you talk about launching a preferred program. Do you mean there would be a default word processor and a default browser but this particular user needs a different browser and so on?
11:19:11  <TranscriptKirsten> The implication might be you need it for a particular dataset, globally readable file formats. That may be a harder sell.
11:19:27  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: You're saying if there's generic technology, will it work with all the different tools?
11:19:58  <TranscriptKirsten> Hopefully in thread 2 there will be a common core, and people who are required to have their stuff accessible will need to make sure it works with common core technologies.
11:20:06  <TranscriptKirsten> In phase 1 we'll be reaching out to the internet and making sure we can reach internet content.
11:20:39  <TranscriptKirsten> Part of the personal preference profile is not just large print, but a particular program. Being able to stop not only generic, but very specific, so you're not left at the hands of what a generic decision makes about what is good for you.
11:20:49  <TranscriptKirsten> You can pick what everybody else thinks is less optimal, but you think is more optimal.
11:21:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: It's set up such that, similar to CSS, the local, more specific request is handled first, and if that's not possible it's graceful degradation until you get to the generic.
11:21:52  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Another thing to consider is success criteria. What level of coverage do you need? For example, I could have NVDA on my USB stick and there are many computers where that won't work. If I have a self-booting Linux there are plenty of computers that by configurations or manufacture refuse to boot from USB.
11:22:11  <TranscriptKirsten> We can create this national public infrastructure with a USB design, but by its nature it will not work on 100% of the machines I walk up to. Is that okay?
11:22:52  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Graceful degradation, or graceful failure. We always have to have a fallback of total virtual access, so the local machine is totally locked down and won't let you do anything at all. Then we can have solutions that push back down to the machine for more efficiency etc.
11:23:05  <TranscriptKirsten> So the reason for it is exactly what you said. There are really powerful techniques that just may not work in some instances.
11:23:50  <TranscriptKirsten> The other thing is that if you do something and it's stable and it's known, you can make it so public places don't thwart it. Right now, having 10,000 of doing everything, there's no way to even ask.
11:23:54  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: It becomes a requirement to push to the national infrastructure. We need some standards.
11:23:54  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Okay. This is open, so people can come back later and pick up on it.
11:24:23  <TranscriptKirsten> We need to select standalone products, commercial, free and open source. 40-50 packages and climbing, makes it difficult to do all of them. On the other hand, if you select, that's difficult too.
11:24:55  <TranscriptKirsten> Then we need to create the ability to set the platform and features to the user profile, actually reach into preference files and change them.
11:25:24  <TranscriptKirsten> Ability to select and store settings on the server side, and we talked about this where you want to have something which when a person comes up will automatically bring down the material and cache with the user profile, particularly all the detailed settings, so it comes set up.
11:26:18  <TranscriptKirsten> One of the questions is that this is a temporary solution. Do we want to create solutions in thread 1 that cross platforms, or are we just going to say PC? You could actually boot different operating systems on different hardware systems. What is in the public systems now?
11:26:40  <TranscriptKirsten> Hardware platforms, operating systems? That's a question we don't have the answer to. If we decide we're going to try to do thread 1 on three or four different operating systems then we've got a lot more work.
11:26:55  <TranscriptKirsten> May be able to run virtual machines pretty easily, back to a common denominator.
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11:27:50  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: The harpie on contextualization. If we go for the quick, it's more disability specific, but personalization is increasingly a general need that all kinds of people are going to want to do.
11:28:39  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Even the initial Web For All was intended - most of them are intended to create a personal profile for everyone, not just disabilities. Internet access at community centres. One of the demands was to keep personal bookmarks and so on that you don't carry with you, part of the preference profile as well.
11:29:04  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: New jobs come out of this, help people pick what they need. Servers to store the data.
11:29:23  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: In terms of where you carry your preferences, it started out with smart cards, looked at USB, remote servers, and Joseph who's just joined can say much more about this.
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11:29:49  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: We're talking about Web For All like implementation. Please look up and tell us everything we're missing!
11:30:47  <TranscriptKirsten> For developing the distribution network - school libraries and labs, public access points, community centres. There's a fair number of government programs that allow you to use their computers to do specific things, not public access points, but used for government services.
11:30:56  <TranscriptKirsten> General libraries. Any others we should be thinking of?
11:31:09  <TranscriptKirsten> For people who don't have computers, that they would turn to to get access.
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11:31:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Louis: Transit sites, buses, trains, planes, that are quasi-public.
11:31:52  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I would also suggest as a subset of community centres. Tech Act centres. Which is, after all, what NPII US is.
11:32:17  <TranscriptKirsten> I also wonder - Lighthouses for the blind. Any organization dedicated to serving disability groups with technology, this should be provided for them.
11:32:35  <TranscriptKirsten> Louis: When do you envision the important section of this being rolled out in any meaningful way?
11:33:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: 18 months. The goal would be in four or five months to get to initiation, and within 18 months for phase 1 wanting to be out there. We're rolling out all the broadband, we don't want to just roll out the broadband and roll out disability access a few years later.
11:33:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Trying to get disability access to hit the same timeline as broadband rollout.
11:33:36  <TranscriptKirsten> Those are excellent suggestions, thank you. Tech Act centres, public transit point.
11:34:00  <TranscriptKirsten> There's also Starbucks and things like that, but these are wifi points. People don't go there if they can't afford their own computer, just their own internet connection.
11:34:09  <TranscriptKirsten> USB approach would be used for public if people want to have something on their systems.
11:34:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Anything else on thread 1 delivery?
11:34:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Joseph, you see the link at the top of the page to look at this.
11:35:25  <TranscriptKirsten> Joseph: My head's still in the mobile area, but it occurs to me, I heard Jutta talking about smartcards and USB keys. It occurs to me that people might have cell phones or mobile devices where they have their preferences. Not sure if that's in this list.
11:35:32  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: We're talking about it a bit more in the next link, but cell phones is something people have suggested.
11:35:45  <TranscriptKirsten> Joseph: It occurs to me that a cell phone is much more powerful than a smart card.
11:35:54  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: How does the computer get information from the cell phone?
11:35:59  <TranscriptKirsten> Joseph: Bluetooth, wifi...
11:36:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: What's pre-installed on the computer such that it's looking for the conversation?
11:36:36  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: Every cell phone is uniquely identified. That's the beauty of it. I bet you can transmit it via Bluetooth to something.
11:36:51  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Using the ESN?
11:37:10  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Even if you allow for the lack of standardization of the USB plug, I don't think there's any standard for how a phone talks about USB.
11:37:27  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: I want to log the question and not work on the answer, since it appears that we all have a peripheral shot at it.
11:38:05  <TranscriptKirsten> We can keep talking about computers and things, and I want to see we're really interested in mobile technologies in other countries, and people who are blind and accessing in an audio fashion, the cell phones don't have a great big screen and who cares, they have everything else you need.
11:38:11  <TranscriptKirsten> These are very powerful things and I want to think about how this might fit into all this.
11:38:36  <TranscriptKirsten> Thread 2, delivery on demand. Develop virtual delivery/invocation system for Commercial AT.
11:38:50  <TranscriptKirsten> Develop architecture for server-side (network based) built-in extended usability access features
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11:39:29  <TranscriptKirsten> The reason I talk about extended usability is I really think that at some point, we want to paint this not as the disability access network, but if you have trouble using your computer, this is how to make it more usable for you.
11:39:38  <TranscriptKirsten> Extended usability features, more adjustable for you. Bigger fonts, lots of things.
11:40:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Even Web For All, intended just to be disability access, very quickly other people find the interface is not necessarily usable. Need to develop the architecture for doing this.
11:40:35  <TranscriptKirsten> The next one is even tougher, develop an architecture for hybrid server-platform solutions, part of code on each side. For efficiency, probably requires work on both ends.
11:40:51  <TranscriptKirsten> The hardest part is we'll have different amounts of support on each platform. Big area of exploration.
11:41:08  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: A real-world example of that, my local grocery store, you no longer need to wait in the checkout line.
11:41:51  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: To develop and refine an architecture that allows mirrored and offline versions of server-side services. They will not allow all their internal communications to go out to the cloud. Need to figure out how to make cloud clones and put inside.
11:42:13  <TranscriptKirsten> What if you can't afford to stay online and lose all of your accessibility as soon as you log off? The question is what can be done there to bring the cloud into your computer.
11:42:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Some clouds involve human beings and connections to others, and some you can't do this way. But others, what makes sense?
11:42:43  <TranscriptKirsten> Procuring cycles, where are the servers, who's paying for it?
11:43:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Work with OS and browser developers to provide platform side access components. Pile stuff into Javascript and ship it down, but you may want to access a text-to-speech server. Ability to do local text-to-speech within the browser, actually have Javascript in a browser able to talk without going back to the server, which is what they do now.
11:43:33  <TranscriptKirsten> Browser access to OS access features.
11:44:05  <TranscriptKirsten> Standardization of basic behaviour across platforms. All implementing similar kinds of zoom, but every time somebody sits down to a computer they have to know the OS and the flavour of the OS.
11:44:37  <TranscriptKirsten> Some work by the Japanese to look at standardizing activation. We need to be looking at what we should do to activate thing so that people don't sit down, even when we talk about AT, if something's not available try something else.
11:45:00  <TranscriptKirsten> It does the same thing except you have absolutely no idea how to make it do it. Those keystrokes may not be the standard way but in your preference profile you can reassign it.
11:45:13  <TranscriptKirsten> And then for automated system we have commercial AT and we have the network based features that we both need to think about updating.
11:45:52  <TranscriptKirsten> So I want to stop for a second and say, who is it in these areas - obviously in thread one, we want to talk to the Web For All team, but what other people for thread 1 (the install package run from USB), who are the key players that we should be talking to?
11:46:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Obviously the GNOME accessibility folks who were talking yesterday, that will connect you out to Ubuntu or Fedora or Solaris or whatever distro you want to put that on.
11:46:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Some of the components, I don't know if you want to wait for those bullets.
