developersWG 09.13.2019
Amaya, Charles, Doug, Glinda, Neil, Evan, Jason, Kyle, Lisa, Tara, Cary, Volker, Matt, Sina, Lauren, Bruce, Richard
Here is a link to the audio recording with auto-generated transcript
This year we had 5 chapters. The topic areas were chosen by the DIAGRAM community. The topics were accessible k-12 computer science written by Richard Ladner. We had accessible data visualizations by Doug Schepers. Multimodal user interfaces was done by Emily Moore and Jenna Gorlowitz. Alan Harnom did personalized learning chapter. And Bruce Walker did the sonification chapter. So thank you to all of or writers.
Bruce: Is there going to be authorship of this that we can cite it? Charles: We could look into that Bruce. Glinda: I was going to ask the same thing. It would be wonderful to do this officially. Bruce: If you treat it as a publication, identifying the year and date, the editors of it, so people could refer to it as if it were in a chapter in a report or in a book. Lisa: Can I follow up with you directly Bruce? I'd like to pick your brain a bit to make sure we do it right. Doug: You might think about making it a PDF and as an EPUB. That might facilitate the distribution. Sina: If we are going to take an inclusive design having an EPUB in addition to available online might be just as spreadable. So we don't open up a can of worms of the PDF thing. We would need to spend a bunch of effort making sure it's accessible. Charles: As part of our last DIAGRAM report, I may do a single EPUB that includes all of our chapters done over the years and bring it in to Bookshare.
Demo of the app the Lauren and Richard created. It's a native iOS APP. It controls a dash robot. It mirrors traditional block-based languages. The learning curve for using the APP is small because it uses the built-in voice over.
Sina: a few areas were missing ordinality. Every time there is a context switch, I'm wondering here, on the repeat constructs, it seems like that can be done by mapping the action to the rotor, so you wouldn't have to leave the context of the block itself while manipulating it, so it doesn't cause two different working memory operations, and I think that would streamline the manipulation of the box.
Lauren: Originally that's how it was done. We found it was challenging for the low vision kids to use it. But we may need to explore it more.
Sina: There was a swipe landing of the block start and end reach. I'm wondering if it's possible to streamline that. If two out of the 5 things you've heard are scope indicators, then you are trying to remember scope. Right now you land on boundaries. Any scope definition, difference, you land on that. For good reason. But what I"m saying is it doesn't need to be the loop starting as an addressable unit. They could be told that while landing on the first statement of the loop. So you would be inlining the contextual information.
Lauren: The loops are interesting because you can change the number of times you are in the loop and you can move the loop. Let's talk more.
Sina: Absolutely.
Doug: I think the App is great as are Sina's comments. It's great that you tried to include low vision and screen reader into one mode, but you may want to consider different modes because the two are so different.
Richard: These are fine points that are definitely worth exploring. There is a conference in October called Blocks and Beyond and Lauren and I submitted a position paper on accessible block space languages. I don't know if anyone else will be there.
Doug: I wish I could.
Doug: You should all know I've had a change of affiliation. I'm still doing my startup. But I'm also working at UNC, they have a new digital accessibility office team. It's about two months old. I am specifically doing training for them. So I sm designing training programs for them. I'm learning a lot about the education space. If anyone is interested in talking more about what we are doing at UNC or maybe how we can collaborate with Benetech. The training i've designed visual accessibility training is hopefully the first one that will become mandatory at UNC. I'm working at s captions one now and then web accessibility. So if anyone wants to talk about higher ed curriculum I am here.
jason: W3C accessible platform architecture published a revision of its 2005 note on the accessibility of Capture. There has also been an announcement of an inclusive XR web standards workshop in early November in Seattle.
Kyle: I am switching out of material science at MIT and moving into an artificial intelligence consulting on campus. So I will have access to large data storage and large data analysis. So if anyone has products and infrastructure and things like that are a limiting factor, get in touch and I can try and find ways to support. We also have a set of grammars for spoken LaTex that I can pass over.
Volker: I will be st Accessing Higher Ground, will anyone else?
Doug: I am a maybe.
Evan: I'll be there.
Richard: Charles, at the last meeting you had a new person at Benetech.
Charles: yes Matt.
Richard: I just wanted to mention that the Assets conference is in October so it would be great if he could go.
Evan: My colleague, our media accessibility specialist is leaving, so if anyone knows anyone looking for a junior-level position to be the subject matter expert consulting with our teams on accessibility. It would probably be well suited for someone about a year out of college. I will send the job posting to the list.
DIAGRAM Center Website http://diagramcenter.org