Consultant to the Canadian Government- doesn't represent positions held by the Government
“Towards a smart open house”-
Several languages- regional /English /French
Warehouse attitude- care/ not competent to look after themselves
Greenhouse attitude- enables people /capacity to learn
Open house- inclusive approach- empowerment
Canadian primary distribution of information is not via the web but has changed over the last few years- repository of information
The social costs of exclusion will eventually exclude ourselves from someone we need to communicate with
A country that works is a country that can share information, integration of systems and the flow of information.
If we don't use this theory, we cannot communicate with people who don't have the same systems as we do. /we become victims to our own redundancy.
Two approaches to meeting accessibility standards- a compliance based approach or a transformation approach
Interopability with interface to system integration
Importance of authoring tools- supports unconscious healthy practice-
Accessibility for Learner information package- how do I want things to display/control/what content is/ needs
Accessibility Metadata- Label primary resource- How flexible is the resource, is the display separate form the content and display/ do you know of any equivalent tools
What access modes are there?
Web4 All- Personal preference on a smart card/ expressed as short XML string- Configures the system, assistive tech www.web4all.ca
People who do the buying of IT systems are building the blocks for future accessibility requirements throughout the organization.
Standardisation supports diversity
Accessibility is about flexibility- anyone that reduces that will help make it not work, in display, content, style, approach.
4.3 billion on ICT expenditure
E- Government policy framework 1997- all services to go online
2000- to start to meet W3C standards- most agencies use bobby/ make sure that all content is accessible to those that actually useit
PDF forms are the biggest form of complaint
Citizen can lodge a complaint about any government, any level, regional, federal etc
HREOC is helping AUS government identify complaints and move forward
Australian Government web guide- gateway page/ current accurate- showing legal and policy requirement
FaCS first annual report demonstrated first AAA annual report standard ( refer to for Corporate rebuilding of University web site)
ATO – interaction is inevitable, everyone needs to put in a tax return, provided a great business case for accessible information
Multimedia Victoria- vic.gov.au/ part of Dept of Infrastructure- Chief Technology Office
IT&T39- Depts should make sites accessible/ not necessarily “must”
Level A compliance
Online requirements review- were sites complying with standards? Bobby as tester tool
170,000 responses to Accessibility survey- 33% response rate
(results available via –eGovernment Resource Centre/PoliciesandReports/webmeasurement/ etc tec
Website Management Framework- align better communications strategy, tailor content to be accessible/ better management of costs, outputs, consistency etc
Endorsed on December 8 th - mandatory standardisation
Another test to be done early next year
ACT Government –Kerry Web/ experiences with policy and accessibility issues in gov sector
330, 000 people in ACT
110 websites
distributed development- capabilities and support vary
ACT information management- smaller AGIMO/ advice re tech information to government initiatives.
Compliant from ACT community- visual impairment- prepared a response- for explaining PDF documents:
Controls experience, less tampering etc?
Adobe 6 has a PDF reader via website
Auxiliary benefits of the accessibility
Increasing market share, increase efficiency of your organization
Advantages of CSS, site maintenance, headings, site optimisation etc, and how these various benefits might help you.
Those that spoke about the social activities, the technical benefits, the financial implications of all and the legal and policy benefits of it.
So the first area that the document ants to talk about is the social factor, what might go into the business case
What if you are a government, large business, small business, educational
There is a short discussion on the corporate and social responsibilities, many have the policy,
Within the social factors, they talk about other who will benefit from this.
New and infrequent users, it sort of expanses the argument why you would want to use accessibility as an initiative.
Forrester study for Microsoft suggested that 57% of computer users would benefit from assistive technology, something as small as colour changes, etc
Technical factors, site dev and maintenance. XHTML and CSS will have much more accessible page at the end of the day.
Financial factors,
potential use by more people,
find ability
Usable in more situations,
positive image for organization.
Direct cost savings, - site maintenance,
Cost considerations; invest in finding out about assistive technology.
Ongoing costs increased development time and additional testing time,
Decreasing costs incorporate accessibility form the start
Specialised organization wide resources
Organisational policy that has lodged with HREOC
Endorse standards will be released by 8December, Each standard that the government releases a question ”Why are we doing this” along with the standard
Minimum requirement – all sites must be Level A Compliant
New web sites must developed in Level A complaint and must be able to report by June of next year 2005
Existing websites must implement updates etc
How will they know its been implemented?
