(Second Half) 2021 Meeting Notes

December 24, 2021

This meeting was canceled.

December 10, 2021

Attending:

Chris Knapp – Knapp Strategic/LearnXP

Topics for this meeting:

Chris Knapp hosted—nobody else joined the call so he just used the time to continue working on the “Sakai 22 Accessibility Regression Test Script”

Chris sent the following email out to the Sakai A11Y list serve…

“Our plan was to have Josh Wilson from the Marketing team join us at our next meeting to go over the Sakai Road Map, but we have decided to wait and have Josh present at our first Sakai Accessibility Working Group meeting of the New Year, which is scheduled for Friday, January 7 at 11am.

In the meantime, I am sharing the current version of the Roadmap (v2) with everyone via email so that you can review and comment before January if you'd like. 

For context... Josh described the various proposed items in the roadmap in his recent Sakai Virtual Conference workshop. Here's the workshop recorded video; the description of proposed roadmap items begins at 19:49. There's some background about the goals for the Roadmap as well as our iterative process from 3:09 - 6:57

Also, I have attached the most up-to-date version of the “Sakai 21 Accessibility Regression Test Script” Excel spreadsheet for your reference, as well as a draft of a new “WAM-A11Y Jira Review Process” document that we will go over during this Friday’s meeting.”

November 26, 2021

This meeting was canceled

November 12, 201

Attending:

Chris Knapp – Knapp Strategic/LearnXP

Jen Bethmann – Illinois State University

Topics for this meeting:

Jen Bethmann and Chris Knapp spent some time looking into an issue Dave Eveland from Johnson University had brought up about the best way to embed links to PDFs and videos in Sakai, whether these should open up in the same tab or in a new tab/window. Jen and Chris adapted one of Chris’ Course sites to test the screen reader behavior when clicking on links to PDFs and videos embedded into a Lessons page on a Sakai course site. They were able to verify that the default in Sakai is for the PDFs to open in a new window/tab, which is ideal, since it allows the user to use either the Control+W or Control+Shift+Tab keyboard shortcuts to close out of the window and return focus to Sakai.

Specific to the issue of embedded videos—Jen made the point that certain users, for example, those  with cognitive disabilities, prefer to have all of the information right there in one place so it’s not a distraction, so she recommended that videos be embedded on the Sakai page, and leave it up to the individual users to determine how they want to access/view the videos. A follow-up email was sent to Dave summarizing these issues—Tiffany Stull from Virginia also weighed in to explain that the default behavior of having PDFs and videos open in new windows/tabs has to do with a security issue, as well as to provide a consistent user experience and prevent against any unintentional loss of information when accidentally closing out of windows without saving changes.

Chris also brought Jen up to speed on the new “wam-a11y” “wam-a11y-reviewed” and “screen-reader-qa-needed” labels/filters that Shawn, Gonzalo and him have come up with for working through the current backlog of accessibility-related Jiras.

Chris also gave Jen an update on the plan to help evaluate some of the new Bootstrap 5 components that the Sakai UX team is going to be looking at for the Trinity (updated Sakai U.I.) project. Chris is going to talk with Shawn Foster and Michael Greene about having Jen sit in on a future Sakai UX team meeting to share some of her own experiences evaluating different Bootstrap 5 components from an accessibility perspective, especially some things to think about for ensuring that they will work as intended when incorporated into an actual Sakai build environment.

October 29, 2021

This meeting was canceled.

October 15, 2021

Attending:

Jen Bethmann – Illinois State University

Topics for this meeting:

Jen Bethmann hosted—nobody else joined the call so she signed off after about a half hour.

October 1, 2021

Attending:

Chris Knapp – Knapp Strategic/LearnXP

Tiffany Stull – Virginia

Jen Bethmann – Illinois State University

Topics for this meeting:

Chris, Tiffany, and Jen discussed how to prioritize existing accessibility-related issues in the current Jira filter.

Talked through some strategies for cleaning-up the current backlog of issues in the filter, for example, removing any tickets that don’t include the “SAK” prefix, or any issues pertaining to old technologies like Internet Explorer which are no longer being supported.

Tiffany wasn’t able to get the Jiras with the right statuses to come up with the search that we worked on, so she went back to the email template that Matt Clare used to use for the meetings and adapted his search from there.

View search results

Tiffany also recommended that we have some of the regular QA folks go through and complete keyboard testing on our “Sakai 21 Accessibility Regression Test Script” as a first level check for any potential accessibility issues.

Chris also worked with Shawn Foster to send out the below email to the Sakai Accessibility Working Group and Sakai UX Team about hosting a joint meeting of the two groups at one of their upcoming meetings…

“Hi, Sakai UX group and Sakai Accessibility group!

Chris Knapp and I have been discussing how our two groups can collaborate on our current initiatives: the Sakai Accessibility Strategy and the new Sakai UI redesign.

We started brainstorming some of the ways that our two groups can work on these projects together:

• The SWITCH initiative: building an inventory of components being used across Sakai and doing some A-B testing of components to determine which are most accessible

• Cleaning up the page structure to be more accessible and adding Landmarks to make navigating more intuitive for screen reader users

• Reintroducing an accessibility help topic keyboard command (ALT+0) that can be accessed from anywhere within Sakai and provide instructions for navigating the interface

• Establishing consistent use of components, access keys, etc. throughout Sakai as the new design is built

The A11Y group has put materials about the current accessibility VPAT plan in a Google folder (including a recent session recording, transcript, and related materials), which you can check out:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16iat_-V8GylOTkP55UQF0y-z9u6QcYIw

We would like to discuss these ideas with you at our future Sakai UX group meeting on October 20th, so we hope you can join us then at 11am EDT in BigBlueButton room 3.

Thanks,

-Shawn and Chris”

September 17, 2021

Attending:

Chris Knapp – Knapp Strategic/LearnXP

Jen Bethmann – Illinois State University

Josh Wilson – Longsight

Wilma Hodges – Longsight

Gonzalo Silverio – University of Michigan

Topics for this meeting:

Josh and Chris facilitated a group discussion about the Sakai 22 VPAT plan.

For anyone who wasn’t able to participate in the discussion, you can visit the below Google Drive to access the session recording and transcript. The session recording, transcript, and related materials can all be found under the “Meetings” section in the “September 17, 2021” folder.

Sakai Accessibility Working Group 

September 3, 2021

This meeting was canceled

August 20, 2021

Attending:

Chris Knapp – Knapp Strategic/LearnXP

Topics for this meeting:

Chris Knapp hosted—nobody else joined the call so he just used the time to continue working on the “Sakai 21 Accessibility Regression Test Script” Excel spreadsheet.

August 6, 2021

Attending:

Chris Knapp – Knapp Strategic/LearnXP

Jen Bethmann – Illinois State University

Topics for this meeting:

Chris updated Jen on his recent testing of the “Lessons” tool.

Discussed current status of VPAT

Chris talked about some of the Jiras that he has recently done testing on—plans to go back and test the T&Q error message one with Shawn using the new production environment Chuck set up for them.

Jen to draft a response to Tiffany RE: her email about how to include help text for disabled fields in Date Manager.

July 23, 2021

This meeting was canceled

July 9, 2021

Attending:

Chris Knapp – Knapp Strategic/LearnXP

Topics for this meeting:

Chris Knapp hosted—nobody else joined the call so he just used the time to continue working on the “Sakai 21 Accessibility Regression Test Script” Excel spreadsheet.