Reflections on the COGA meeting

To the RQTF

Just before heading to bed (11pm here), just wanted to share some reflections on the COGA meeting:


  1.  I felt a little bit uncomfortable about the first topic which seemed to infer that we're the Research Questions Task Force, but aren't prepared to take on research questions for COGA.. I think  that we can perform basic literature searches, but as Jason indicated not necessarily literature reviews due to not having the knowledge around cognitive disability.  I think we need to revisit this with COGA and explain we are open to them for putting research questions, but we need to have a specific remit: it seemed on the call that the type of research is very broad cognitive information witchwood make it difficult to narrow down useful  literature. I don't' want to close the door completely though and would like to flesh out a bit more on what we can actually do to help within our abilities.
  2.  The second topic makes more sense and again I'd like to let COGA know that we a door  they can knock on, especially if there are very specific questions we can really dig into. A narrow scope would allow us to find specific papers, Nd if the scope were narrow enough perhaps we could put together a basic literature review around our findings
  3.  I think the elephant in the roomt that really needs to be addressed, and appreciate we ran out of time for this, 'Is mental health a part of W3C WAI work?' I the this question is far bigger than RQTF, COGA and even APA. We all generally agree in the group that it falls int a different category, but COGA clearly believe it is a factor, and inferring its another type of disability. I'd like to propose that W3C WAI needs to have some definition about the relevance of mental health to broader accessibility work so we can then understand how it fits in and how we can address any research questions that come our way. I'm assuming there's a reason why this wasn't in recent COGA work and also a reason why it's coming in now, so I feel that addressing the relevance more broadly makes it much easier ofr us and other groups to understand their role here.
  4.  Communication: just to throw in my two cents: if the current system doesn't work, I don't think having a standalone COGA webpage s the answer or some extra notification, I think we need to fix the existing one for everyone. In the public WAI mailing list, the subset of WAI-IG just for announcements, I don't' recall seeng remote meetings there for example, it tends to just focus on completed work. Likewise at w3.org/wai the lastest news item that I can see as in May and again can't see public working drafts. If the two major public notification channels don't mention it, I can see how this would make things difficult. That said, I do remember a lot of effort being put into letting COGA know about this work so I don't want ot suggest in any way that there is already a lot of active communication going on, but perhaps the public information can be improved which in turn would help everyone.

Just my two cents - happy to discuss.

Thanks everyone

Scott.


[Scott Hollier logo]Dr Scott Hollier
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