Independent and random assessments, There will be an audit run by the Chief information Office
• Overt approach
• Middle road
• Sneaky
Overt - Very aware of the precedent- consultant in Feb of this year for 2006 commonwealth/They themselves understand that accessibility is important, how do you convince Marketing? How do you get them to change colours of a logo? etc etc-
Middle road -
Hired for accessibility- funding not enough to review sites/3 seminars, basic, why you should do it?
Policy seminar- this is how you go about putting together an accessibility policy
Accessibility development area- talk to Developers/
Subtle approach- Victoria e-government tool kit- Quick fixes, business cases etc , justifying for those people interested-
Sneaky way -
I guess it really comes down to four major areas:
Standards and compliance
Education/training etc
Support
research
Telstra is a very large organization with an enormous amount of staff, business units, contractors, and people developing for us.
“One of the tings I find very important in the organization is the standardisation and policy of incorporating the W3c standards- along with the standards are process documentation saying, this is who is involved, this is what they have to do, this is what they need to deliver etc. People have a tendency to pass the buck onto another group, especially in a silo environment, so the process takes it through, so it starts and possibly end that means to develop a product of service to us, in the contract it will say that this needs to be accessible, and it needs to be upfront, otherwise people will sign it and say that's fine.”
(Gap)
All the steps should be documented with whose responsibility that they needs..It is important to realise that different groups etc that even though you may be different boundaries, silos etc, the boundaries don't exist between customers…
To talk about how we think the company should move forward, other than HTML templates etc- we have developers training, and this all fits into the company having corporate policy about disability services.
We are an example of one of those companies that has a disability action plan- so all the processes are part of measuring against that progress.
The better you get that the ore likely that people are able to follow it, the difficulty isn't accessibility it's getting it actually done.
Question for Sheryl form Vic government standards on the eight
December: the question is how you would get the secretaries to report up to the managers on the accessibility policy standards- and I noted that whole there is a provision for the accessibility standards, there is no provision for websites accountable…
Andrew mentioned the social bit that goes into the W3C primer- its often forgotten – has anyone had any big wins?
Chaals-Microsoft- Told techies that it was a “huge techy problem” so it challenged them0 oh wow, this is really cool and I also help people but am fixing something.
MM: In then early days of trying to get accessibility standards we did user testing we also collected video footage and of blind/disabled people actually using the site.
Thursday 2 nd December Jutta- Accessibility/e-learning
Outcome based transformations, metric based adaptations.
Specifications to support personalisation, IMS- Access for ALL
Proposed ISO/IEC standard-
IMS Accessibility Agenda
Content package that accommodates alternatives or variant resources
Q and tests that accommodates different tests and questions based on disability
SCORM-Dynamic Appearance model- linear sequence based system- API dependant on JScript,
LMS – open source system, optimise online, different language capabilities
Personalisation / e-learning in Canada- interest in Learning Object repositories.
Distributed collection of learning objects, variety of tools and online services
Government funded
Definition of learning object-varies in granularity/ re-usable/connectivity/sequence etc
What have we e-learned?
Learning is a process, not a process- its active, not passive
the objects are not the most important aspect of the learning, its people and tools etc
Discipline experts not necessarily teaching experts
Contextualisation plays a role- its how we layer it that determines whether a learning object is reusable.
Function from control- Activity from content
There is learning in the act of connecting
Rich media may be more entertaining but does not necessarily result in better learning
http://inclusivelearning.ca
(The inclusive learning exchange)- Cross sector, Pan-Canadian Community of Practice
Instructors procrastinate- Alternative format service delivery is inefficient
Text evolution project- student enrols in class, goes to online class that they are in- takes them to an index and digital copy of the textbook and see what parts are required, they then click on and are prompted to see whether they want to buy. The texts are priced so that a digital copy is only 60% of total cost of resale books. Incentive based!!!! Saves money and makes more efficiency- this solves the problem of text book publishers losing sales, copyright infringement etc
Online demo of My Utoronto – online learning repository
Daisy 3- ISO not propriety format- specifically built for people with print impairments-equivalent to SGL /parentage etc
Barrier Free Project- repurposing video/ make it interactive/captions and desc etc
cnice.utoronto.ca
Response Neil McLean- e-learning /beginning of understanding what it really means- Accessibility has become fundamental to the new learning methodologies.
Repositories are a post –e learning “frame of mind” –
“Its been my dream for a few years that we need to harness- (jisc)
3 countries joining forces in the practical level to see if we can get there faster- we need to tap into the quite splendid work that we have built up in Toronto- we admire the work you are doing and it doesn't come easily, it takes a lot of perseverance and thought/
Thursday 2 nd December 2004- Ed Smith The problem with maths- MATHML
“This session is a important session. This is the serious academic reporting.
