Teleconference Information

• Feedback on the public PRDs
• Status of the Enterprise server

Mirapoint Accessibility Teleconference 09/17/2007
By: Gale Stafford

Next meeting

• Date: Monday October 1, 2007
• Time: 3:30 PM EDT; 2:30 PM CDT; 1:30 PM MDT; 12:30 PM PDT
• Phone: TBD

participants

• Hadi Rangin – University of Illinois
• Jon Gunderson – University of Illinois
• Gale Stafford – University of Illinois
• Miah Adams – University of Colorado at Boulder
• Howard Kramer – University of Colorado at Boulder
• Larry Herman - Mirapoint

Discussion

Note: Allan Tuchman of the University of Illinois was unable to attend; however, prior to the meeting, he submitted his comments concerning the Product Requirements Document (PRD) over the MIRAPOINT-ACCESS-L@LISTSERV.UIUC.EDU list.

Meeting opens and everyone makes introductions, briefly discusses their role.

Hadi asks for feedback on Jon’s comments concerning the Web Accessibility PRD that Larry sent out.

Miah asks about PRD, noticed that Standard Edition wasn’t mentioned in the PRD but Corporate Edition was mentioned.

Larry:

• regarding the future of Standard Edition and Corporate Edition, the debate goes on at Mirapoint. Larry would like to see these two presentations (Standard and Corporate) merge. There’s also the possibility of a third, separate application emerging.
• MOS 3.9 is about to come out the door
• MOS 4.0 expected to be available for customer use in roughly November 2007.
• We’ll have two parallel streams: a MOS 3 branch and MOS 4 branch.
• MOS 3.9 will be functionally equivalent to MOS 4.0 but based on different kernels.
• Larry doesn’t like to use these terms but will describe the two versions in this way: the MOS 3.9 kernel is based off of BSD. MOS 4.0 is based off of Red Hat Linux.
• Larry mentioned the need to embed these accessibility-related features into future version of our products. Another approach is to focus on making an accessible branding for webmail Standard Edition.

Miah asks about having a special branding applied to S.E. to make it accessible.

Larry: Temple University developed a brand for the most simple mode (i.e., “No Frames Mode”) inside S.E, with the goal of improving accessibility of the application. The No Frames Mode seems to be the best mode for readers. They’ve been successful in rolling that out to some of their users who use screen readers. Larry will contact them to see if they’d be willing to share their branding.

Jon discusses his suggested modifications to the PRD:

• Re: ADA compliance. Not clear what it means for the web right now. An application can be fully ADA compliant but not accessible.
• Re: Accessibility checkers. A better tool from UIUC.
• Re: AT screen readers. Screen readers and magnifiers can be used to test usability.
• Re: the Feature Description. Jon has a number of suggested modifications.

Larry asks for clarification on Jon’s “labels and form controls” suggested modification.

Jon explains need to associate that label text with form control. Google example – they don’t label their text box.

Jon explains more of his suggested modifications:

• Re: ARIA and widgets. ARIA markup is much more trivial than getting the keyboard part right.
• Re: Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) which use AJAX. Flash and Flash/Flex technology.

Larry says he can peruse all of Jon’s comments and reply back by email. So far the comments from Jon look great. Easy and understandable.