11:46:43  <TranscriptKirsten> The other ones I would talk to for the packages, David Baines in England. And his two companions.
11:47:18  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Anyone else? The work David's done over there, and Jutta. Also IDEAL, they came out of the States.
11:47:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Preference profiles, that's the next item on the agenda. Anybody else doing - those are the three people I know doing - how about who to talk to about virtual machines opening up inside?
11:48:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: The obvious one to go for is Virtual Box, which is Sun. The ability to build the source code and make your changes there, whether Sun is formally involved or not, that's going to be an obvious one.
11:48:47  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: In Linux, Xim or KBM-QEMU. Redhat is the big one there.
11:49:19  <TranscriptKirsten> Jamon: Amazon's service - VNC service running, you don't need a USB stick to connect, you've always got access to that machine.
11:49:31  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Sometimes we say it's paid so you can't use that, but maybe we can use that exact same model.
11:49:42  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: A big commercial vendor of course is VMware.
11:49:55  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Anything else on Thread 1? Joseph, do you know anyone else doing Web For All like stuff?
11:50:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Joseph: Nobody's called me up. The only people have called me up to say "Can we have Web for All?" and I say download it, go ahead. Shortly after we released it in 2006, around that time, I think there's a company that put on a USB memory stick all your applications, all your documents and have everything set up exactly the way you wanted it, and when you
11:51:17  <TranscriptKirsten> plugged it in it would show up in the taskbar as a live disk. Basically a copy of your desktop. Might have been Active Desktop.
11:52:04  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: See the list? Joseph, if somebody was going to assign that to you, what do you think it would cost?
11:52:10  <TranscriptKirsten> Joseph: *snort* Ten million dollars!
11:52:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: You've done it, the rest of us can guess. We're doing something a little different, so you've got to factor that in.
11:52:57  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: In addition to the cost for what is currently off the shelf is the cost of improving what's off the shelf between now and 18 months. Just to make sure you don't lose that.
11:53:07  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: One of the things Web For All just did, they took their old system and did an updated refresh on it. Sort of a dry run. We're talking about doing more than they were doing.
11:53:21  <TranscriptKirsten> What I'm mostly looking for is what costs that you didn't think was going to cost.
11:53:45  <TranscriptKirsten> My favourite quote, you can always identify the one who won the bid is usually the one who did a math mistake. They forgot to include something and the number was accidentally lower than it should be.
11:53:54  <TranscriptKirsten> You want to make sure that oversight doesn't change the number.
11:54:04  <TranscriptKirsten> Thread 2, any thoughts on particular people that should be involved?
11:54:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: Maybe Mike Cowell, Matt Campbell?
11:54:38  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Thread 2, you specifically say Commercial AT? Does the virtual stuff have to be commercial? What about open-source AT?
11:54:52  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: If you don't pay for it, it's extended usability, it's free.
11:54:54  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Got it, I remember now.
11:55:37  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: We did that because, Apple has a screenreader built into their OS. Is that AT or a built-in accessibility feature? To not get into wars. Zoom is universal design, part of your browser, someone else will say that's AT.
11:55:45  <TranscriptKirsten> If you pay for it, it's commercial AT. If not, it's universal design of the infrastructure.
11:56:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I wonder again, but to have the second phrase be parallel.
11:56:17  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: We did this one because it broke into two parts. The first one had to do with server side, the second with hybrid.
11:57:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: There's so much here that is trying to be accomplished by NPII. Having text that helps people rapidly understand and map this is useful. I would suggest that we have something parallel to the first sub-bullet. You can have virtual delivery ... essentially using the same delivery mechanisms as the first bullet, but it's not Windows with Jaws, it's Mac
11:57:27  <TranscriptKirsten> with Voiceover, whatever. But we're basically using the same technology, something like VNC technology that we know well.
11:57:44  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Make open source obviously identifiable, trying to use parallel language.
11:58:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: And also specifically the virtual delivery is the same. Once we build a mechanism for virtual delivery of desktops, it's the same. Using the same language helps people understand.
11:59:00  <TranscriptKirsten> I would also think, but I'll let Rich speak for it, Sun... I'm guessing IBM's work in cloud computing would make IBM a candidate, Amazon already mentioned for their cloud work.
11:59:08  <TranscriptKirsten> Google is rumoured to be doing cloud stuff. Obviously Microsoft with Azure.
11:59:24  <TranscriptKirsten> Rich: I'm just nodding. It's true.
11:59:29  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Any comments at this point?
11:59:35  <TranscriptKirsten> Rich: It's good, IBM has an interest.
11:59:53  <korn> Rich: I heard your head rattling around... that's why I mentioned you and IBM... :-)
12:00:01  <TranscriptKirsten> Anybody on the phone who wants to talk, just make a noise and we'll call on you.
12:00:40  <TranscriptKirsten> Louis: A point we should keep in mind is this is an easy topic for commercial vendors to exploit, say with advertisements. The last thing we want is someone to be confronted with ads at every conscious moment.
12:00:50  <TranscriptKirsten> Isolate it from that kind of possibility.
12:01:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Somebody said why should we worry about paying for this when you can put ads on it and it'll be free? My concern is it's too easy with all the personal profiles to say "I'm going to advertise all my financial services to everybody who asks for a very simple interface with large print, that's who I'm going to go after."
12:01:47  <TranscriptKirsten> It's a very tricky thing to figure out how to apply this. Do it in such a way that nobody but the user knows what the user is using.
12:02:06  <TranscriptKirsten> We also talked about the fact that any of this stuff on servers is going to have to be on bonded servers, all this stuff is going to have access to information.
12:02:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: These are some of the issues we had to deal with Web For All. Canada is sort of a leader in privacy, and Canada is always advocating for greater privacy.
12:03:10  <TranscriptKirsten> We did the pre-identity, pre-preference types of marketing, you could call it. Bell donated all their smartcards, as did RBC for another program. Neither Bell nor RBC would have any knowledge of the identity, but it gave us the necessary infrastructure and had their logo on it.
12:03:16  <TranscriptKirsten> That type of corporate giving or participation.
12:03:49  <TranscriptKirsten> An evaluation was done of Web For All and we'd be happy to share that. An analysis of privacy that was done through... this must be a misprint. Large evaluation of privacy.
12:04:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: I would love to get the Web For All evaluation, if you could send it to me.
12:04:36  <TranscriptKirsten> Next, user profiles.
12:04:43  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Actually, can I interrupt-
12:05:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: A quick comment about user profiles, I'm almost to the point of saying you don't need this section. Again, this is just a common general problem for everybody, going to get solved in the broader deployment in general.
12:05:01  <TranscriptKirsten> What's particular about accessibility concerns. We don't want to solve it just for accessibility.
12:05:02  <TranscriptKirsten> A better argument about commercials and so forth, as it's getting better at targeting.
12:06:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: I'm worried that even if they don't know who they are, if they know what you are, they can reach out to you with an ad. We don't want them to be able to fish.
12:06:01  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: But this is a global problem, not disability specific.
12:07:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: I just want to read through this quickly. First thing we talked about: 4P, Personal Preference, Permission, Payment profile.
12:07:01  <TranscriptKirsten> Preference Profile, Permission Profile for AT, special content, public-paid services available to qualified people or paid subscribers. Payment mechanism
12:08:00  <TranscriptKirsten> for auto-micropayment of personally paid access services
12:08:01  <TranscriptKirsten> Use help for 20 seconds, cost a nickel. Need a mini-charge or credit system.
12:09:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Whole bunch of accessibility features that someday we can do automatically, half we can do now, the other half we just can't do.
12:09:01  <TranscriptKirsten> Suppose you do OCR on something, it works, great. If it doesn't, upgrade it, they charge per page and you get the supercomputer, that doesn't work, you can upgrade to have a human look at it.
12:10:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Then, some way of storing all the user settings for apps and services. Some standard or profile that combines all the different standards. Don't want to make up a standard. Different groups working on different aspects.
12:10:01  <TranscriptKirsten> Don't want someone to log in four times to get access. One-stop identification of preferences.
12:10:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Second thing, to develop a cross-disability preference/setting wizard. Physical, visual, hearing, reading, cognitive.
12:11:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Integrate those into one tool so somebody can sit down without being identified as "something". Quickly walks you through some questions and responses and takes you into whatever is relevant.
12:11:01  <TranscriptKirsten> Has to work for people who don't think they have any disabilities, like an older person. But it is nice to have larger print, simpler layout.
12:11:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Rich, are you on the call still?
12:11:03  <TranscriptKirsten> I had developer tool portion, wasn't sure if I picked that up off of your notes, and could you explain that one?
12:12:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Rich: We need open source developer tools and the technology provided to the developer. Challenge today: if you want AT, you have to pay through the nose for it. Not only frustrating for end users, but also for developers. When you think about overall this national infrastructure, we need profiles for developers to create new content, and
12:12:01  <TranscriptKirsten> also be sure they can use these services before they go out in the infrastructure. Does that make sense?
12:13:00  <TranscriptKirsten> For example, let's say I am going to create a new web application. The first thing is where do I get a tool I can integrate during the development process? I'm a new developer, where do I get a test tool to find out what the user experience is?
12:14:01  <TranscriptKirsten> That's a real big problem for corporations today. Frustrating. Companies aren't provisioned for having the other ATs available. Developer gains access to these tools, how do I get an AT I can test with my application on the Blackberry?
12:14:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: So what you'd like to do is get an idea for the dimensions peoples' abilities, what might come out of this, but a set of generic AT you can run against your product to see how it will perform?
12:14:03  <TranscriptKirsten> Rich: Even including symlinks, like at IBM, visualizing how long it takes to complete a task. It'd be nice to have these available.
12:15:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I would suggest we have links into Bullet 5 from here and from 1. From here it would be to say that the output of the settings wizard should be consumable by the developer tool. Particular user, needs fonts this way and that.