You'll have to forgive me if I mess this up, because my screen is blank. If you want to be able to see if you'll have to move closer, we'll just have to see how accessible we can make mathematics when you are far away.”
When a person looks at mathematics =, they usually look at it in a particular way, in bits and then in modes…
(Include equations)
Two parts in a curly bracket and a simple equation at the front
Next Vector and pressures in compressible viscous fluid.
F= ma (density times the time of root of velocity, etc etc
(time derivative, gradient of pressure, and velocity)- How can a blind reader approach these things? If they can read brail they can read these things, I will discuss this in a moment, although there is a lot of detail..
To blind readers that don't read brail, its not very helpful, we have to come up with alternatives.
If a reader can use brail we have to set an equation editor, copy it, edit, and immediately, we get a MathML version of the equation.
MathML which includes code version for symbols, then we can get a brail version to do this too, we are nearly there..
A=1/2+ (square root of 5)
The way I broke the result into chunks is a way you work out very precisely how to work out the equations.
The A+B=C+D
Define A,B,C,D
“Velocity in the pipe has a component within the pipe in the div V Div R Diver Theter theter”
If we are gonna teach blind students who cant read brail how to do these kind of mathematics, then we have to come up with some way of being able for them to understand them.
The derivative of R minus the derivatives of Z is nought.
If we are gonna face hard mathematics to teach to brail, my point is to break everything onto meaningful chunks and then make them easiest enough to understand them.
Mathematica- will do mathematics for you and a style in which is does mathematics/method requires no symbols- has text forms for every single you want to use. For example: symbol for integral is int.
Tree of definitions either as chunks at the top defining them more carefully as we go down the list, or as chunks.
An approachable form- we can fold away definitions of chunks and the reader can then get a global overview of all and then get on with the process of working out the problem.
One was that they copy it out into brail and then work from that and the second one is they try and commit it to memory and then try to work it out, which is also laborious,
Jason White: My question to Ed is that the way that you have worked out things there – would Mathematicians look at it this way?
Ed: I would say yes- because you would look at the components or bits and see the way they relate to each other.
The other thing I would like to point out that a sighted reader would never have to read out an equation so I am astounded that you (Jason) is expected to remember this, a verbal string – its extremely bad.
Annotations- notes, comments, interpretations, etc
how can they be used- in the paper I use teachers as an example. A student can submit online with annotations and a teacher can check out the homework with the notes included.
Annotea
Amaya
Annozilla
Annogates
Zope- open source server
Snufkin- annotation toolbar
SWAD-Europe Annotea Tools
LibAnnotea- moving development from Amaya to Mozilla firefox
Annotea users W3C servers, uses W3C standards etc etc
Installation can be painful, use installation file
International student (International student) from Greece, worried she wont be able to understand all texts in English-
Solution would be to add annotation in Greek to page
To make annotations you can do two things, apply to whole document or select picture/ doc area and then paste in. (CS note to self, basically like a long description but can be a translation or a thought /notes about doc area)
Case 2 – Dyslexia- background colour, fonts, images, etc etc are easy to comprehend- paragraph justification actually has large amounts of white space which makes it hard for readers to understand
Match box project for cataloguing cultural artefacts- so for example, depending on which tribe you are from would change your view on the artefact. Annotations help add richness to existing repository.
Accessible interactive resources for first year students
Airport- academic interactive resource / portal
ESL and International students (not only focus) aiming to include all first years students about 10,000 in terms of requirements for the site we agree with “Equity for all” we are looking at variety of students/ Socio economic status, rural and remote students, NESB students, women in non traditional areas of study and indigenous students.
Most of them present accessibility issues use 14.4k modem, 9.6 modems- in terms of disability we try to make all sites areas accessible.
backwards compatible as we can, trying to cope with a broad range of areas…
PHP, XHTML/CSS- transactional site, not reading site/browser needs to support cookies text editor call vim
Content providers majority have PhD's /experts in their fields etc/ they don't have experience in writing for the web…..
Learning skills advisors have teaching skills but not all…we really have to make the site accessible
Survey was sent out- responses: more thinking, greater demands on creativity, because you cant hide behind some flashy thing, you need to have top notch content.
