Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 15:07:49 -0800 (PST)
To: accessibleweb@u.washington.edu
Subject: Minutes from kick-off meeting March 13, 2003


  NEXT MEETING: Thursday, April 10, noon-1pm, at the ETS Conference
   Room, Health Sciences T-254. The guest speaker will be
   Helen Remick, Assistant Provost for Equal Opportunity who will
   speak on the UW's legal obligations relating to accessibility of
   Web sites and services.

Attending: Rick Ells, Mary Waters, Melody Winkle, Terry Dobrich, Carmen
Cook, Paul Beard, Nancy Weiner, Paul Gibson, Becky Smurr, Dan Comden, Joan
McCarter, Luke Wallace, Harry Love, Sheryl Burgstahler

Introductions and challenges people are encountering
  - Whether to provide long description of complex graphics used
    in distance education online courses
  - Making flash animations accessible
  - Hard to decide if a site is truly, officially accessible
    given the variety of guidelines
  - Providing accomodations for handicapped persons taking online
    courses
  - Which tools to use
  - Predicting where this is all going so we can make better
    decisions
  - Accessible design of online instructional sites
  - Maintaining accessible designs of sites maintained
    by groups
  - Finding out who is doing what and how successful is it being
  - Making accessibility just part of our work process
  - How can you just build accessibility in
  - Need a place to bring issues - how are you guys doing this?
  - How to be a pest about accessibility nicely
  - Knowing when you have done enough - where is the accessible
    design endpoint?
  - No matter how accesible I make something I can find someone who
    can't get to it

Meetings of AccessibleWeb@u
  The group agreed on the following plan for meetings:
  - Meetings will be held once a month on the second Thursday
    from noon to 1:00pm
  - To better get to know each other, for a while meetings will
    be held at locations around campus volunteered by members of
    the group
  - The meeting host provides cookies
  - General meeting format will be to have a guest speaker who
    gives a 15-20 minutes talk, followed by discussion

Locations of Meetings
  - April 10
    Host: Educational Technology Services
    Location: Health Sciences T-254
    Speaker: Helen Remick
  - May 8
    Host: DO-IT
    Location: Academic Computer Center
    Speaker: Sheryl Burgstahler, Dan Comden, Terry Thompson
  - June 12
    Host: Educational Outreach
    Location: Roosevelt Commons, 11th Ave NE and NE 43rd St
    Speaker: Joan McCarter, Luke Wallace

Projects
 Rick Ells C&C
  - Surveying web developers for how to better teach accessible design
  - Volunteers needed
 Dan Comden, Terry Thompson C&C
  - Studying accessibility of Carnegie 1 educational
    institutions web sites
  - Evaluation based on WCAG priority one criteria
  - Comparing results to Bobby
  - Trying to answer the question "how do you develop policies and
    procedures that lead to better accessibility overall?"
  - Identifying promising practices
  - U Texas at Austin was most accessible
 Melody Winkle C&C
  - Removing tables from UW Home Page and UWIN
  - Tested against many different browsers
 Luke Wallace, Educational Outreach
  - Redesign course delivery templates
  - Switching out of tables
  - New color scheme and navigation
  - Making it easier for course developers
  - Trying various experiments in navigation
 Harry Love, Health Sciences Libraries
  - HealthLinks
  - Encountering resistance to phasing out v4 browsers
  - Why do people keep using old software?

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