Re: EOWG: Agenda for 13 February, 2002

Outreach Update

I gave a series of talks in Finland last week:

Discussed at TIEKE various aspects of accessibility and what we are doing at
W3C for future development, as well as outlining a bit the work the EO is
doing. (They were concerned that the abstract technical specifications are
too abstract). I think that it is worth providing more liking to the
curriculum material, even if that is only effectively a draft (since we would
like to update it I believe)

Took part in a two-day workshop at the Media Lab of the Helsinki University
of Art and Design. I talked about the guidelines, how to use them, and some
discussion of evaluation and repair techniques and tools, and how a sample
site might be made accessible. (I used http://www.spool.com.au - an
australian site built in flash). There were also presentations of various
pieces of work being done in Finland - there are some cool things there,
including a learning environment that is sort of web based, and I think
fairly accessible: http://fle3.uiah.fi and some more advanced topics that I
think are currently more relevant to PF or to the new RD group when it is
active.

I gave a lecture and workshop at CELIA - library for the visually impaired,
again on the guidelines and evaluation. They have started a finnish language
group to discuss accessibility, which i hope will have ongoing members who
are also members of WAI groups, to ensure that the flow of information is
good. (There are people working in finland who are not confident of their
ability to participate in an english-language group, but whose contributions
can be useful. This seems to be a model which is useful generally).

Celia: http://www.celialib.fi/

I also saw there a translation into finnish of WCAG, by Katariina Killiainen
and Minna von Sansen. I hope that is helpful for people, although my finnish
isn't good enough to read it ;-)

I visited the Tampere University Human-Computer Interaction unit, where they
are working on some interesting projects. They have been running a
voice-based interface to email services for a couple of years. An interesting
part of that is that they thought from the start it is important to be able
to change languages for the synthesiser - with Finnish and Swedish as
official languages, and English in common use, this is more or less
essential to understand the text being read, since pronunciation rules are
very different. They are also doing interesting work in areas like
information visualisation (this was a topic presented in Helsinki too) and
emotional interactions. http://www.cs.uta.fi/hci

I also visited the Netti Nysse - an Internet Bus. This is an old suburban bus
that has been refitted with internet connection and a number of computers,
and is used to teach people in the Tampere area about how to use the
Internet. (I always wanted to have an office like that, and they do some cool
things, although their focus is not really accessiblity per se).

I gave a lecture and participated in some workshops at the Technical
University of Tampere - an audience of about 200 for the lecture, which was
again introduction to the guidelines and evaluation / application.  These
were organised by the Digital Media Institute there, http://www.dmi.tut.fi

Many thanks to Antti Raike, of the University of Art and Design, who has
participated in WAI activities and works on some very interesting
accessibility projects himself, for organising the week (and for teaching me
some finnish sign language).  http://mlab.uiah.fi/~araike

Thanks also to many other people - Tuuli, Hannu, Sami, in Tampere, Katariina,
Juuka, Maria, Marjo, Kari, Minna in Helsinki, and many others in both places.

Charles McCN

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI    fax: +1 617 258 5999
Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
(or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)

Received on Thursday, 14 February 2002 08:10:57 UTC