Focus on accessibility creates layers of learning- create an activity minimal feedback but with the option to view more stuff…
Trial run with local and international undergraduate students
Positive responses to the content
Example exercises
airport.unimelb.edu.au
airport_guest
ozewai2004
Atutor project to create a learning management system /content management system www.atutor.ca
First thing to note is that it is part of a very active open source community, new tools and pieces being created every day, constantly changing.
Use to study open source communities, way beyond expectations- 100's of developers/ accessible designed to be
both for instructor and administrator,student interface is accessible.
Navigation is really important thing- the way you move though the content is crucial/schemas being developed constantly
Retrieve learning objects based on search specifications.
Translation – available and popular because of this feature
in some of the instances (India /brazil) has allowed digression of code due to prolific output/versions may look different to English versions
Customisable interface/ students can chose how they like to see the interface based on layout hide/see views
acollab-Display settings that allow you to linearise all tables /table transformation utility
Preferences> utilities /friendly to a lot of disabilities
Supports content packaging, you can migrate easily – files from Web CT 3.8 export and import content
Document drafting room-sharing document libraries, events calendar, tracking and managing members, chatting facility, forums, support multiple languages, group admin functions- Acollab
Group administrator role – views have additional features
Hardware req's/ PHP,
Achat- accessible chatting tool, java chat and PHP chat- choice in how to display, notification, composing, window tracking, participant display, etc
Problems with appropriate focus in other readers/ didn't support people and navigation very well
Aforms-utility for accessible forms- delivers a block of code that you can build on
Accessibility checker- created for integration into learning tools, open accessibility checks (eval n repair)
What you can do is customise checker any ways- select (point and highlight?)
WCAG 2.0/ or WCAG 1.0
Atalker- copy any piece into an input field, text to speech/ output mp3 /audio/wave files etc
A-prompt- downloadable accessibility checker does everything Bobby does. Infact worked very closely with CAST, to ensure there is some consistency with the two checkers. It also guides with repair eg: chose what conforms you want it will suggest something for you, make the suggestion and verification/repair and put alt text in appropriate place
GOK
Gnome- Alternative platform to windows
Work with Sun-accessible architecture and onscreen keyboard- open source project. Interact with computer by nose point, head point etc-automatic capture of navigation and tool bars etc
/Captured groups of menus etc so that you can select beyond scanning
visual cue code- applies to things like binary codes- but still customisable
SNOW- Special needs opportunity window- resources for teachers and parents/snow kids site- external facing connection site
Signing web- primary ambition is to sign first/ provides an authoring tool that allows you to capture any kind of sign-
Learning disability resource commentary-latest articles etc- particular shell is open source- so you could use these functions in accessible format, such as chat, forums etc you can use it for other things
Access guide Canada- assessment for things like restaurants, movies etc, for visitors to Canada-check resources available
Interface is available for other uses (again open source) Incentive based too- prizes given for great places
CNICE- cultural artefacts etc – challenges in making culture accessible/ how do you deal with subjectivity- Now has a guideline document and quite a few tools and captioning tool- more than caps to capture more than visual/description tools (live dancing on a dance floor- realtime etc)
Accessibility and VRML- three dimensional work is done with spacial components- screen shots of static screen captures/ the first piece that we did was to look at how you make amap accessible to someone who is blind- the first project was the grade 4 atlas and try to create physical models, it would fill models and tactile images would fill this room-So what we wanted to do was to find a different way of doing it vermal 2.0 was available
Created text notes and translation language for geo-spacial information. So we used tactix (tactile information- like in gaming world- autoreverb in PS2) eg: you can drag something over an image that will give resistance and vibration so it will give an indication of texture. 3d locators, text/speech/ and capticons, (shapes you can sense)..
So if exploring a map- if you approach a lake, city etc we would incorporate real world sounds that would indicate closeness, and there would be capticon which would make it feel like... F1 keys would give information about the city such as populations etc just like a real atlas
Elastic latitude and longtitude/ so you can see how many intersects before you got to a location.
Used a tactic mouse mover to give real movement
How do we use this for other simulations
Physiotherapists program- how to give blind physiotherapists look at PIP joints emulate those so that with the tactic advice to show what the different injuries would feel like, the idea being that if you had 100 students wanting to know what it feels like a real patient doesn't have to physically demonstrate 100 times.
We want the software, we want people to use it, we want to change the standards, so go ahead and download it. There is licensing so that you cant sell it.
The atutor 411kb etc etc- very small to download
requires apache server
MySQL
Atag Specifications – Jutta and Liddy
Question time: one of the things I became really aware of was the amount of support you can give – by making sure that you do have Content management systems to make sure that the kinds of things are avialble to the authors.
