Accessibility WG Teleconference Minutes 01-12-12

Attendees

There are other sakai groups that are switching to Cauliflower for their conference calls.
One of the reasons for this is because it has local access numbers and you can access it through Skype.
A vote was taken on whether or not the Accessibility WG should switch, and the consensus was that there will be no changes.
Accessibility WG teleconferences will occur every other week until the end of the semester.
Mary will make changes to the wiki.

Yesterday the firss tbeta tag for 2.9 was released.
Brian says the new version will probably be ported over on Saturday.
An e-mail will be sent out over the weekend when it is done.
Joe recently did Firefox protocols. Links are on results page. one of them is Gradebook.
Scott has expressed availability next week to do testing.
Testing for the 2.9 accessibility review needs to be done.
They will keep putting out betas until they have a stable product, so testing will be ongoing.
Brian and joe are still imputting Jiras from issues already found.
Brian put some in before the holidays.
A lot of them that could be put in would be in neoportal, so he would rather just work with Gonzalo directly sometime next week.
Jiras for both Gradebook and Assignment still need attention.
Donna is going to work with Scott next week to familiarize herself on the testing process. She is not teaching this semester. she is primarily a Mac user.
Brian will send an e-mail to scott, who wil forward it to Donna so she can join the e-mail list.

One thing to retest is forums because they are rendered differently than in 2.8.
Forums is used by a lot of people who use Sakai.
This tool has traditionally caused a lot of accessibility issues, for people who use screen readers.
For example, they need to be able to differentiate between a reply to previous reply, topic, or thread.
One task for the Accessibility WG is to figure out if there are quick fixes, maybe pieces of text to indicate parts of a thread or a new thread.
Mary sent out an e-mail that contained what she believed to be more accessible forums.
These forums would not work for Sakai, because they were simpler forums. once a message is started, they go into a thread. There is no ability to reply to a specific person.
As a result, the Accessibility WG is still looking for examples of more accessible forums.
Joe suggested that there might be more accessible forums on Moodle. Brian doesn't know how hard it is to set up and run, but Moodle demos do exist.
Brian will look for a Moodle demo we can try.
Mary will ask Ball State and Purdue about Blackboard and write to ATHEN about Moodle to ask about the accessibility of forums.
Donna Goodin says that blind users at the University of Michigan have complained about inaccessibility of forums on blackboard.

Scott wrote a walkthrough script for the Chat tool, which is built into Neoportal.
Mary and Brian went through the chat feature once.
Once the beta is up and the fix is in to prevent crashing, Mary and Brian will go through it again.
The chat will be incorporated in the 3.0 release, which is scheduled for 2012.
There are similarities in top navigation; the neoportal mimmics 3.0.

Joe is working with developers from Sakai OAE on a formal review process for Sakai OAE.
joe is in the midst of talks with people who have links to the design group and developers. They seem to have questions about a full accessibility review .