[WG: Accessibility] [DG: User Experience] Here comes trouble

[Richwine, Brian L]

Hi,

I'm writing as a lead of the Accessibility Working Group. We'd love to get involved with the Sakai 3 UI development to help with making Sakai 3 have the best user experience possible for people with disabilities and users of adaptive technologies. We have been talking among ourselves about the best way to do this, and it seems that a good move would be to announce ourselves here and our desire to help.

Traditionally, the Accessibility WG's largest role has been to conduct accessibility reviews on Sakai releases. But, since the reviews started only a few weeks before the code freeze dates and much of the design is already set, the best we could hope for would be that some of the easier fixes we identified would get fixed for the next release. We hope that by getting involved in the early stages of Sakai 3's design, accessibility concerns can be identified and the addressable issues fixed before they get too cemented into the design.

We'd love to discuss the best way for us to get involved. We'd be happy to participate in the UI development efforts, consult, perform accessibility evaluations and testing on designs, write simple accessibility checklist/guidelines/style guides for developers, provide accessibility awareness, etc. We are excited that great things can be achieved towards making Sakai 3 accessible. Improvements in handshaking between browsers and adaptive technology, improvements in adaptive technology itself, the emergence of technology features like the WAI-ARIA guidelines, accessibility features getting included in more UI/JavaScript libraries, and a larger established base of techniques make it easier than ever to achieve accessibility even in complex web applications.

>From our experience in reviewing accessibility of Sakai 2.x, the group has prepared a list of accessibility improvements that could be achieved in Sakai 3. They can be found here:
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/2ACC/Accessibility+Improvements+that+Could+Be+Seen+in+Sakai+3+over+Sakai+2.x

Sincerely,
  Brian Richwine

Brian Richwine
Adaptive Technology Support Specialist
Adaptive Technology and Accessibility Centers
Indiana University - Bloomington/Indianapolis
http://iuadapts.indiana.edu
(812) 856-4112


________________________________________
From: sakai-ux-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [sakai-ux-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] On Behalf Of carl.hall at et.gatech.edu [carl.hall at et.gatech.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 4:11 PM
To: sakai-ux at collab.sakaiproject.org
Subject: [DG: User Experience] Here comes trouble

For those of you that follow the k2 list, this isn't news [1], but it's good to announce one's self I'm told.

Beginning just a couple of days ago, Stuart and I have changed our focus from strictly k2 concerns to implementing UI bits, screens, elements, etc.  Our focus will be to get UI designs implemented and doing any needed plumbing work required to get that functionality finished.

We've read through the development guidelines and have followed the UX list for a bit.  We're planning to start on version 0.1 issues first then continue on, but are certainly open to suggestions for tasks.  We're no strangers to the dev approach being used but don't hold back if we slip something up.  We're all here to get this done and greatness will be achieved!


[1] http://groups.google.com/group/sakai-kernel/browse_thread/thread/52cd1444020920d3#
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