For future releases, there will be small issues that will be resolved in a point release later on.
Content authoring and a different way to migrate data from older to newer versions are the primary focuses for upcoming releases.
For 1.3 most of the focus will be adding new features and performance tweaks.
Many Jiras will be targeted in 1.3.
Jiras from this accessibility review won’t be the focus until 1.5, although there has been discussion on the list to have accessibility be the focus sooner than that.
The release date for 1.3 is up in the air because of a migration problem in 1.2. They would like to get it out before June 10, which is the Sakai conference.
Accessibility Review Wrap-Up
It’s time to move on from the accessibility review. If there are any outstanding reviews, please get them tested by Friday. Please have all accessibility results from testing posted by Tuesday, May 15.
The server will be reset over the weekend and upgraded to 1.2.
Scott has one more outstanding item. Mary also has one more.
Joe is working on posting results to Confluence from Mary and Jane.
Joe is going to test the add content dialog and worlds.
After the 15th, Joe will post a short 1-4 page executive summary style report describing the overall state of accessibility for OAE to the Accessibility WG e-mail list. After it has been approved by the WG, it will be sent out to the core team and publicly talked about at the Sakai conference.
Joe’s goal is to have all Jira issues added to the system so they can be documented in three weeks.
Many issues that have been discussed and found have already been fixed for 1.3, and some new issues have been found. Joe has to locate the appropriate existing Jira ticket for each issue documented and add it to the document.
Features that have been changed since 1.1 include the collections widget. There was talk about removing the suggested content, located on dashboard, but that won’t change until a later version. The content authoring feature has changed quite a bit. The activities feed will also change.
Joe will send out an e-mail to talk about all the changes in features so WG can discuss future reviews.
Other OAE Work
One accessibility issue that has been worked on is including a skip navigation link. Other accessibility issues include a much better heading structure, and adding ARIA landmarks.
Some accessibility issues that need to be resolved have no target release, such as inline editing where you click on what looks to be text and dynamically turns to where you can edit it. There are also outstanding issues if you go to the Jira system and search for accessibility issues in OAE.
Sakai CLE
Sakai 2.9 News
There are still a couple of weeks until the release of 2.9. The current beta version is 0.5.
The Users Presence feature has been replaced. Where it used to be a div element with a hidden heading so you could see that feature in the headings list, now it’s like the Neoportal chat feature. It’s an icon on the bottom of the page. If activated it pops up a DHTML dialog box that lists the users. It has an ARIA live feature announcing every five seconds. They used assertive for the setting, so no matter what you are doing, if typing, it will interrupt the typing announcement to announce the name of the person who has entered or left. Brian will write a walkthrough script where tasks might include: navigating to Users Present, see who’s there, and close it. It is tied in with the chat feature but not disabled by default. It’s not demarcated in structure, so it’s hidden at the bottom of the page below the footer. So there is no way to find it unless you navigate to the bottom of the page. There is hardly any keyboard focus when someone is using this feature.
The date picker is going to be replaced. Brian is going to check that out. He hopes to get to the date picker next week.
He is still compiling a list of significant Jiras and their statuses. He will send a list of these to the accessibility lists once a week. CLE people are on the list as well, and they are monitoring it. Brian will try and summarize the effect of these accessibility issues on users.
Other Business
Sakai Conference
Sakai conference is June 10 in Atlanta.
Brian and Joe will present a BOF and an accessibility update at conference.
Brian sent out e-mail to many Sakai lists to say representatives from WG will be there to talk, work and give demos to try out AT on their tools so we can try and spread awareness to developers who may not know about or have accessibility in mind.
Presnetation materials will be posted to conference site and WG after the sessions.
Automated Accessibility Checkers
There has been a lot of talk about automated checkers for accessibility There have been concessions made that say these checkers do not catch everything, but they want to at least catch low hanging fruit.
If there are any plugins that you think to recommend to OAE developers to obtain more understanding of accessibility issues they might be causing, please post to the WG list any input you might have Please make sure the subject line says something to indicate that the discussion relates to accessibility checkers. In the next two weeks Joe would like to give them something..
One tool is Deque Systems WorldSpace FireEyes. FireEyes does a great job with checking accessibility of hidden content; other tools give strange results. FireEyes makes an effort to not give false results for checking color contrast ratios. There is very good online support.
WebAIM's Wave Accessibility Evaluation Tool/ does not look inside iframes. OAE is mostly html5 and dynamic content using jQuery or some other javascript coding, so no iframes to worry about.
Be careful of color checkers; some give false results.