12:16:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Likewise, under delivery systems, all the free public AT and potentially virtual AT connected into developer tools. Quickly use one of free public built-in accessibility features when you are running your program even in the debugger.
12:16:01  <TranscriptKirsten> Secondly, if there's a way in our virtualized environment to upload tool to our virtualized desktop. We have something like this in NetBeans, deploy from NetBeans to a phone and see it running on a phone.
12:16:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Upload your app directly to an Amazon cloud, IBM cloud, Windows is doing this for Azure cloud. Run back through the cloud with commercial AT in the cloud.
12:17:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: That tells me NetBeans is one to talk about. We are now going to take a break for lunch for one hour.
12:17:01  <TranscriptKirsten> 45-minute break because I've run over.
13:02:48  <TranscriptKirsten> check one
13:02:52  <TranscriptKirsten> Check check one two one two is this thing on?
13:02:56  <TranscriptKirsten> *taps mic*
13:04:54  <jamon> yep, that works fine
13:08:41  <TranscriptKirsten> Is there anyone reading this ONLY through IRC?
13:08:53  <jamon> i am :)
13:08:56  <TranscriptKirsten> If so, when did the transcript stop during the last session?
13:09:02  <TranscriptKirsten> You are not! You're right over there! ;)
13:09:07  <jamon> 12:04pm
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13:20:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Okay, so. Who do we need to talk to, which standards should we be looking at, and what have we forgotten?
13:20:20  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: And where are the microphones? Ah yes.
13:21:06  <TranscriptKirsten> So, for 4P, one of the folks you should look at it the Liberty Alliance. Come up with open-source approach for authentication, single sign-on, so they're a candidate for you.
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13:21:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Okay, excellent. Any particular standard?
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13:21:34  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I think they created their own, I don't know the technical details. Sun was a partner, IBM was a partner, Oracle may have been, this was 4-5 years ago.
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13:21:53  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: We have 24751, an ISO standard, but that'll only cover the preference stuff, not permissions or payment.
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13:22:33  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: It was intended to be part of a larger standard in both IMS and ISO, which covered the authentication, payment and those sorts of things.
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13:23:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Within IMS it was LIP, Learner Information Profile, and then within ISO I will find the exact number, I've forgotten, but there is an equivalent in Working Group 3. I'll get the ISO number.
13:23:26  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: One other thought for the developing a cross disability preference setting wizard. A thought of first doing some mockups.
13:23:53  <TranscriptKirsten> It may not work to have a cross-platform settings wizard. The Mac setting wizard should naturally be part of the Mac experience, the Windows naturally part of the Windows one. Having a different interface might not work well.
13:24:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Get feedback from industry, say you're welcome to use this mockup. Can develop an open-source one that goes into GNOME, but then what you develop and user-test is immediately readily usable by that community.
13:24:53  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: ORiginal thought was to do something online to generate generic profile. But to go beyond generic profiles to specific features, eg., platform, it should probably be done within the platform so the choices actually work on that platform.
13:25:31  <TranscriptKirsten> You raised wizard, I'm going to come back to user profiles, but while we're on wizards. Who is interested? I've got Christoph Gaios, who used to be part of Seattle, he's very interested.
13:25:43  <TranscriptKirsten> And King at IBM has already told me he's interested. Matt King.
13:26:01  <TranscriptKirsten> And ATRC, obviously.
13:26:09  <TranscriptKirsten> Who else do you know who's done wizards, who'd be interested?
13:26:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I know the GNOME community is - Will Walker should have the names. Unless, Janina, you know those names?
13:26:27  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: Sorry, I was distracted.
13:26:34  <TranscriptKirsten> Offhand, no.
13:26:46  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I know it's being looked at and discussed, but I'm not sure of the specific individuals.
13:27:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: We have about 12-13 contexts in which we've created these wizards, and we can link you to the other groups.
13:27:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: ATRC and its extended family.
13:27:19  <TranscriptKirsten> Anybody else know of anybody else?
13:27:49  <TranscriptKirsten> We want to set these things up so they work not only for people on their own, but for professionals in evaluation so you can get better fonts.
13:28:05  <TranscriptKirsten> User profiles, again, we've got the IMS group, we've got ATRC and family. Anyone else?
13:28:22  <TranscriptKirsten> WGBH.
13:28:34  <TranscriptKirsten> Pete: Somebody went to the IMC meetings from Korea.
13:28:39  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Could you track that down and send it to me? Thanks.
13:28:53  <TranscriptKirsten> Joseph: Do you have ISO on your list?
13:29:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: ISO standard... anybody in particular? No?
13:29:20  <TranscriptKirsten> We are also looking for people to spearhead this activity and we need to identify a US cohort for focus on this.
13:29:49  <TranscriptKirsten> We're looking at who are all the people we should talk to and coordinate with, who would be a good person to spearhead this in the United States.
13:29:57  <TranscriptKirsten> Anything else on user profiles and wizards?
13:30:08  <TranscriptKirsten> Let's go on to security and privacy.
13:30:29  <TranscriptKirsten> Rich: Greg, I think we've got some work at Yumato that may apply as well. Chienko's team is doing work on wizards.
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13:30:48  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: We've been trying to design a wizard authoring environment to change language and features according to context.
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13:31:03  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: We have that everywhere else except the wizard. It never occurred to me.
13:31:24  <TranscriptKirsten> I know that Chinese and Japanese characters, when you think of stroke width and character size, it has a different meaning for what's legible.
13:31:49  <TranscriptKirsten> Security and privacy, people can think about that for a second.
13:32:18  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Again, Liberty Alliance is appropriate. Another thing to think about is how much of this can you do without the user carrying a device that does computation to prove they are who they are?
13:32:44  <TranscriptKirsten> When you think about ATM machines, what you have and what you know is critical for authentication. I have a safeword platinum card to set up a VPN. ANother way this is done is with a Java chip card.
13:33:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Because the processor is something I carry, it means there's no possibility of compromising, and it means I'm not sharing my PIN with anyone else, because I enter my pin on this and it gives me a number and that number is what goes out.
13:33:31  <TranscriptKirsten> It's not clear to me that we can get a sufficient level of security and privacy entering some number on a public terminal that might have a key snooper installed.
13:33:44  <TranscriptKirsten> Might run into some nasty limits of what we can do unless the user can carry some authentication CPU with them.
13:34:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: All of these systems having the key is... the key. If you lose your house key, the key is everywhere.
13:34:24  <TranscriptKirsten> Having some sophisticated code you enter doesn't work for people with cognitive disabilities, because they can't remember the code and can't login.
13:34:50  <TranscriptKirsten> Then you get into biometrics. Each time they login they log in with a different credential, but now that requires something sophisticated enough to do biometrics.
13:35:01  <TranscriptKirsten> Not fifty cents or a quarter or dime. More in the fifty, seventy-five dollar range.
13:35:09  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: You're likely to use it for a long time.
13:35:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Unless you lose it or something.
13:35:20  <TranscriptKirsten> Rich: Well, that wouldn't help everybody.
13:35:48  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: No, it doesn't. But what you're talking about is a variety of means, so people who can remember codes use a code, people who can't use something different. No reason to insist everybody carry something around.
13:36:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Again, I don't want to solve the problem, I want to know what are the characteristics of the problem we want to address.
13:36:07  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: What are the disability-specific aspects of it?
13:36:37  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: One of the ways you look at this, separate from chip card readers, there are versions of that... requiring all public computers to have a reader, whether that's a proximity card or Bluetooth to your phone.
13:37:08  <TranscriptKirsten> If we are prepared to have users carry what may be an inexpensive device, but again with a processor on the device, then you can potentially have the biometric on the computer, either you download a program - all of a sudden suggesting Java again -
13:37:38  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: We're now trying to solve the problem again. In Canada they ended up with different places using different readers. That's why we turned to USB, it's the only thing everybody has.
13:38:11  <TranscriptKirsten> If in solving this, we are a catalyst for something the industry wants to solve anyway. Figuring out what the industry wants and then figuring out how to do what you want in a way that rides on their coattails.
13:38:45  <TranscriptKirsten> Stuff coming from the mainstream, but really slowly. The privacy issues climb up really quick. But if we can figure out how to do this to meet our needs, on the front-end of what industry wants, we may actually be able to bring something in.
13:39:01  <TranscriptKirsten> Helps us for sustainability. One thing to get it in, another to get it broken ten minutes later.
13:39:26  <TranscriptKirsten> I have Liberty Alliance. Who around security and privacy, and who if you said "We need to hire somebody to look after this part?"
13:39:45  <TranscriptKirsten> Commercially trustable system for anonymous permissions, and everything we create has to be reviewed for malware and security holes.
13:40:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Like the process with Apache and Firefox and the App Store. Somebody has to look at everything being distributed to make sure nobody's being nasty, but even more so, people aren't creating a big vulnerability they're not aware of.
13:40:37  <TranscriptKirsten> Who would you talk to for either the trust, anonymous identification issues, or the security review?
13:40:43  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Anyone who's part of Liberty Alliance.
13:40:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: That's interesting. The names that come to mind were all names part of Liberty Alliance.
13:41:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: If you're looking to find a company to pay to do this work.
13:41:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: And if your source is open you may get a lot of reviewers, without paying.
13:41:48  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Well, you can, but it's hard to get somebody on Friday night for somebody who wants something released by next Wednesday. On-demand is tricky.
13:41:54  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: They won't necessarily catch it in the short term.
13:42:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Louis: On home page of Liberty Alliance, "Featured Event!" World Health & Energy Conference in November.
13:42:38  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: US Department of Defense is also a member.
13:42:54  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: What do they know about security? I was thinking we should get the Blackhat...
13:43:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: NSA is conspiciously absent.
13:43:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: No, they're conspicuously invisible. Next, on-demand support.
13:43:44  <TranscriptKirsten> The ability for people to call up and get help. One of the mechanisms is on-demand commercial support, and there's a number of people doing that.