You cant say you are not doing anything if you are not buying authoring tools/ up to date
(all contents for ATAG found on w3c site –homepage)
There is a common theme – what is the relationship between usability and accessibility?
55% say there is a conflict between the two (British HCI Group)
What is it? Usability is the measure of the quality of the user experience when interacting with something, whether a website, a traditional software application, or any other device the user can operate-
Jakob Nielson
The five e's of usability- effective, efficient, engaging, error tolerant, easy to learn- Whitney Quesenbery
ISO definition- efficiency and satisfaction-
http://www.deyalexander.com/presentations/usability-accessibility/
“I think what comes out of these two definitions are two key differences I wanted to point out, in terms of users, users will vary each time depending on what you want to use and how you want to use it”
Contrasting with this, the users are always the same- always
Then again if you look at the design goal it is to improve the ease of use, whereas accessibility is removing barriers so there is equity of use”
(User testing- recently run an online survey in user testing methodology practitioners)
Most part we user different groups of users, we tend to have testing sessions based on task scenarios, we don't always use expert users- some of the main differences where the same users were used, reason being that its hard to find a range of users across disabilities because once you find one you don't want o let go of them , we also use experienced users.
That notion of iteration is not obvious in accessibility design
ITTATC- at Georgia Institute
“Differences in usability practice- accessible design is an optional extra- there is a failure to recognise the benefits of accessible design.
Right at the moment 57% of users will benefit from accessible design, the market is only going to increase. In terms of it being an optional extra, we all know about the legislation, it is our responsibility as professionals to inform our clients that it is a legal obligation, not just an optional extra.” Dey
CM “There has been a long history of people trying to say this is accessibility and that is usability and they are different worlds- people in building WCAG have argued that they don't match but as Dey says they have a huge amount in common. We could all benefit from learning from each others side- I shouldn't say side because they are so similar.
Accessibility has been slower to come out of the closet- today is the 23 rd day of celebrating disabled people. It used to be that people were kept away and didn't interact with us and we didn't interact with people with disabilities”
“The result is extending to solve the problems across a broader variety of problems”
“we are developing a profession here and we need to look to our closest neighbours”
J ” I certainly agree that we finally bring usability and accessibility together- definitely from our clients point of view accessibility is upfront in the technology”
“We need to understand from a usability perspective we need to decide have to gather accessibility requirements-
The Semantic Web and accessibility- CM
All right, these slides are allegedly on the web.
Its about providing meaning in the web for computers, its not about IA its about baby steps, its about simple stuff we can do today, instead of the longer term research in IA where we will be doing something really amazing.
It's adding to the functionality and usability of the web.
PICS, XML Schemas
The basis W3C RDF Ontology language for the Web, but those are the family specifications.
Almost like saying my page links to that page, except that the relationship is identified, which gives you a lot of power in processing.
(Creator, Author, Primary Author, Label-Language,
Each of these statements can come from a different source.
EARL application of the semantic web a vocabulary about the web
Creating it- Hera, Axforms- WCAG Testing
Designed to help you do manual testing of stuff- eyeball the page and work that way.
When we collect the results we can do some nice stuff
HERA was originally written in Spanish/
The comments don't change, no automatic translation, not anything more complicated than this checkpoint has an English translation and a Spanish translation
How can we use it? 50 reports analysis, different testers, different pages, different tools, but you can look at the conformance levels, show me the inconsistency of levels.
You can ask complex questions about the report.
UBAccessify, took ordinary search engine results and re rank original results to see whether they meet a variety of check points (cross referencing)
WAINu- reports about content to drive the repair= take the report someone had done and the problem is there- and give prompts.
Finding resources: Title, Author, Language, Version, Format, Author, IsAlternative for the Version'
(Relation creator- ) RDF for describing people, relationships, creator as person.
Adapting or manipulating resources, you describe a web page, provide missing information, generate appropriate versions
Because in RDF you don't even need to own the page to assign the page these categories and use it to generate a useful version of the page.
SVG image/ XML described image format-you can present the image as one big text description, or a properly navigable image.
Bliss symbols, typically have a board with the pictures or symbols to communicate the message, if you have a vocabulary of 300 terms, it makes sense.
Describe the concept- you label the abstract with words or pictures, so you can communicate
Peepo- searching for non-readers (very serious cognitive disability) – so he built a search engine which is a visual search engine, you have somethings you can look at ,you use icons to find resources on the web. New version incorporates SVG/ looking for resources. Designed for people who cannot read the standard information versions ,
Annotations work is another bit of semantics web-
Jason White- Prepared as a response to Greg Vanderharden – invisioned a technology future, co-operating network devices that would provide access across applications and environments, regardless of needs.
