WAI Education & Outreach Meeting, December 11, 1998

• Attendees
• Action Item Summary

1. Outreach Updates
2. Do we need short & friendly guidelines?
3. Use of WAI curriculum by other folks
4. Additional outreach on "Call for Cross-Disability Review"
5. Planning future media coverage
6. Review status/priorities of Section 2  (Promotion & Outreach) of Deliverables
7. Upcoming meetings

ATTENDEES

• CL: Chuck Letourneau
• JB: Judy Brewer
• GF: Geoff Freed
• AC: Alan Cantor
• WL: William Loughborough
• PB: Peter Bosher
• RN: Rob Neff
• SS: Sheela Sethuraman
• BK: BK DeLong
• MN: Masafume Nakane
• JA: Jim Allen

ACTION ITEM SUMMARY

1. Peter Bosher and Sheela Sethuraman to talk to provide some input to PAWG on "user friendliness"
2. Chuck Letourneau to integrate W3C copyright info into curriculum slide set.
3. Peter Bosher will co-ordinate with Stella O'Brien to ask for EU participation in the cross disability review of the three guidelines.
4. E-mail Judy if you have thoughts on meeting schedule. Should it remain weekly or return to bi-weekly?

1. Outreach updates

• CL: has been asked to do web-developer training on accessible design in January. Will train 10-20 people over one or two days. CL would like to use the curriculum set at the training aid. Give them a good practical test.
• JB: BK DeLong, Bebo White, Kynn Bartlett were doing some training on Web accessibility at Builder.com this week. 30-40 people in attendance.
• PB: National Grid for learning Conference in UK went very well: Minister of Education was there, Chris Stevens (BECTa disability co-ordinator for National Grid for Learning). George Kersher gave a good presentation.
• GF: last week talked to 125 pubic TV webmasters about accessibility.
• WL: writes an article in a quarterly magazine that goes out to a few thousand people.
• JB: BK Delong gave a panel session on Web Accessibility to 30-40 people (with Kynn Bartlett and Bibo White) in New Orleans. Harvey Bingham has submitted a workshop to XML Europe 99 conference. Dominic Archambault has printed a French document to introduce web accessibility guidelines. Also developing accessibility forms for webmasters.

2. Discussion: do we need short & friendly guidelines version?

• JB: Started with Kynn Bartlett's complaint that the guidelines were too big, to dense, to complex for his needs. Others say it is a reference work and has to be available in that form and that other forms include the reference card. But others see the need for an "in between-sized" guideline. Do we need a user friendly guideline version?
• Quick Poll of EO ?
• CL: Guidelines as big as they need to be, let others do the simple after-market work (cf Web Accessibility for Dummies) - Mike Paciello is writing a book.
• BK: we need to help others in the industry develop the user-friendly guideline.
• PB: thinks it can be user friendly as well as huge, especially on the web… paper copy another story - would need some.
• RN: the guidelines are good enough the way they are, but would support a quick-list.
• SS: don't think there is a problem with the current guidelines, but we could look at it and make it more user-friendly - make them more easily navigable. But not directly an EO work item.

ACTION ITEM: PB and SS to talk to provide some input to PAWG on "user friendliness"
• WL: thinks Shiela and Peter should join the PAWG.
• WL: thinks there must be a checklist (as was originally intended/promised from PAWG.
• CL: the checklist was deferred until a stable reference work was developed - too much work to keep it up to date.
• AC: we are here to educate, but his reading of the subject is that the size is a major concern and thinks it is our responsibility to make a 3 or 4 page document to complement the 50 page document. Perhaps an "executive summary" of each of the points on the quick-tips card.
• WL: is certain that the job belongs to PAWG to fill out the various levels.
• JB: EO must remind PAWG that the checklist is important.

3. Use of WAI curriculum by other folks

• JB: has been meeting with person at North-western University who would like to use all of our materials as their course materials for their curriculum (a for-profit operation).
• BK: we should have some sort of oversight or notion of what courses the materials are being used in. Agrees we should make sure material doesn't get diluted or have errors creep in to it.
• WL: The material at the moment does not have copyright on it.
• RN: would we want to ask for Memorandum of Understandings with users of the material.
• JB: that would be quite unusual in these circumstances. We should at least have the W3C copyright boilerplate in the introduction.
• CL: also easy to put "Copyright 1998 © W3C" on every slide.

ACTION ITEM: CL to integrate W3C copyright info into curriculum slide set.
• WL: thinks it most useful to get wide distribution is to modularize it.
• GF: Chuck is doing that and the final set will be much better than is currently reflected.
• WL: if someone is going to start a course on Web design, and wants to use these materials in the course, the question is how do we monitor it.
• JB: the point was to have these materials used as is by trainers. But what if someone wants to take and repackage and sell this material?
• JB: maybe the way to get value back to WAI is to ask for "in-kind" support (promotion, etc.)

4. Additional outreach on "call for cross-disability review"

• Consensus: people liked the request and like the "weekly" updates.
• JB: has been personally targeting people she knows in the non-blindness communities to get their input.
• JA: has contacted people about the Learning Disability community and received a list of 12 names. He copied that information to the people on that list.
• JB: is anybody else on the EO doing that kind of thing?
• SS: can do something at CAST regarding the call for review of the various guidelines.
• PB: do you have much European contacts?
• JB: no, and would love his help since she doesn't have many non-blindness contacts in EU.
• PB: Stella O'Brien might have good contacts. He could co-ordinate with her and send out the request to as many as possible

ACTION ITEM: Peter Bosher will co-ordinate with Stella O'Brien to ask for EU participation in the cross disability review of the three guidelines.

5. Planning future media coverage

• BK: thought that one of EO's biggest priorities would be to get in touch with publishers and writers of mainstream and accessibility on a regular basis to be kept informed of the latest and greatest. Educate journalists in general about web accessibility. And he would be perfectly willing to co-ordinate this.
• JB: W3C has had a pretty good PR engine, and had previously been doing a good job of building up to good press. W3C traditionally has only a few milestones that suite PR (first working draft, Proposed Recommendation, Recommendation). But the main PR person (Sally Khudari) left, and the process hasn't been as clear as before. JB would like to bump up the priority of posting or archiving the press we are getting now.
• There was considerable discussion.

6. Review of status & priorities of Section 2 of Deliverables list

- Brochures - fairly high priority;
- Reference Card - doing great, getting feedback to quick-tips list;
- Bulletin - highest priority, for people who aren't on any WAI list, a concise once-per-month list of resources and news. The IG update is essentially a pilot for that, although the bulletin would only be once a month. To broaden our contacts much more widely.
- Dissemination Points - mailing lists, multipliers - Ron can do this.
- Press Coverage - discussed earlier also should have high priority.
- Interactive Web site/ Mirroring/ CD-ROM
- Articles/Chapters/Books

• Most: bulletin to have higher priority than brochure because its numbers .
• WL: Offered dissenting opinion - brochure higher than bulletin. Should have some Braille embossed on it to show people what we are up against.

7. Upcoming meetings

Meeting ended at 10:02 AM EST.