13:44:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Another is crowd-sourced peer-based support, where you have people calling for help and there are a cadre of volunteers. I think Firefox does that, a help line and you log in to it and you get anyone who's logged on right now.
13:44:32  <TranscriptKirsten> And then automated support mechanisms, you run into those all that often, try to get help and you end up talking to a robot. Sometimes they're good and sometimes they're not.
13:44:45  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Why is support not something you have funding to operate?
13:45:10  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: There's nothing we're building we're providing support for if somebody else virtualizes their stuff to put it into the network. We can't support it, we don't even know what it is.
13:45:20  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: What about the built-in, free, accessibility features?
13:45:26  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: The NPII doesn't build those either.
13:45:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: That seems broken.
13:46:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Think of it as a utility company. You want to have them do those things nobody else can do, but you want them to stop short selling you telephones. What if they just sell you the line up to the house, and the phones are made by a rich array of companies rather than black bakelite phone?
13:46:27  <TranscriptKirsten> The NPII is designed to provide the roads and components for phones, but not actual phones.
13:47:01  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: So the NPII is funding operation of delivery systems, operation of user profiles. Who do I call when there's a pothole in my road and it needs repair, who do I call when the traffic light is broken, when my phone stops working? Is that not support?
13:47:33  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: That would be support for our infrastructure, yes. One of the things we need to know is users may need help with our parts, NPII parts. So we need to operate user support of -
13:47:41  <TranscriptKirsten> You think our user system or preference system will have bugs in it?!?
13:48:08  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I'm just presuming our user evaluation and testing of the interface to the preferences will be not so perfect that it's completely and perfectly intuitive for every user including those with cognitive disabilities.
13:48:15  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Well, I think you're overly pessimistic.
13:48:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Support for something that is an end-user, free, public accessibility feature in some fashion. Let's say our delivery system, phase 1, is a self-booting USB card that has an OS and AT in it. It's fabulous, we're giving something for free that's incredibly powerful.
13:49:13  <TranscriptKirsten> But they might still need support. How does that happen? If it's outside the scope of NPII, is it inside the scope of national broadband plan?
13:49:46  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Might be outside long-term NPII, phase 1 is delivering solutions. Also need to worry about support for phase 1 solutions. Peer support amongst organization, but if only support for users in libraries is other librarians, then we have abandoned things.
13:49:56  <TranscriptKirsten> We obviously need to support everything we distribute.
13:50:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: One last thought on the support piece. You've been asking who are the names. So the obvious names to support any live USB OS is whoever provides that OS or supports that OS, so Ubuntu for Ubuntu, Sun for OpenSolaris.
13:50:49  <TranscriptKirsten> I would see if any of the disability organizations would be interested in supporting organization funds for open
13:51:17  <TranscriptKirsten> Rich: I approached one of the advocacy groups about this at TechShare. That's something we'll need to address. If we don't include something in the proposal it won't be considered as a gap even if NPII doesn't deliver it.
13:52:08  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: There's another piece, we need a way to route trouble calls. When people sit down to a computer and their AT doesn't work, they're not going to have any idea. And the better we are, the more transparent it is, they won't have any idea where which feature came from. We have a real problem that is endemic in the industry when you have a component system.
13:52:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Everybody points to everyone else.
13:52:58  <TranscriptKirsten> Rich: I'm reluctant to say who the organization is, because they haven't made a decision, but they had 75% of their members were unemployed, and they agreed that a lot of people could work out of their houses, a tremendous benefit to open source technology in that they can provide first and second level support, gets them a source of income.
13:53:19  <TranscriptKirsten> I'd like to address - although this is being proposed for the US, we have to plan how this would roll out internationally. The world is very flat today.
13:54:15  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: One of the things that can also happen is international support, on-demand, 24 hours almost demands that you go around the globe. There's a lot of bleary-eyed people sitting in the middle of the night trying to answer intelligent questions. A lot of international implications around this whole thing. And you also have issues of explaining how to fix something in a local context, too. I...
13:54:16  <TranscriptKirsten> ...don't know how we do that.
13:54:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: I think we're missing a whole level of support, for the people who want to put it behind a firewall, not the user stuff, but the IT professional at work pulling his hair out saying how do I get this installed?
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13:55:27  <TranscriptKirsten> People are going to be installing our pieces. Those IT professionals are going to need to ask how do these pieces go together? Support doesn't just mean a user saying how do I read the document, but the guys in the server room saying how do I make this thing work.
13:56:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Two things, that was excellent. One is support for the IT guy with the cloud outside the firewall. The other is we need to create this so it can be installed behind firewalls. There is no way people are going to allow cloud interface features to be used behind firewalls, with all the input going out through the firewall and back again, since it basically exposes everything.
13:56:36  <TranscriptKirsten> Installing mirror versions behind firewalls.
13:56:57  <TranscriptKirsten> Rich: How do you integrate the services, charging model... We should look into that and see if IBM can help. There's a lot of things to take into consideration.
13:57:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: Don't think in terms of current paradigms.
13:57:36  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Hard not to think about - trying to Wayne Gretzky this and skate to where the puck is going to be. Figure out what we're trying to make accessible in the future, use what's available in the future to solve our problems.
13:57:49  <TranscriptKirsten> If we were all really good at that we could spend half of our time making a gazillion dollars and the other half doing this.
13:58:05  <TranscriptKirsten> There are people that spend most of their time trying to guess where the future's going.
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13:58:24  <TranscriptKirsten> Most of what we're talking about is specialized application of technology and ideas that are mainstream. If we can find people in the mainstream.
13:58:27  <TranscriptKirsten> IBM Services.
13:58:30  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Disability groups.
13:58:37  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Anybody we haven't talked about?
13:58:47  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: For anything open-source, there are user groups.
13:58:53  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: AT groups, open source...
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13:59:34  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I also wonder, at the ATRC... We've seen in many universities the development of disability service organizations. Would any of the disability student services be interested in broadening outside students? They can support anything within the university that's cloud based.
13:59:47  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Talking about people who would be delivering the service. I'm talking about people to build the architecture.
13:59:57  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Part of what we might build is peer support networks.
14:00:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Crowd-sourced, peer-based.
14:00:49  <TranscriptKirsten> Louis: One thing I'm encountering is ability to provide education to millions of students and retrain adults. Exploit distance learning technologies. This would be relevant, it's just a matter of degree and technology.
14:00:55  <TranscriptKirsten> The delivery mechanisms should be more or less the same.
14:01:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: We have lots of generic ideas. Two things specific, the crowd source, the peer based, anybody who knows people who are doing that.
14:01:32  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: The Ace Centre in the UK.
14:02:10  <TranscriptKirsten> Doing remote assessment of disability needs, ship a laptop, run software in tandem, remote control of the machine, interview the user. A human wizard.
14:02:15  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: A contact there?
14:02:19  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Send me mail.
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14:02:41  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Any of these generic things, if we're going to build this, if you know somebody good to talk to.
14:02:45  <TranscriptKirsten> Anything else on on-demand support?
14:02:57  <TranscriptKirsten> Development tools.
14:03:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Four areas: development environment, common components, support system for developers, standards development.
14:03:49  <TranscriptKirsten> Under standards development, identify gaps in standards, create standards teams. We can't actually create standards but we can participate in them and encourage them.
14:04:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Some little bit of standards ourselves, internal interoperable modules, have to define borders of the modules.
14:04:23  <TranscriptKirsten> Don't want to compete with national and external standards when we could go out and participate.
14:04:38  <TranscriptKirsten> Not going to talk more about standards at this point unless people have specific ones I didn't capture here.
14:04:52  <TranscriptKirsten> Service standards, preference & permission, on-demand IT integration.
14:05:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Rich: Delivery context ontology? Something to describe vocabulary for the context a device is operating in.
14:05:41  <TranscriptKirsten> GPS capability, situational access. We need to look at what Open Mobile Alliance is standardizing on, how we would fit into their planned infrastructures going forward.
14:05:51  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Can you send me the key people to contact?
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14:06:37  <TranscriptKirsten> Support system for the developers, help system, bug reporting system, beta testing. One of the things developers can help, network of users.
14:06:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Does anybody know any networks of users for testing? We had several set up at Trace years ago. Microsoft asked us to set them up for anonymous testing.
14:07:09  <TranscriptKirsten> People give feedback without being attached. If there are user networks for doing testing for places.
14:07:18  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: I can give you contacts too.
14:08:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Louis: This includes a QA question. Can we leverage our contacts in open source to involve themselves in this? If so, the rubrik would have to touch on OpenOffice but the other ones that might be of interest. Corollary or subsequent to that, framing the message correctly so it's clear what we're asking for and wanting to expand to a larger meta-community in particular ways.
14:08:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: I think the idea of building on existing testing networks, or expand them to include more people with disabilities, has a double advantage. Have all the tools and mechanisms, plus adding in the people we need.
14:09:27  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Obviously NetBeans and Eclipse. Work under the FP7 grant to build a vision impairment simulation tool for NetBeams. I assume you already know about the tool added to Eclipse.
14:09:38  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: AChecker.
14:09:55  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Also under AEGIS grant is work to do accessibility regression testing for developers that might have application here.
14:10:17  <TranscriptKirsten> Chris: I know a couple hundred really good accessibility beta testers, but not so sure I want the shark chasing me again.
14:11:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Mellon has invited us to create a quality assurance tool based on ATAG for code quality assurance. Automated expert system that has accessibility as an integrated component. Supposed to start in March, not sure how it works into your timelines.
14:11:34  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Perfect. They want matching funds, so if you say here is the scope of work, here are the parts we can leverage...
14:12:23  <TranscriptKirsten> Okay. The rich development environment. We have to talk about developing for several environments. Cloud-based - getting lots of comments from universities and other places. Developers ask how do I make something commercially available, vendors don't want it?
14:13:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Something called Valley of Death, and it's between R&D and commercial deployment. Lots of money for R&D, and the industry will put money into it, but getting from one side to the other side, most things die.