Considerations of accessibility sat very well within this model.
Confine the focus of attention of this paper, specific technology tradition with structured markup languages- such as SGL, XML, etc etc
Concept of markup goes back to the tradition of typesetting, ie: annotations about the layout, the fonts used.
Electronic markup tells a typesetting program which font to use etc etc
Two stages of abstraction- from procedural markup regarding layout, to a much more descriptive markup, (this is heading with paragraph) component based markup.
Second half of the paper follows the interface- structured semantically markup
Demo- essentially what we have here are executable functions that can be created – constant values that cant be changed these are modelled in the V2standard, user interface, software description. It also uses XML schemas to control validation types etc. Presentation template defines the standards of the interface.
Rainbow- work on combinations with three interfaces into one/not enough bi-lingual people in these two groups, so there is a lot of repetition, so that in year not only will we have one of them or five of them!
JW _ adding to that briefly, it is very difficult to predict, it will happen sooner if you contribute to it, if you are promoting it, implementing it, it will happen sooner//
LN : I think the point of the paper is that abstraction introduces intelligence, the point is that by layering or abstracting form the object itself, makes it quick, and the US government is going to mandate certain devices, already, the companies who are likely to be affected are playing a serious part in it. Its just question of whether they implement the V2 standard aswell.
My last comment is that it has taken along time in the web context, computer science is about abstraction, and at the beginning, it wasn't that well organised etc.
CM : Pretty much you will find these things when you look for them- eg dream about what you would like to see in a mobile phone, a tv, a map, a city address, links to great restaurants. Its not a case of people not using it, it's a case of when everyone will be using it”.
Dey Alexander- WANUA what it is? Web Accessibility Networks of Universities in Australia .
Aims of the group are to raise awareness of accessibility- educate about legal obligations, influence policy within, develop strategies to deliver quality development.
Did decide that accessibility related conferences and training.
Challenges- interstate difficulty volunteer based work. No money etc/
We have applied for a higher education grant- to hire a project Officer to get infrastructure in order.
Working group members have capacity to engage experts /WAI has highest proportion of members. We are only a member because we got a government grant which pays the $15,000 fee over three years. Established to educate web community about guidelines. In the past, authoring tool considerations, what factors might go into business cases.
Some of our challenges get the work done, the rest is volunteer work. The other challenge is remote lists, because we meet for 2 hours via phone and the rest via email its hard to get policy approved. Task force approach now in place.
redesign of WAI site currently underway.
Charles- SIDAR- Vice President of an organization working on accessibility to the internet, virtual organization set up about 8 years ago, has mailing lists etc with around 500 subscribers, challenging because most is in Spanish, Basque, Catalan, etc. We have working groups, working on tools, techniques for design, translations, comes from WAI and other English work, and a lot of Spanish workers don't speak English etc. We track some of the W3C group, we have people like me and follow the group in English and then we go back to the group and explain in Spanish and then translate chunks of the specification and then take conclusions back to the working group. Tis is actually very important for a couple of reasons, about 3-4 years the Spanish was working on WCAG, some implementation came out in English and the Spanish were left out. By in large it is an independent community. We meet once a year and the foundation does courses to get money. We run courses for public administration etc. We spend that money on the conference and the web server and then the money is gone. Evaluation for money too. Looking at setting up a formal place in Argentina- there has been an increased awareness in South America. Turns out there isn't much difference, less money but less wage cost – we give incentives. Managing the tension between supporting those who do the right thing and those who support crap is hard,but we keep going on.
IMS - pay to develop specifications, content management, develop guidelines for people in education to work out what they need to do. We published the guidelines but need to bring them up to date. They are designed to be a bridge between the technical an education. Supports the development of metadata standards- IMS has support materials and one staff member, rest is volunteer. One volunteer is the guys WGBH- Easy.cc. Another live session of the sixteenth-there are a number of othe
DublinCore metadata initiative-Australian government- experts in metadata- many open source resources.
OzeWAI solid base – we hope to grow this
Matt Harris- Australian Computers Interactive Group- August this year. We are trying to work out how to put into a strategy /Task force for accessibility and mobility. Challenge our member base to make it a technique rather than a problem. Annual awards are going to be held in Sydney-critique other peoples works- Free trade agreement- if any of our members want to sell software in the US, then they have to meet the Section 508 outlines.