NYS Forum IT Accessibility Committee Meeting

October 8, 2009, 2:30-4:00 p.m.
Forum Offices, 24 Aviation Road, Colonie

Attendees: Kristen Albright (Parole), Lisa Cammarota (OCA), Estelle Council (Parole), Laura Edlund (AT&T), Kathy Farrell (CTG), Kim Fraim (Health), Mike Hritcko (INS), Dee McCumber (Health), Joel Obuchowski (INS), Debi Orton (GOER), Paul Peters (DTF), Lisa Rosano-Kaczkowski (CQCAPD), Kelsey Rosell (COMSYS), Mike Short (DCS).

Old Business:

  1. Agency Consulting:
    1. CIO/OFT - Registered Work Group opinion on adoption of Section 508 as NY's new accessibility policy compared to NYS-P08-005.
  2. Training Progress Report:
    1. Writing for the Web - Planning two three hour sessions on 11/12. Kathy Farrell outlined the plans for this session, covering reading levels, clear language, how users read on the web, and how to optimize content for the medium. Debi reviewed session sheets and will send out to Rebecca.
    2. Creating Accessible PDF's - Half-day session tentatively scheduled for 12/2. The forms component will wait until Marty is available to cover the accessible forms piece.
  3. Change in Leadership: Estelle will be running the meetings beginning next month.
  4. Interaction with Other Forum Work Groups: Estelle attended an ETC meeting with Jim Costello and others regarding Ning and discussed other initiatives on Web 2.0.
  5. Interactions with Other Groups:
  • Discussed an ITAC Wiki Library and doing a presentation for the NYS Training and Development Counsel on 9/25.
  • Also have a presentation on web-delivered learning for OFT's elearning and web development staff on 10/16.
  • Forum has a contract with Cisco for WebEx which the Security Work Group is currently using. Estelle will keep on top of the accessibility issues.
  • CTG invited Forum members to review social networking. Want to make sure no one gets left behind. Jeff Bennett had previously offered a session on how various social media work with screen reading software. Debi suggested collaboration with others to facilitate. Estelle will work with Jeff Bennett to facilitate a session in the spring.
  • Governors AT Conference: Cancelled due to budget constraints. Lisa and Debi discussed that we may be able to do our own session including Writing for the Web, Social Network or Creating Accessible PDF's.

New Business:

  1. Upcoming Presentations: Here are the other programs we are planning with estimated target dates:
    1. Search Engine Optimization and Accessibility - TBD, possibly a session that exposes some of the hidden benefit of using semantically correct, syntactically correct markup.
    2. Social Networking class including Twitter, Facebook with Jeff Bennett
    3. Possible Web 2.0 Refresh with the Webmaster's Guild
  2. Adopting Section 508: OFT had asked that we consider the adoption of the Federal section 508 standard. Marilyn will be writing something that will be broad in scope. Concerns were expressed on the recommendations of another hybrid standard (that is, only selecting parts of 508 to adopt) . This would put us in the same position of needing a custom validation tool. Also, the current version of 508 for web pages (1194.22) aligns with the W3C's WCAG v. 1.0, which has been super ceded by WCAG v. 2.0. In addition, we feel that we need to support 1194.24, which relates to multimedia, 1194.21, which relates to applications, and 1194.31, which requires minimal functionality. We also need the addition of waivers for undue administrative burden and fundamental alteration (1194.3) because under the current NYS policy, there is no protection for maps and other graphics on sites.

Next Meeting:

November 12, 2009
2:30-4:00 p.m.
Location: Forum Offices, 24 Aviation Road, Colonie