Minutes of the Silver teleconference of 24 March 2017

Formatted minutes: https://www.w3.org/2017/03/24-silver-minutes.html

Text of the minutes:

    [1]W3C

       [1] http://www.w3.org/

                                - DRAFT -

                     Silver Task Force Teleconference

24 Mar 2017

    See also: [2]IRC log

       [2] http://www.w3.org/2017/03/24-silver-irc

Attendees

    Present
           Jan, Shawn, Jeanne

    Regrets
           Jemma, Sarah, Dave

    Chair
           Shawn, Jeanne

    Scribe
           jeanne

Contents

      * [3]Topics
          1. [4]How to look at the social model with Silver
          2. [5]Other topics
      * [6]Summary of Action Items
      * [7]Summary of Resolutions
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    Jan: The End of Average book. We all have to be better than
    average, the book says. We are now moving into an age of
    individualism. It costs so much money to go to college, and
    industry still can't find skilled workers.
    ... people will have to change in higher education to meet
    certifications for certain skillsets. People can't afford that
    kind of debt to still not have the skills to get a job.
    ... people should be able to design their own education
    program.

    Jeanne: I met with Jamie Knight of the BBC. We talked a lot
    about the BBC Mobile Accesisbility Guidelines.
    ... WCAG needs to move away from the medical model of
    accessibility and move more toward a social model of
    accessibility. That people are not disabled, they may have
    impairments, but it is the environment that disables them. We
    need to focus on change the environment that causes people to
    be disabled from what they want to accomplish.
    ... we need to design and code the web so it doesn't disable
    people
    ... his personal opinion is that automated tools don't work,
    because it makes people think that all they need to know about
    accessibility is in the audit report.
    ... I learned that we need to think about the interview and
    survey process about communicating with people the way they
    want to communicate.

    Shawn: We should start out the interview asking people how they
    want to communicate. This will be particularly important
    working wiith members of the deaf community. For example, we
    can text and write instead of trying to have a phone call.
    ... we also need to look at the W3C survey tool because many
    people find it difficult to use. It will skew our results if we
    aren't getting input from all the groups that we need to.
    ... How can we adapt this communication for the user, because
    people can focus on their important points, rather than how to
    communicate.
    ... It also shows that we are coming to listen to them, rather
    than forcing them to exert themselves to communicate with us.

How to look at the social model with Silver

    Shawn: I agree with a lot of what Jamie said. Personas that are
    medically oriented don't address the needs of people who don't
    have that medical condition, and people with multiple
    disabilities and situational difficulties.
    ... I think it is a difficult balance, because people do need
    to know what to do, but we don't want people to game the
    system, and just check the boxes.

    Jan: I think we should have a value statement of what (for
    example) color contrast does for a wider group of people than
    just people with low vision.

    '... for example, the aging population where people don't think
    they have a disability.

    scribe: it could be a document that government could use, but
    it needs to be a useful document for industry to use.

    Sahwn: I often use the example of situational impairments that
    are very common. FOr example, a gray on gray font and
    background, and I just woke up and I haven't had my coffee yet.
    Or a person is trying to use an app and they have an upset
    toddler on their lap. Or you are walking down the street in
    NYC, trying to find a restaurant and you have to click through
    16 screens to find the menu.
    ... Another example is drunk accessibility testing (joke)
    because there is vision, cognitive and motor impairments.
    ... the purpose is to look at disability differently than "some
    person who uses software you have never seen and is having
    problems with it".
    ... maybe Silver can be oriented about having a framework that
    can expand to different kinds of interactions and then have
    user interfaces that make those interactions less disabling.
    ... like an image, that is primarily a visual medium, so you
    provide alternatives

    Jeanne: We need research behind this idea.

    Shawn: We need research and experiments with the models.

    Jan: If we start looking at disabilities as problems with the
    environment, we need to educate people to not to make
    assumptions about the audience and their abilities.
    ... people don't understand the disabilities, the barriers that
    are denying them access to good paying jobs/careers
    ... I like the ability videos that the EO group has just put
    out.
    ... I know it can't be in the standard, but we have to make
    sure the standard point to those materials.
    ... otherwise, coders wont' realize they are coding a barrier
    into the product.

    Sahwn: OTher platforms make it easy to creat accessibility
    products. The web does not. The standards that are there to
    create documents and apps are based on 1995 assumptions of what
    the web should be.
    ... on mobile platforms, a simple app is accessible by default
    if they use the platform conventions.
    ... on the web, it isn't a platform that is made for accessble
    web applications.
    ... making web apps accessible, takes a ridiculous amount of
    time and resources to do it. That is the fault of the web
    platform. ARIA takes too much knowledge to use. The web
    platform is not designed for applications.

    Jeanne: This would a great question to ask Tim Berners Lee. I
    put him in the interview list, because I thought there would be
    bigger questions that he might the right visionary to ask.

    Shawn: It might not be possible. I haven't heard anything from
    Web Components and Shadow DOM in a while.
    ... but it still comes down to the flat page model, and it may
    not do anything to fix that.

Other topics

    Shawn: I wanted to talk about the tracker and what needs to
    happen for researchers. Let's talk about that on Tuesday.
    ... This was a good brainstorming session.

Summary of Action Items

Summary of Resolutions

    [End of minutes]
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