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), Dee McCumber (Health), Rudy Nugent (OMH), Debi Orton (GOER), Sharon Rehder (EnCon), Lizette Rivera (OPDV), Mike Short (DCS).

Old Business:

  1. Agency Consulting:
    1. OPDV - Seeking input on fillable PDF form
    2. Forum - Seeking accessibility eval. on Survey Monkey survey.
    3. CIO/OFT - Registered Committee opinion on adoption of Section 508 as NY's new accessibility policy
    4. OMH - Questions regarding proper layout of a data table for use with screen readers
    5. DCS - Question on how to find Brailling service
    6. NY-Net - Question on accessibility of multi-channel webcasting tool
    7. Partnership - Question on viability of Bobby
    8. VESID - Review of CSS style guide (Unfortunately, not yet completed)
  2. Annual Meeting: Debi shared the news that the Forum Annual Meeting is scheduled for Friday, September 11th and encouraged the committee to participate in the event.

New Business:

  1. Upcoming Co-Chairs:
    1. Estelle Council, Division of Parole (ecouncil@parole.state.ny.us) and Joel Obuchowski, Insurance Department (JObuchow@ins.state.ny.us).
  2. Upcoming Presentations:
    1. Creating Accessible PDFs - Debi working toward mid-October session.
    2. Writing for the Web - Planning a session for either 11/3, 11/4, or 11/10. 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.
    3. Search Engine Optimization and Accessibility - TBD, possibly a session that exposes some of the hidden benefit of using semantically correct, syntactically correct markup.
    4. Social Networking presentation including Twitter, Facebook with Jeff Bennett
    5. Possible Web 2.0 Refresh with the Webmasters' Guild
  3. 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 superceded 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:

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