RE: Auto-wcag promotion and communication

Additionally...

Utah State University's WebAIM WAVE tool now has a Stand-alone WAVE API that
runs behind firewalls: http://wave.webaim.org/api/ . 

Perhaps the University might be willing to have someone join us...........

* katie *
 
Katie Haritos-Shea 
Senior Accessibility SME (WCAG/Section 508/ADA/AODA)
 
Cell: 703-371-5545 | ryladog@gmail.com | Oakton, VA | LinkedIn Profile |
Office: 703-371-5545

-----Original Message-----
From: Katie Haritos-Shea GMAIL [mailto:ryladog@gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, October 9, 2014 1:36 PM
To: 'Wilco Fiers'; public-auto-wcag@w3.org
Cc: ryladog@gmail.com; Katie.Haritos-Shea@Chase.com
Subject: RE: Auto-wcag promotion and communication

So there are a couple of dev tools that I am aware of. 

HiSoftware has a dev tool called Compliance Deputy that does page-level only
tests that developers can run during development - it maps/connects to the
test rules of its mother ship Compliance Sheriff an enterprise-level tool.

Karl Groves recently released Tenon a developer tool that check code for
accessibility before it is allowed to be uploaded/checked-in to a production
server. He would be an awesome person to recruit - though I doubt he has the
time.

Deque has FireEyes that runs in Firebug, that runs in Firefox....:-)

Also, I would be happy to volunteer to join Birkir and whoever else will be
at CSUN for a talk - that would spread the news about the Group and promote
it to gain participants.......

I could also share something at TPAC on Plenary Day if given the
opportuntiy.....

* katie *
 
Katie Haritos-Shea
Senior Accessibility SME (WCAG/Section 508/ADA/AODA)
 
Cell: 703-371-5545 | ryladog@gmail.com | Oakton, VA | LinkedIn Profile |
Office: 703-371-5545

-----Original Message-----
From: Wilco Fiers [mailto:w.fiers@accessibility.nl]
Sent: Thursday, October 9, 2014 1:00 PM
To: public-auto-wcag@w3.org
Subject: Auto-wcag promotion and communication

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the good meeting again. Sorry it was a bit chaotic, the calls are
getting quite full. Maybe we should start working with a queue when we're on
6+ people. Anyway, what I wanted to talk about today was what we should 
6+ do
about promoting and communicating the efforts of the group. I think we've
been around long enough and created enough content that we can show people
that we're serious about this stuff and that we're not going to disappear
any time soon. So maybe it's time to get a little more organized.

So there's a couple of things which I'd like to hear all your thoughts
about. 

---Website---
The nice people of the W3C have been so kind to give us a Wordpress website.
Up until now we've only done stuff on the wiki, but I think it would be good
if we used this website as well as more of a calling card for what we do and
why we do it. perhaps we could create a few pages on things like our goals,
why we think this work is valuable, how people can use our work, what people
can do to contribute, etc. Do we do anything with regard to news or things
like that?

---Twitter---
This was an excellent suggestion by Birkir. One way we can make our work
more visible is through Twitter. There are a lot of professionals in our
field that use Twitter, and this could be a great tool through which we can
connect the work different organisations are doing, and of course our own
work. So should we have a Twitter account? What should we use it for? Who
should update it?

---Approach Tool Developers---
We have been quite fortunate with the initial outreach we got when launching
the group. W3C's announcement of our group got a few great people on our
team who participate or have participated in projects related to our work. I
think the biggest benefit this group can provide is that we collect all the
things that have been used in different projects and share this.

I've recently approached Jesse Beach, who I know through work with Quail.
She is currently the main developer of QuailJS and she'll be joining us in
the group. So are there other organisations / people we should try to
connect with to see if we can collaborate with?

---Presence at conferences--
Another important way to increase our visibility came from Birkir, who
proposed speaking at CSUN. We can, for starters, announce our existence and
explain the kind of work we are doing. But what other things would we like
to tell the world? The obvious one is to help tool developers. But what
about others? Are there broader themes we want to address and to speak
about? And if so what kinds of place do we want to take these to, and who do
we tell it to? Which breams me to the next point

---Vision---
And here is one I'm sneaking in, because I've been thinking about it a lot
and it has some relation to the subject. Do we all have the same idea of
where to go with this group. I have a pretty good idea for myself where I'd
like this group to go and what I'd like to achieve in the coming year(s).

I think automation of accessibility could be a great way to make
accessibility a more approachable subject for developers. I think currently,
the way most companies do accessibility (if at all) is by having a team of
dedicated accessibility experts audit their final project, or maybe they are
included in the project and check the work at the end of each phase of the
project.

What could really help to improve this in my opinion is if these developers
would use automated tools to audit their code, the same way they're using
test suites, validators and linting tools. This hasn't really worked well
until now I think, because tools developers have had a very hard time coming
up with good tests. Which is where our work comes in of collecting all of
their best ideas and combining them. If we can get that right, we might be
able to break the 20% coverage barrier, and if we can get more reliable
results, and help tool developers to better integrate their tools into the
work flow of developers, we maybe could hope to improve web accessibility
through that.

So what do you think? Am I messing things, either in this idea for the group
or in terms of our communication / presence?

I'll be sure to dedicate a big chunk of next week's meeting to the subject.
Looking forward to hear your thoughts.

Regards

Wilco

Received on Thursday, 9 October 2014 17:43:39 UTC