14:13:45  <TranscriptKirsten> If we can create something more iPhone-like, get an idea and build it up, and in developing it, we'd like to see the users, clinicians, where just a clinician came over and said "are there some students that can help me?" and the students jury-rigged it using the tools on the iPhone. Whammo, it's available.
14:14:01  <TranscriptKirsten> A student project, available as an app on the iPhone. If we can create something that facilitates this.
14:14:37  <TranscriptKirsten> Development tools for all the things above. Some of them can be in the cloud themselves. We can also have development environment which you download and install on your computer.
14:14:57  <TranscriptKirsten> As soon as you have installable, different variation for each platform, etc. Particularly interested in cloud-based development for cloud-based solution.
14:15:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Documentation, which everyone hates to do.
14:15:25  <TranscriptKirsten> User-need-based challenges and grand challenges to developers. Seed the development environment with things that are really needed by and useful to people with disabilities.
14:15:34  <TranscriptKirsten> Those are the four categories. Things that are missing, people that you know?
14:16:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: The use of Android and iPhone in your title. When you say cloud-based, iPhone isn't really cloud based, Android app stores aren't cloud based, they just happen to be internet stores. Cloud is the program is running somewhere other than your local device.
14:16:26  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Someone pointed out earlier, I'm trying to make an analogy and the analogy gets picked up as being what I'm talked about.
14:16:46  <TranscriptKirsten> In our environment, which is cloud-based, I'd like to have tools to put building blocks together and push a button. With very little work you create an app.
14:16:57  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: An IDE that allows me to deploy to the cloud.
14:17:36  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Something so that people can build solutions in such a form that it is compatible with the distribution system. Still has to go through security screening.
14:17:49  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: iPhone and Android are not that at all. Look at Netbeams and Eclipse.
14:18:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Rich: Voice recognition for devices that don't have the horsepower, could deploy from the cloud. Stream audio. Google has some services like that.
14:18:49  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Some of this is the next part, common building components, code and services. Who has built the development environments. Netbeans and Eclipse are examples.
14:19:15  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Kenei, sort of a cloud you can deploy applications directly to. Run app on Kenei servers.
14:19:38  <TranscriptKirsten> Louis: Google Code, sourceforge. Amazon also, to a certain degree. Not quite the same as Kenei.
14:19:50  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: If you want to contract with somebody to build an environment, who would you turn to?
14:19:58  <TranscriptKirsten> Louis: I can do that.
14:20:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Martin Bailin in Prague.
14:20:45  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Last comments on development tools? The next one is a big list, building common components. Not going to determine the base technology here.
14:21:12  <TranscriptKirsten> As long as they can interface with each other in some standard fashion. Determine most commonly needed components. Interoperability standards, development of key blocks.
14:21:36  <TranscriptKirsten> Universal open-source Braille driver module, OCR based navigation, some are technical and political and commercial challenges.
14:21:51  <TranscriptKirsten> Structural OCR, help somebody navigate through the page.
14:22:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I'm trying to understand the distinction between these sub-sub-sub bullets and the items at the very bottom of the page you haven't expanded.
14:22:24  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: There is no difference. I started doing them here and jumped to the bottom.
14:22:45  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I think what would be useful from an organizational view would be a master list of common modules and services, and links back from them to say where they might be used.
14:23:04  <TranscriptKirsten> This OCR might be a reusable building block for developers, might live in the cloud, might live on the desktop.
14:23:24  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: I want to capture the list.
14:23:52  <TranscriptKirsten> In the cloud, in a bootable USB... installed...
14:24:18  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: As components of free public access features. A Braille driver is obviously a component of a free screenreading access feature. Making the distinction between cloud-based and client-based.
14:24:24  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Bootable and installable are both client-based.
14:24:49  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: In general most things could go most places, but when you build it it's important you think about where it goes. OCR is inherently parallelizable task.
14:25:01  <TranscriptKirsten> How you design it is impacted by where you're designing it for.
14:25:17  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Some of them could be standalone. Send a page up and it comes back, versus things meant to be integrated in.
14:27:11  <TranscriptKirsten> So we have the long list, re-rendering in large print, reading text, heuristically analyzing and enhancing a page for faster keyboard navigation. A whole bunch of modules.
14:27:38  <TranscriptKirsten> On-demand things like visual description, cognitive assistance, CAPTCHA assistance. Head-tracking, eye-switches, eyebrow switches etc, being done with webcams. Crowd-sourcing.
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14:28:26  <TranscriptKirsten> We don't have to think about all they would be, people can think of other modules and send them along. If we're trying to do the modules it'd be good to say "I know somebody doing this or that".
14:28:37  <TranscriptKirsten> I know OpenGazer in England is doing all three of these, at least some of them.
14:28:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: We have a student project.
14:29:07  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Need to connect them.
14:29:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I've got a bunch of comments, but I was holding them-
14:29:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: We'll have a break at 2:45.
14:30:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: I'll cover these other ones so we can end on this and continue. Interested in anybody who has any ideas on how to do the awareness.
14:30:33  <TranscriptKirsten> Even with the cost of AT, it could be four times as many people using it if they even knew it existed. Older people, families, they don't know about it.
14:30:44  <TranscriptKirsten> Anybody who has any ideas, or knows somebody who did this really well in another domain.
14:31:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Louis: The most obvious thing to me would be schools, education, and other large public places where people go to on a regular basis like hospitals, clinics.
14:31:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Like how people are becoming apprised of H1N1 virus. That being a negative thing, but similar mechanisms.
14:31:35  <TranscriptKirsten> Just making it something people want to demand.
14:31:45  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Anybody who knows anybody who's really good at awareness.
14:31:57  <TranscriptKirsten> We need to get information to all the public access points.
14:32:17  <TranscriptKirsten> We would like to get information out to web developers, same kind of thing, W3C, WAI is best mechanism there.
14:32:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Websites, popular press, trade magazines...
14:32:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Louis: Oprah. She is an industry unto herself.
14:32:38  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: That would be very interesting.
14:32:58  <TranscriptKirsten> Please, keep this one in the back of your mind. Techies aren't the place to look for awareness experts.
14:33:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: At the risk of being a little facetious, whitehouse.gov. Obama has spoken eloquently about the needs of people with disabilities. Him doing a segment on awareness might generate some press. Not as much as Oprah, but...
14:34:01  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Good idea. The way to do it would be say it's not only nice to have the administration support, but - once it's in place and proven - and when we're ready for the influx, that would be a really good idea.
14:34:15  <TranscriptKirsten> (?): If you could get on every school computer, every student would know it as well.
14:34:48  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: The other part we have is legal policy analysis. This is looking at the legal issues of transposing. Is it legal to take a web page and take a version that's accessible, and the answer is no.
14:34:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: Wait a minute. Who says it's not?
14:35:23  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: The lawyers. Exception of copyright doesn't apply to everything, it's focused on literary. Websites aren't literature. Part of the problem is the rules get written to only apply to certain things.
14:36:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: What we found at AFB - I got an exemption to the DCMA. Said we could crack any encryption we needed to crack. House Commerce committee had a paragraph that said nothing in this copyright law will prevent any blind person for making a copy of a phonograph recording. That was relied in in the Betamax case in the 80s.
14:36:50  <TranscriptKirsten> And the US Supreme Court took that sentence, and with lawyerly logic and said that obviously Congress intended timeshifting. I suggest we not worry about a problem until one is thrown at us.
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14:37:25  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: IBM was legally challenged. All we want to do is look at what's there and make sure what we're building and proposing will work. We know that if you put a screenreader on your computer and read something, people are pretty much alone. On a network, maybe not so.
14:38:00  <TranscriptKirsten> We just need to figure out how these different things work. Also, if somebody adds metadata to your website, that's not making a phonograph record. We have to look at the different dimensions. I don't want to do that here, I want to identify people. So I have Janina -
14:38:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: Yes, and George K. (?) as well.
14:38:36  <TranscriptKirsten> If the goal is to not get attacked, that's almost not controllable. A defense fund is what's needed; just because somebody attacks you doesn't mean they're right.
14:38:41  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: That's true. Anyone else?
14:39:00  <TranscriptKirsten> NFB has been looking at and active on this. Reading Rights Coalition looking at one aspect.
14:39:46  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: This is for a third bullet to your legal and policy analyses. Looking at the way that we fund things at the government level. For example, AC software for iPhone doesn't qualify for purchase because it's a general purpose device.
14:40:21  <TranscriptKirsten> We will only fund a $2000 device rather than a $200 iPhone Touch. Similarly, if it's free or free public, we still want to appropriate funds for training and support. That get back to talk about training and support for NPII stuff.
14:40:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Vehicles and venues for acquiring, should be covered.
14:40:43  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Not going to go into the last one, just general operation and making sure people are involved, mechanisms for generating revenue.
14:40:59  <TranscriptKirsten> I'd like to spend our last seven minutes flipping back to development of modules, common components and services.
14:41:15  <TranscriptKirsten> This is just a quick list. Peter, you had comments.
14:41:43  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: For TTS, you should break it into TTS for rapid, interruptable use and for book reading or other long, uninterrupted reading style, more humanlike.
14:42:09  <TranscriptKirsten> Already talked about OpenGazer. I'm curious why we want an off-screen model. I would question it.
14:42:25  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Going to call on Rich to comment on this. It was found we couldn't get there.
14:43:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Rich: NVDA is working to get traction on the Windows platform. The problem is there are companies that do absolutely nothing to support accessibility. If they don't provide some level of access, you're not going to be able to compete with JAWS or WindowEyes.
14:43:46  <TranscriptKirsten> Drive towards supporting interoperability through rich APIs, but if we don't have an off-screen model, they're not going to be competitive at all. So we need to do something. I was asked explicitly by NVDA how I could help with that.
14:44:04  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Sort of a safety net situation where you want to be able to do everything through APIs, but if everything isn't there...
14:44:26  <TranscriptKirsten> OCR module should never need to be used, unless you're taking a picture of a street sign. But if you open a PDF and it's a picture of a page of text, you need something to fall back on.
