WebMail Accessibility Interest Group

Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services (CITES) and Disability Resources and Educational Services (DRES)

University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign

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Teleconference Details

Date: 2006-09-21

Time: 1:00 PM CDT

Agenda

Hello everyone,

We are at a stage that we need to work collaboratively on the WebMail guidelines. 
I would like to encourage our members to dedicate a few minutes of your time to work individually on in a group at least in one WebMail related tasks. We all are familiar with Webmail related tasks and we just need to organize our thoughts and write down our findings.

Here's the list of WebMail Tasks so far we identified:

1. Composing an e-mail (covered)
2. Viewing a folder (rough draft but not covered)
3. Creating a folder
4. Reading an e-mail(rough draft but not covered)
5. Adding/modifying an entry in Addressbook (rough draft but not covered)
6. Using Addressbook
7. User preferences and options

The following tasks are not directly related to WebMail but WebMail applications are embedding more interesting features. We haven't discussed it in our working group yet and so we haven't decided if we want to cover these tasks or not but here's some more:

8. Search?
9. Calendar?
10. Event?
11. news?
12. Task list/To-do list?
13. Instant Messaging?
14. Audio conferencing?
15. video conferencing?
16. Ads?

It would be nice if  everyone pick a task and work on it. If more than one person is interested to work on a particular task, then I suggest that they work together on it. 
You better pick a task by yourself, otherwise I might assign a task to you. :) Just kidding.

How a rough draft can be furnished for a task?

People have probably different approaches to furnish an accessibility report and you are welcome to use any method you are comfortable with but this is how I usually do it:

1. Identify all relevant controls for a particular task in a WebMail environment
2. Organize the controls in a kind of logical groupings
3. Specify the types of form controls
4. Identify potential accessibility issues
5. Organize the findings in the following categories:
   a. Global issues
   b. Configuration issues
   c. Navigation issues
   d. Text equivalence issues
   e. Styling issues
   f. Scripting and automation issues

Please let me or the list know what task or tasks you would like to work on.

I have already worked on a few of the tasks but I can work on Search, Calendar, and possibly on Using Addressbook. If anyone interested to work on either of these tasks with me before our next meeting on Thursday, please let me know.

Thanks,
Hadi

Minutes

WebMail Accessibility Working Group Teleconference 09/21/2006
By: Ken Petri


Started talking in IRC on Thursday 09/21/2006 2:00 PM Eastern.
 
Hadi Rangin, Jon Gunderson, Ken Petri and an unidentified person (JC) on IRC channel. Ken taking notes via IRC. First part of conversation well documented. Second part resulted in changes to the shortcut section of the template, linked to in this transcript, below.

------------------------------------------
Hadi: I have been thinking about talking to people at educational institutions to get more people to actively participate in taking tasks. What we could do is connect a person from an educational institution with a person at a commercial vendor. This might get more commercial partners more seriously involved. 

Jon: Not sure if they aren't coming to our regular telecons they would participate one on one. I'm also not sure what we want in the documents. What would the smaller working groups come back with, unless we have a solid template.  

Hadi: We have a template for organizing the documents.  

Ken: Hadi's template from a previous email, for how task documentation might proceed. I'm pasting it in: 
  1. Identify all relevant controls for a particular task in a WebMail environment 
  2. Organize the controls in a kind of logical groupings 
  3. Specify the types of form controls 
  4. Identify potential accessibility issues 
  5. Organize the findings in the following categories: 
    a. Global issues 
    b. Configuration issues 
    c. Navigation issues 
    d. Text equivalence issues 
    e. Styling issues 
    f. Scripting and automation issues 

Hadi: Here's the URL of the current doc: http://www.cita.uiuc.edu/collaborate/webmail/docs/template.html 

Hadi: A 30-minute phone call would be helpful, one-on-one. If there is not commercial/vendor input there is the possiblility that then the best practices become "Jon and Hadi's best practices." 

Hadi: People are interested in following the discussion. But there is a necessity for people to participate directly.
Jon: Last week's discussion was very good, especially around shortcut keys. The format seems to be working pretty well. Maybe this is just a bad week. 

Jon: Hope that when we get a document down in rough draft, there will be more attention. And my experience is that when there are things to look at from a previous meeting, people are likely to come. 

Hadi: What about getting together a template and providing members of the group with a task, assigning, or on a volunteer baisis 

-> JC has joined webmail 
JC: What I would like to see is for us all to work on the same task at a given time. Ideally, we should all be brainstorming on a specific issue/feature prior to the meeting and bring the ideas to the meeting. 

(Conversation changes to talk on shortcut keys section of template document)
Hadi: shortcut keys on virtually every control 

Jon: the ability with Javascript to set events and keystroke combinations on the fly and saved as a preference 

Jon: and how do you inform the user what access keys are mapped and in which views 

Jon: every dialog has "shortcut keys" as a link so that users can do a contextual lookup. Keys are set per view and are configurable.

Hadi: Each view has a glossary 

Ken: And there should be a way to save the preferences.

Jon: The user needs to know how to find the shortcut key area and have an idea of the functionality associated with each key.

Hadi: If every page has a heading that lists under it shortcut keys, then the problem of locating the glossary is solved.

Hadi: I'm not sure how it is possible to give people an idea of the functionality. A certain amount of knowledge about an application is assumed.  If the person knows nothing about the functionality of the application, then there's not much to do. The best you can do is help them along.

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