1. The meeting was called to order by Eulenberg at 2:35 p.m.
2. Belsky asked to be added to the mailing list for committee communications.
3. Since no word has come back about the job description given to Dr. June, Eulenberg said he would follow up on its current disposition.
4. CSUN Conference on Technology and Persons with Disabilities, March 17-21, 1998. Hestenes reported that this meeting gets bigger and better each year. More big companies (e.g., Microsoft) are attending, which bodes well for the future. The keynote speaker this year was Brenda Premo, Director of the California Department of Rehabilitation (www.rehab.cahwnet.gov).
There has been considerable attention to web-related assistive technology. For example, W3C (worldwide web consortium) has been working on guidelines under the rubric of Web Accessibility Initiative (www.w3.org/WAI/). Sun and IBM were discussing how accessibility can be implemented in the Java foundation classes. However, Sun and IBM are at odds with Microsoft as to how Java should look.
Microsoft has been creating tools for accessibility, and they have discovered that many others besides the originally intended users are benefiting from them. Microsoft had 3 or 4 sessions, covering various products. Hudson felt that much of Microsoft's message is more marketing than accessibility and that most of their features amount to helpful key stroke shortcuts. Their new standard for captioning, called Synchronized Media Access Interchange (SAMI) will permit developers and programmers to include captioning or descriptive video into the videos, thereby helping both blind and deaf users. Microsoft lost a lot of credibility with the disability community when Internet Explorer 4 (IE4) shipped without the access tools found in IE3; they claim they have corrected that problem now. One of the ways the web can be made more accessible is by implementing cascading style sheets, which can reformat HTML documents to meet the user's needs. Other web developers besides Microsoft are working on this area, too.
There was a reasonably well attended paper on tactile maps entitled "The MSU Talking Tactile Map Project: Advancement Through Collaboration," by a member of our MSU community, ATC Vice-Chairperson Michael Hudson. There was another interesting paper on guidelines for microcomputer lab design by a San Jose State University group. Although we appear to be setting a higher standard at MSU, it would be helpful to have such guidelines available. Chmielewski suggested that we might like to present a paper on our integrated approach to microlab design at next year's CSUN meeting.
There were many vendors present, e.g., Henter-Joyce (Jaws), HumanWare, Pitney-Bowes (copier). (Hudson actually touched the Pitney-Bowes copier, but he could not determine either the price or the accessibility features, as the machine was powered off and the company representative was unavailable.) Hestenes noted that next to the copier was a CD-based talking book player, with access to individual pages and other helpful features. This format gives better random access to information than the traditional sequentially stored magnetic tapes. Guiding this new technology is a European-based consortium called DAISY (Digital audio-based Information System, www.daisy.org); their CSUN presentation is at www.dinf.org/csun_98/csun98_065.htm. There were several infrared alternatives to the mouse, including head-pointing devices. Hudson noted that even though he saw 120 exhibitors, there were still 40 or so he missed; so many vendors, so little time!
4. Chmielewski noted that Renuk will give the invocation at the April 20th conference at the Kellogg Center. His topic will be "Disability in Popular Culture."
5. Chmielewski passed out information on the June 9-11 Conference on Women and Disabilities, in Detroit, which she and Belsky are helping to plan. There is some funding available to send students to this relatively expensive conference.
6. The meeting was adjourned (Forro; Hwang) at 3:20 pm.
Respectfully submitted,
George Allen, Recording Secretary
Note: These minutes were assembled largely from a typescript of an audiotape of the meeting.
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http://www.msu.edu/unit/atc/minutes/980408.html.
Last updated 21 April 1999.