14:44:36  <TranscriptKirsten> You can yell at the people who sent it to you, but that doesn't help the person who needs access.
14:44:50  <TranscriptKirsten> The offscreen model is in the same safety net fashion. Something that is there when people are not using it.
14:45:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I'm still going to push back on it. I see them as very different. An OCR module has tons of uses, it's not just a safety net for poorly marked-up PDF. Whereas an offscreen model has one purpose, to deal with badly behaved apps.
14:45:39  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Do we not want a mechanism for people to access badly behaved apps?
14:45:59  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I'm very concerned that if we go forward with it, it's in a fashion where the use of the offscreen model in an NPII context is very clearly called out.
14:46:15  <TranscriptKirsten> We should communicate to the user that the user is getting something through an offscreen model from an ill-behaved app. I'm very serious.
14:46:37  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: You could get apps that never behave, because they say "Oh, it works fine with such-and-such". Spend money patching the bad apps who have a get-out-of-jail-free card.
14:46:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Need a fashion that's not too annoying to the user.
14:47:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: The offscreen model may be needed, but it's dangerous.
14:47:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Braille transcription library a la LibLouis. I didn't see it there but maybe it's hiding?
14:47:31  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: I need to write it down. Thank you.
14:47:50  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: And then vision impairment simulation, might be in the development part, and other disability simulation tools.
14:47:59  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: They would belong under developer tools.
14:48:09  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: New York White House has some simulation.
14:48:45  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Whole panoply of tools, testing of seizures. You could easily see that as cloud-based, and you run all videos through that tool. It becomes like a 5-second delay, and if you see a seizure-inducing moment in the video, you alter the streamed video.
14:48:53  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: Filters.
14:49:32  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: We actually have an active request to create an open source version. The one we have now we paid a large amount of money to buy the license so we could offer it free. But we would like to find someone we don't talk to other than to tell them what the problem is, to do an open source version.
14:49:51  <TranscriptKirsten> We're polluted because we know the algorithms. Prevention tool should be easier than the analysis tool, because that's pass/fail.
14:49:55  <TranscriptKirsten> If you can trigger-
14:50:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: You can have some false positives.
14:50:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Shift the colour, change the contrast, freeze the video, things that wouldn't bother you. The algorithm is a lot simpler.
14:50:39  <TranscriptKirsten> Anybody else?
14:50:57  <TranscriptKirsten> Look at this as if I were building AT, what kind of modules would I want?
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14:51:46  <TranscriptKirsten> If you have other ideas, please put it in. If you know people working on these areas, especially open source, let us know.
14:52:10  <TranscriptKirsten> Server-side text to speech, we've got Alan Black at CMU. It's the people we don't know about that we want to know about. Okay? Alright!
14:52:26  <TranscriptKirsten> So that's basically what we're talking about with the infrastructure, and as you can see we're trying to do everything we can to provide this.
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14:52:58  <TranscriptKirsten> If you say there isn't anybody doing that, that makes a great challenge to universities, especially if we can word it so it's not disability-related, but linguistic, or computer science, and get somebody else to go after it.
14:53:01  <TranscriptKirsten> Any other questions or comments?
14:54:00  <TranscriptKirsten> The easiest part is talking about what somebody else should do - the hardest part is doing it. We're going to ask for a commitment for it. This is important enough that they're spending money on a whole bunch of other things, this has got to be among them.
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14:55:01  <TranscriptKirsten> The most important part is we're not looking for weekend warriors. We need to have commercial quality systems. It's got to sustain the number of users and be reliable, so that's what we're looking for. Commercial quality infrastructure and tools that will then open up the ability for a wide variety, everything from weekend warriors who come up with the most innovative stuff through clinicians and
14:55:04  <TranscriptKirsten> commercial solutions, side by side.
14:55:38  <TranscriptKirsten> Louis: Back to the point about exploiting assistive technology from vendors. The model I use is alternative energy, where we're trying to build an entrepreneurial class as well as supporting existing companies.
14:56:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: A question online: will the task list remain at that URL, and will there be further documentation?
14:56:44  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Yes, or there will be a link to where it moved to. We are setting up npii.org. Raising the Floor is a coalition of efforts, so Fluid and AEGIS are all part of this general effort.
14:56:59  <TranscriptKirsten> Just as each of those have their own identity, NPII will have an identity so people can tell the difference.
14:57:50  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: It's fantastic. And impressive you're willing to put so much effort into it.
14:58:01  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: I was hoping somebody would come along and grab it and run with it.
14:58:04  <TranscriptKirsten> Louis: Thanks, Greg.
14:58:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: But you are not going to escape unscathed.
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15:24:27  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Okay, everybody, we're going to have the report back... you have two minutes.
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15:33:09  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg is still missing, so we'll start with the other team. Bringing up the wiki and Jorge can speak.
15:34:38  <TranscriptKirsten> Jorge: So on the wiki page, you will see the Working Group Brainstorming Notes. Unstructured notes for an unstructured discussion. We did end up talking about two or three different main topics.
15:35:18  <TranscriptKirsten> There's different levels of that that we ended up focusing on. We identified three different areas of action from very broad and general principles on mobile accessibility all the way to very specific solutions, including dropping some specifications on a potential solution.
15:36:42  <TranscriptKirsten> So there's a variety of opportunities to start a road map on this. In terms of the general principles, most of the needs that arose were focusing on the need to make development flexible.
15:37:04  <TranscriptKirsten> The possibility of adapting interfaces, functionality, personalizing, incorporating things like needs and preference profiles, that was a very broad need that was identified.
15:37:34  <TranscriptKirsten> The other was cross-platform development, and then there's a variety of technologies that may allow us to do this that are open technologies. We spent some time fleshing out that idea of ensuring accessibility is available across systems.
15:38:08  <TranscriptKirsten> Finally we determined that of course the main requirement of any accessibility endeavour in the mobile space will involve users as much as possible to ensure these solutions are appropriate to the context, as opposed to being based on assumptions.
15:38:18  <TranscriptKirsten> We need to include the users in any endeavour of open-source accessibility in the mobile space.
15:38:43  <TranscriptKirsten> Those are three very broad principles that we have to define a road map for open accessibility. The second level of discussions had to do with specific gaps and potential ways in which we can address those gaps.
15:39:26  <TranscriptKirsten> Quite a bit of discussion on how AEGIS is addressing some of the needs on users and use-case scenarios. We don't necessarily know yet about how people are using these technologies. The landscape is quickly changing. Projects like AEGIS have the methodologies to understand some of these contexts, but there's gaps.
15:40:01  <TranscriptKirsten> User groups are not necessarily being considered - deaf-blind, speech assistance in face-to-face communication as opposed to text-to-speech or other TTS applications or accessibility tools.
15:40:47  <TranscriptKirsten> And in that sense, once we identified some of these gaps in terms of the populations that are not being consulted right now because of different barriers to gathering that knowledge, we discussed two different approaches for fulfilling some of this unmet accessibility in the mobile space.
15:41:25  <TranscriptKirsten> One was this idea that has been inherited from desktop accessibility: universal remote control or touch-screen interface with mobile devices. I say it's inherited because there's been a few different initiatives in universal remote control functionality, and they have not necessarily materialized.
15:41:59  <TranscriptKirsten> We believe the mobile space offers a better opportunity. Using Bluetooth interaction by which people using already have alternative devices that allow them to access other technologies.
15:42:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Their computers can also access their mobile devices. Once the access to mobile device is enabled, different functionality than a mobile device could offer.
15:42:47  <TranscriptKirsten> That would be a very comprehensive solution. That would tie in a lot of the work that has been initiated through AEGIS and ATRC and others that are here.
15:43:02  <TranscriptKirsten> It would be a big endeavour.
15:43:50  <TranscriptKirsten> And then there was another more modest proposal, which is this idea of creating a speech assistant application, cross-platform, for people with speech disorders, that could enable them to communicate in real-time and ask for a coffee, or communicate with people with temporary or permanent speech impairments.
15:44:33  <TranscriptKirsten> Those are the two main solutions that were discussed. They would involve different strategies. And in another level, the whole idea that in mobile space, the boundaries between hardware, software and design are very blurred. A lot of things that enable functionality require us to get a little out of our software comfort zone.
15:44:55  <TranscriptKirsten> Requires also many manufacturers to provide access to at least some interface that enables the software to interact.
15:45:15  <TranscriptKirsten> That was a topic that was also discussed and is also a possibility for the definition of future work. And that's about it. I don't know if you want to add anything else, Greg.
15:45:23  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Can you talk more about the AAC device?
15:45:45  <TranscriptKirsten> Jorge: This was an idea right at the end, because we were afraid we were not being focused enough and not coming up with a solution. I think Gregg has a better-
15:46:07  <TranscriptKirsten> Gregg: This isn't the AAC that we were talking about - scroll down on the wiki.
15:47:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Speech assistant for face-to-face communication for speech impairment, not any other additional communication problem that would require visuals. Laryngitis, and so on. Type in to device, "I'd like to order a coffee", and be able to order.
15:47:38  <TranscriptKirsten> Able to extend that to communicate face-to-face with people outside their current circle. And the idea we came up with was a smaller scope like this enables you to get a project underway and build on.
15:47:47  <TranscriptKirsten> Jorge: I don't know if we captured the requirements. Maybe go further down on the page?
15:48:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Gregg: This could be extended not just to individuals with disabilities, but realtime translation on a mobile phone so someone who's visiting Brazil could type into their mobile phone with access to TTS and translate, real-time, to individuals.
15:48:44  <TranscriptKirsten> If we captured some requirements, or even low-fi ideas, we could interact with consumers directly and see to what extent is this a big need.
15:49:01  <TranscriptKirsten> This is not in European AEGIS. Real-time text, but for someone who does not have speech-
15:49:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: I'm reading through the slide dec right now and reminding myself right now.
