Accessibility WG Teleconference Minutes 03-10-2011

Attendees

The Accessibility WG is pursuing third party certification.
A list has been created with the names, web sites and contact information for several companies that do web accessibility assessments.
Blackboard, Moodle, and Desire to Learn (D2L) already have third-party certifications.
The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) was considered by the group, because they offer web site accessibility certification. However, because they are geared toward non-visual users, the group thought there should be other options.
Brian is looking for feedback on what core tools to test. After feedback is received, the group can write something up to pass to Sakai Management about going for third party certification.

There are quite a few Jira tickets still on the list.
Brian has gone through the list, and he noticed that on the tickets there is no section to indicate whether the fix was merged into 2.8. He wanted to know where to find what versions the fix was merged into.
Gonzalo said the place to find where fixes have been merged is the version commits tab.
Brian will reopen some of the Jiras, make sure they will be merged into 2.8 and mark them as resolved since closing them makes them invisible.

The WG has a wiki space.
Now that Sakai is breaking up into Sakai 2 and OEA, the group needs to keep the documentation very clear for each version.
Brian will be reorganizing that, and he hopes to have it completed in May.
Feedback is requested, especially for the statements for CLE and OAE.
The documentation will be including help pages and include contact information for making suggestions.
Look for more communication about this on the WG Accessibility e-mail list.

Two issues were reported from the feedback provided by Amy Greenbaum.
The first issue is to provide a summary of the layout of the page. The way Miami organized their Sakai instance is to provide tool tips which describe the purpose of each tool. A description is provided when someone uses a mouse to hover over it.
Regarding Kurzweil, the buttons were Miami's layout.

The original plan for upcoming versions of Sakai 2 was to allow the university to configure either CKEditor or FCKEditor as the default WYSIWYG.
There is now concern that FCKEditor won't work with IE9. When the next release candidate for IE9 comes out, FCKEditor will be retested, so no further work on that Jira has been done.

Patches have been put in for the Assignments tool.
An e-mail was sent to Gonzalo regarding the label on the list navigator.
The e-mail discussed how the select element is currently labeled as instructions on how to use it. These instructions are no longer current, and the label should describe the purpose of the combo box, such as "select this to view 20 items."
Brian will submit subtasks for that Jira.
Brian verified the Jira for < and > buttons. They look good on the nightly servers.

The hierarchy of forums is difficult to understand, because it's hard to distinguish between topics, replies and comments.
Blackboard also has this issue.
Feedback regarding more accessible forums: The Moodle forums tool is easy to understand because it uses tables to organize the information.
Gonzalo is working on a forums project, and he would appreciate some best practices on how to design forums accessibly.

The accessibility WG is currently looking at other models to find a more accessible e-mail tool. Once we find one, we will be able to implement it.

The accessibility WG is coming up with best practices so that everyone will be able to access pop-up messages and tool tips.
Hopefully in May we will have time to put together some use cases and start testing those out.

In the tool menus, it starts with reset, tool title and help. Usually there is a bar with different options, and it's coded differently from tool to tool.
Sometimes the menu will be in a list. Sometimes it will show up as forms or links.
In profile2, the options in the menu are links.
The menu is a table in one tool.
Regarding workflow buttons, sometimes button accesskeys are different from tool to tool.
Sometimes the workflow buttons are buttons or links - again, it depends on the tool.
The Accessibility WG will have to check for these inconsistencies and get them ironed out.

The WG needs to get implicitly labeled check boxes and radio buttons and select onchange elements implemented.
jQuery routines have been implemented for both of those.
Another navigation improvement would be for Sakai to include landmarks.
Landmarks give the user the option to navigate to, for example, the main content on a page without using headings.
ARIA attributes include role=navigation or role=main to designate various functions on a page.
Screen readers announce landmarks and have a key to move between all the landmarks on a page.
Another thing to implement in Sakai is making jump to links more useable tor keyboard only users.

Scott Williams has a JAWS user coming for ten hours a week to do testing. Scott has also started doing testing.
An item to add to the next agenda is a Report out on portal for Student 2.9/ Gonzalo is offering to report on it.
Scott reports that the Drop box tool is difficult to use with Voiceover for Mac. He couldn't get VO to announce the name of the uploaded file until he interacted with the level 4 heading.
Mary, Margaret and Brian gave an Oncourse accessibility presentation to Megan May and other web developers, who spent half the day listening attentively and asking questions.
Brian is co-presenting on the accessibility of Sakai at next week's CSUN conference. Other presenters will discuss Blackboard, D2L, and Moodle.