RE: Auto-wcag promotion and communication

Great point Sharron!

 

And definitively let’s scheme up something for TPAC. 

 

 

 

* katie *

 

Katie Haritos-Shea 
Senior Accessibility SME (WCAG/Section 508/ADA/AODA)

 

Cell: 703-371-5545 |  <mailto:ryladog@gmail.com> ryladog@gmail.com | Oakton, VA |  <http://www.linkedin.com/in/katieharitosshea/> LinkedIn Profile | Office: 703-371-5545

 

From: Sharron Rush [mailto:srush@knowbility.org] 
Sent: Thursday, October 9, 2014 1:50 PM
To: public-wai-engage@w3.org; Jessica Looney
Subject: Re: Auto-wcag promotion and communication

 

Greetings all,

Great comments Wilco and I think consolidation of the vision and development of a unified communications strategy is really important and will strengthen the work immeasurably.  Whether we present at CSUN or not, it would be a great place to meet up in person since so many of us will be there, so please count me in for that. And Katie, I will be at TPAC as well so I can support you at that event as well. 

Additionally, if we decide to use the Wordpress site and develop a stronger web presence I wanted to remind the group that it is OpenAIR season, that time of year when teams of web professionals are competing for honors in building accessible sites for nonprofit groups.  We could be our own nonprofit project and benefit from the publicity of the AIR competition - also get the whole AIR community involved in this effort. reliable automated tools would be of great benefit to the teams.  www.air-rallies.org <http://www.air-rallies.org/> 

Best,
Sharron
-- 

Sharron Rush | Executive Director | Knowbility.org | @knowbility
Equal access to technology for people with disabilities

 

 

On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 11:59 AM, Wilco Fiers <w.fiers@accessibility.nl <mailto:w.fiers@accessibility.nl> > wrote:

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 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