15:49:27  <TranscriptKirsten> Gregg: Aligning with what's being done in AEGIS, not duplicating. Want something tangible that someone can work on.
15:49:58  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: This is so close to a subset or stepping stone for what's happening in AEGIS. Does it make sense to have a parallel effort, or simply join with what they're doing and get this as an early release while they build the CCF to Text part?
15:50:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Gregg: Common Coding Framework, that's a different user.
15:50:27  <TranscriptKirsten> Wouldn't be required to wait for open-source TTS if a user wanted to work on an Android platform. Small piece to do.
15:50:53  <TranscriptKirsten> Jorge: Part of the discussion we wanted to see if we could target a specific area. This seemed like a potential opportunity. If it makes sense to join efforts with AEGIS, then that's what makes sense.
15:51:18  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Certainly I would strongly recommend having a conversation with the principals involved to see whether and how this meshes before you start doing much coding.
15:51:57  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: In terms of the universal remote control, one of the things in the Information & Communications Standard of the AOBA will be a requirement for accessible kiosks and touch screens. Are you thinking that might be an approach to that? Almost like a portable control device for systems out in the environment?
15:52:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Parking devices, tickets?
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15:52:33  <TranscriptKirsten> This particular application on mobile, goes beyond what we were thinking of, a way of controlling the parking ticket machines, kiosks at airports, ATMs, etc. Kiosk-type devices.
15:52:48  <TranscriptKirsten> If you have a mobile device you yourself can control, are we thinking of that type of universal remote?
15:53:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Jorge: That's definitely the route that we were taking the discussion. More into the specifications of a potential speech assistant, but even controlling appliances in your own home, lights, at some point a discussion on gesture-based input, real 3D gestures, not just touchscreen.
15:53:59  <TranscriptKirsten> Many mobile devices are equipped with accelerometers and that type of sensor. Convince people who operate those parking machines to - what's funny?
15:54:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: Part of the inclusiveness is the need to be able to talk dirty.
15:54:22  <TranscriptKirsten> It's on the wiki.
15:55:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Gregg: How you communicate with everyone in your ecosystem. I thought I had it pretty well in mind as to what the issues were. I had him come back and type it so I understood - he said can you imagine trying to talk dirty to your wife in sign language or text?
15:55:19  <TranscriptKirsten> Communicating in your network in a different way.
15:55:24  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: But it IS standard.
15:55:51  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: A guy wanted a communication board to be used in bed with his girlfriend. I said he had to make up his own lines.
15:56:24  <TranscriptKirsten> Gregg: The idea of the universal remote control was taken up first - Georgia Tech has done great work, there was work done and there might be a little bit of a graveyard in that area. Shouldn't you be able to access other things in the environment with that device?
15:56:59  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: The work you cited is based off the ISO 24752, which is still very active, ten projects using yet. Were you looking at using that protocol or something else for the actual communication standard?
15:57:33  <TranscriptKirsten> Gregg: It wasn't even that granular. The ability to communicate anything, using Fluid and Engage for example, and left that realm and were thinking in general. But that's definitely once you get closer.
15:58:01  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: We're looking at using the web service descriptions and thinking of all devices like web services and communicating with them in these fashion. Using a standard that's constrained enough.
15:58:37  <TranscriptKirsten> The people who are interested in this, URC consortium just formed last month, within the last 60 days, evolution of the URCC. Involved in a whole bunch of companies and projects in the US.
15:59:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: From a functional perspective, it would go beyond simply control to things like cognitive access. Frequently used example - the TTC or Metro or ticket machines, very difficult to figure out.
15:59:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Someone with a cognitive disability needs something that says "give me a ticket to where I need to go" knowing your context and needs.
15:59:36  <TranscriptKirsten> Just communicating with the machine in a way that's understandable.
16:00:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: We always fall off the table about cognitive and never get anything going. Really interesting application, combination of the navigation software with scheduling, so it says "At this point in time, what would be the right set of trains to take from where I am to go home?"
16:00:50  <TranscriptKirsten> Instead of a map, it'd be "Go to this corner, get on this bus, get off at this stop, get on that bus". Awful lot of mainstream users who use a bus who have to pull out the schedules to get from A to D given where the buses are running at any time of night or day.
16:01:01  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: University of Colorado was doing something like that.
16:01:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Clayton Louis. And the Coleman Institute, we'll be discussing that there.
16:01:27  <TranscriptKirsten> Also having travelled to many subways and metros, I would love one of those.
16:01:46  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Go up, go down. Two trains run on the same track... this is your train.
16:01:57  <TranscriptKirsten> Anyone who has any ideas for cognitive, see you next week at the Coleman institute.
16:02:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: There's also stressed, tired, inebriated, all stand-ins for some type of cognitive impairment. Just like hands-busy, eyes-busy.
16:02:50  <TranscriptKirsten> You can imagine trying to get to your hotel in Madrid at 1 AM after being up at 5 in the morning as a stand-in for cognitive impairment.
16:02:57  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: And language-impaired, trying to read street signs.
16:03:17  <TranscriptKirsten> Gregg: It might be valuable to capture this in applications. We don't always target it specificaly.
16:03:20  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Good work. This is great.
16:04:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Gregg: We also talked about this but didn't dig in, the concept of touch-free access as opposed to eyes-free, hands-free, because both of those require some physical access. In the area of mobile it's very true. Regardless of disability, in Ontario the new laws about accessing your mobile phones in driving, look at completely touch-free interfaces.
16:04:40  <TranscriptKirsten> Voice-activated, use whatever modality is available. Speech recognition on the device, operational access and command control. Didn't go down that specifically, it's pretty broad. Not a lot of projects in that area.
16:04:59  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Anything else?
16:05:10  <TranscriptKirsten> Louis: In terms of research on what's already available, did you touch on that at all?
16:05:13  <TranscriptKirsten> Jorge: We had to.
16:05:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: That was the first exercise, and one we started in Vancouver.
16:05:34  <TranscriptKirsten> Gregg: The only addition is the things now available that weren't as of Vancouver.
16:05:44  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Thank you. And so we'll move to Greg.
16:06:36  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: We covered a lot of ground, so I'm just going to summarize it and pick out some highlights. We're talking about the national public inclusive infrastructure, building access into the infrastructure so that anyone anywhere can invoke it.
16:07:30  <TranscriptKirsten> If I repeat stuff from the morning, let me know. One of the issues: really, why are we talking about a nation at a time? This is a global problem. The goal is to use national efforts, money to build within countries national public infrastructure. They would share the same workings and we would build a global public infrastructure through the connected and replicated NPIIs.
16:07:52  <TranscriptKirsten> We are taking advantage of the stimulus funds in the US, coordinating with efforts in Canada, to do parallel efforts. We're all drawing from each other.
16:08:02  <TranscriptKirsten> The work comes from Canada, Europe, United States, etc.
16:08:36  <TranscriptKirsten> In the US NPII we were talking about, we have two threads. Thread 2 is on-demand, but that's going to take a while to get to. We talked about a Web For All-like implementation in parallel. That also allows us to do a bunch of things.
16:08:50  <TranscriptKirsten> There's a lot more to be done, preferences, authorizations, standards, that sort of thing.
16:09:27  <TranscriptKirsten> Also want to take the base and build from there. ANd then a lot of these things can be used to develop the key components - wizards, ability to configure different needs, how you deal with a larger, broader range of things.
16:09:49  <TranscriptKirsten> Then we went through and there's lots of issues around building the packages, what goes in them, installing them. Thread 2, we looked at the issues involved.
16:10:06  <TranscriptKirsten> All of this is up on the net so people can look at it in detail later. http://www.raisingthefloor.net/NPII/TaskList
16:10:47  <TranscriptKirsten> One of the interesting things was the need to really look at the mainstream technologies. As we're doing this, almost everything is related to something either of interest to mainstream technologies, or will be. We may be ahead in some of these things.
16:11:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Personal preferences, they're not doing that in mainstream so we will probably get that first, but stay in contact with everybody else.
16:11:23  <TranscriptKirsten> Have three models, one of them the cloud we talked about, you live in the cloud and your AT and apps are in the cloud and you have a thin client.
16:12:02  <TranscriptKirsten> Local cloud, this is where you invoke a local cloud, boot off a USB drive and create your own environment different from the product, launch on a machine and live in that world. Like having it up on the server but you made your own local one.
16:12:17  <TranscriptKirsten> Third one is web. We want to explore all of these, there are some things you can't do in the cloud.
16:12:49  <TranscriptKirsten> One of the things we need is operating system and browser cooperation. Printing, braille, TTS may be on your computer, but you may not be able to get to them if you don't have the drivers attached.
16:13:03  <TranscriptKirsten> Looking at ways the operating systems and browsers can have open-source generic drivers.
16:13:19  <TranscriptKirsten> Live in virtual land and still have access to some key things.
16:13:24  <TranscriptKirsten> Safe things, not the drive and data.
16:14:02  <TranscriptKirsten> The next area we looked at was user profiles, really  key to everything we've talked about. Device would act like what the person needed, in way that's very natural, not an accessibility adaption. Ability to have something more convenient.
16:14:13  <TranscriptKirsten> We're all using it, and as we get old, we just use it a little differently.
16:14:44  <TranscriptKirsten> Ask for specifics, fall back to more and more general if it's not there.
16:15:04  <TranscriptKirsten> I'd like a Coca-Cola, they say we've got Pepsi, is that good enough? Cascading drink preferences.
16:15:33  <TranscriptKirsten> The other thing was graceful degradation. If you can't get access, will something fail backwards in a way that still maintains as much access as you can have?
16:16:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Not just talking about preferences, but commissions and payment. A one-sign-on type of thing. We want to do this in a way that's private. So I can plug in and it'll give me what I want. Say that I am authorized to have books translated to speech, and say that I can pay for such-and-such a service without every identifying who I am.
16:16:48  <TranscriptKirsten> Authorized to spend up to so much, use things anonymously, and still be able to pull preferences. Standards across all of these, but they're different standards.
16:16:55  <TranscriptKirsten> Security and privacy, obviously, everything has to be secure.
16:17:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Ways for users to get support, both commercial and crowd-sourcing.
16:17:50  <TranscriptKirsten> The purpose of an infrastructure is to build roads and components. Different common building components, big long list of things people might find useful. Bunch more people suggested.
16:18:10  <TranscriptKirsten> But the idea - we want to build an entrepreneurial class at the same time we support the manufacturers. Lower the bar for getting involved, closer to the users.
16:18:18  <TranscriptKirsten> Doesn't just have to be some big company with a lot of resources.
16:18:40  <TranscriptKirsten> Researchers can develop stuff and move it through a pipeline like how you can get it available on the iPhone, versus if there isn't any distribution system.
16:18:55  <TranscriptKirsten> And lots of other notes. Being aware, so people know about it, policy, international and legal issues involved as well.
16:19:15  <TranscriptKirsten> Find out if there were pieces missing, figure out who was doing work in the area.
16:19:20  <TranscriptKirsten> a) Is there anything in there you'd like to help with?
16:19:31  <TranscriptKirsten> b) I have information to contribute. I'm busy, but I know something about that.
16:19:44  <TranscriptKirsten> c) I know somebody who either would like to be doing that, or who has good information to contribute.
16:20:18  <TranscriptKirsten> And then we need to line up people to actually do all this stuff and figure out what it's going to cost. Timeline is, next year for the proposals, go from there.
16:20:27  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Here in Canada we hope to somehow coordinate and align.
16:21:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: One comment I neglected earlier. It's important to ensure that any commercial organization who is building things in parallel to what's being done in the platform, that that should be explicitly noted as compatible with NPII, if not formally part and parcel of NPII.
16:21:26  <TranscriptKirsten> In-kind compatibility with the personal preferences, or so on and so on. Does that make sense?
16:22:01  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Yeah, the national infrastructure is not a company or thing. It's composed of all the pieces and contributions from all the places. We expect it will be created by secured funding and take many people in many places according to their expertise.
16:22:28  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Other comments? Okay. I think we've worked very hard, and come up with quite a bit over the past two days.
16:22:50  <TranscriptKirsten> The last piece of the agenda - and we have very little time, we have to be out by 4:45 because the dinner happens at 5:30. I think most of you are going to the dinner.
16:23:04  <TranscriptKirsten> We wanted to talk about next steps, and there's substantive next steps and then administrative/procedural next steps.
16:24:09  <TranscriptKirsten> We have the four areas - accessible collaboration tools, there we have come up with quite a number of possible proposals within that.
16:24:25  <TranscriptKirsten> I think rather than a single proposal we're putting forward, I understand Colin will spend the weekend creating components already.
16:24:36  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg has a proposal out for collaboration tools and we'll use some of the ideas from that as well.
16:24:50  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Not a proposal, we actually were funded. Telecom IRIC.
16:25:20  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Perfect. And we'll maintain the ongoing discussion and updating of everyone on the wiki. End-to-end accessibility in one platform, we've come up with a vertical application in the financial sector.
16:25:46  <TranscriptKirsten> I've had back-and-forths with Pina and possible funders. Setting up draft proposals over the next few weeks. Susan D'antoni from Unesco is also very interested.
16:26:07  <TranscriptKirsten> We've contacted the people doing microcredit and accessibility. Since yesterday, there's been quite a movement. We hope to have a report back at the next meeting.
16:27:00  <TranscriptKirsten> If you recall, the three large problems we were addressing were access for employees within the financial sector, accessible public-facing interfaces with a special emphasis on cognitive access, and new creative economies and new markets accessed by small/medium enterprise and low income industries.
16:27:33  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Just trying to figure out if there was another context for use in Canada.
16:27:59  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: No, this is a global thing. Talking about access by new possibly single-individual agrarian, financial accounting, access to financing for businesses. Making all that accessible.
16:28:33  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: One thing still on the edge of that, micropayments, and whether or not there is a way to set it up that doesn't cost an arm and a leg to get involved in. So people could serve as assistance to others in a micropayment model.
16:29:01  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: We've also talked about micropayments related to access to curriculum. So if people have additional ideas, please send them along. We'll keep the wiki updated about that.
16:29:21  <TranscriptKirsten> Then NPII, of course, is moving forward with a proposal going in and, as you said, a fairly ambitious timeline.
16:29:29  <TranscriptKirsten> We're going to have discussions in Canada and Europe as well.
16:29:38  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: I want it to be thought of as NPIIs, cumulatively.
16:29:59  <TranscriptKirsten> I think that really a driving force for all of us is not just the countries with the funds, but the fact that it can be replicated in other countries.
16:30:17  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: We haven't talked about the mobile proposals.
16:30:23  <TranscriptKirsten> What are the next steps?
16:30:31  <TranscriptKirsten> Gregg: I guess we have to identify the ones to be done.
16:31:03  <TranscriptKirsten> Jorge: We could post both and see which one. The main idea would be to flesh out the discussions on the universal remote, which may be paired to the touch screen, and on the other side the speech assistant option as well.
16:31:10  <TranscriptKirsten> So we'll have to prepare that proposal, I guess.
16:31:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: And who would it be for?
16:31:22  <TranscriptKirsten> Jorge: We are proposing Gregg and I. I guess.
16:31:35  <TranscriptKirsten> Gregg: Which organization would take on the work, you mean?
16:31:50  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: And who would support the work. What the next step? Take it to NSERC, or Canada, or ...?
16:31:59  <TranscriptKirsten> Jorge: We didn't get that far, but we can definitely continue the conversation.
16:32:05  <TranscriptKirsten> Gregg: That's outside the scope of my expertise.
16:32:17  <TranscriptKirsten> RIM would want to be involved in that.
16:32:56  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: It looks like we have fairly substantive next steps. The next thing is to find a time for the next meeting. We have Japan 2010 Accessibility Symposium. But this is not intended to be the followup.
16:33:20  <TranscriptKirsten> This will be happening on March 16, most likely in Kobei and you're all welcome to attend. It's dealing with the issue of superaging - here we have aging, there we have superaging.
16:33:52  <TranscriptKirsten> A fairly substantive gap between a huge percentage of the population. All of the associated issues are there.
16:34:25  <TranscriptKirsten> Most of the people here are not going to Japan in March. So the question is, when should we have our next meeting? Do people have events we could pair it with? I think it works quite well to pair these meetings with other events.
16:34:33  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: CSUN?
16:34:41  <TranscriptKirsten> Willie: WWW?
16:34:53  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: The deadline was last Friday.
16:35:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: ETAPS, the Greek accessibility event at the end of CSUN.
16:35:24  <TranscriptKirsten> Jess: There's a Web For All in Raleigh.
16:35:45  <TranscriptKirsten> Louis: Web 2.0?
16:35:55  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: There's a conference with Web For All... W4A?
16:36:00  <TranscriptKirsten> Peter: ATIA in January?
16:36:12  <TranscriptKirsten> Louis: And there's FOSTA too.
16:36:33  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: We do want to align ourself with the open source community, but strategically other communities as well.
16:36:51  <TranscriptKirsten> LOUIS: FOSSA might be a good place to highlight what's been done. Early February in Belgium. Brussels. The weather's okay.
16:37:11  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: I will attempt to find funding for travel. February is probably the earliest.
16:37:37  <TranscriptKirsten> We need to thank Raising the Floor for helping with the funding here and other yet-to-be-announced sponsors. Those of you who received travel support, we have Raising the Floor to thank.
16:37:49  <TranscriptKirsten> The other next steps, we'll create a section on the wiki with suggested locations.
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16:38:01  <TranscriptKirsten> Greg: Thanks to Adobe for helping us with phase 1 of our work.
16:38:14  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: Once we know about the others, I'll send a note around.
16:38:52  <TranscriptKirsten> Are you all logged in to the wiki? Add all of those suggestions to that section, and we'll hope to finalize the location within the next three weeks or so. We'll decide upon a final location before the end of November, definitely, so people can start planning.
16:39:02  <TranscriptKirsten> One remaining thing, tomorrow we have FSOSS and how many are going?
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16:39:33  <TranscriptKirsten> We have several sessions there. Fluid/Engage, and the results of today, and that will be primarily handled by Greg, Peter and Jess.
16:40:01  <TranscriptKirsten> That will be at 10:00, so if you attend you may want to come to the session and help answer questions. Also if you're attending FSOSS, encourage people to come to the session, especially strategic people that might be able to help out.
16:40:24  <TranscriptKirsten> The attendee list is up on the FSOSS site and I think there are quite a number of groups and open source communities that could be recruited to help with the things we've discussed.
16:41:01  <TranscriptKirsten> Last but not least, with the remaining five minutes, we have the dinner tonight, over at the Executive Learning Centre, basically right there out the back door and kitty-corner across to the building. Seating is starting at 5:30, reception before that.
16:41:06  <TranscriptKirsten> Dinner at 6.
16:41:28  <TranscriptKirsten> We hope to see you all there. There will be the attendees at the Teaching Open Source workshop that were there today, you can meet some of the professors who would like to engage.
16:41:38  <TranscriptKirsten> Dawn can introduce you. ANd all the presenters tomorrow will be at the dinner as well.
16:41:47  <TranscriptKirsten> If you have any questions about travel, etc, please ask us!
16:41:55  <TranscriptKirsten> Janina: Is anybody else going to the airport early tomorrow?
16:43:05  <TranscriptKirsten> Jutta: So I want to thank everyone who helped to set this up, Burt and Yura and Jamon and Iris and everyone. All the moderators and facilitators of the session, and all of you for taking the time to travel here.
16:43:32  <TranscriptKirsten> I think we had a very productive two days. And please continue to flesh out the wiki, the documents that we have, and as we post the various proposals please add suggestions, links, criticisms, whatever you want to the wiki as well.
16:43:34  <TranscriptKirsten> Thanks everyone.