Re: [SEC508] 508 Live Meeting

[Phill Jenkins <pjenkins@us.ibm.com>]

I do not have any "reports of"
experience with Live Meeting that I can share, but I do agree with your
thinking that some of the functionality needs to be considered as equivalent
facilitation vs directly compatible with assistive technologies.  The
framework also needs to consider the "attendee" vs the "presenter/authoring"
capabilities of on-line meeting (e.g., Live Meeting, Lotus Same Time, NetMeeting,
etc.).  For example, I believe a screen reader user should be able
to be the presenter and share his desktop or application and "show"
it to others during an on-line meeting.  Another example;  they
all seem to have a whiteboard capability (i.e., as the presenter types
or draws, the attendee sees the results live) which has different implications
for presenter vs attendee, and disability type.  And as you suggest,
there are what I call best practices that can serve as equivalent facilitation.
 For example, a company or agency might require that the PowerPoint
deck itself be made compliant & compatible with assistive technology
(AT) (e.g., screen readers, screen magnifiers, etc) AND be provided as
a separate download, so that the AT user could load the file and view it
directly before, during, or after the on-line meeting.  All functions,
including ones like Voice-over-I-P, live video, etc. being integrated into
the on-line meeting also need to be considered into the accessibility evaluation
framework and evaluated separately..  

So the evaluation framework would look
something like the following:

Functions and capabilities in the first
columns, 
applicability to presenter in the second,
applicability to attendee in the third, 
and applicable 508 provisions in the
forth and equivalent facilitation best practices in the fifth column.

Functions would at least include the
following:
UI chrome:
        open
& close the meeting
        raise
your hand
        text
chat
        see
who is in the meeting
        share
apps
        give/take
control
        on-off
VOIP
        on-off
video (camera needed)
        etc.
Content:
        some
apps, any apps? (show vs give control to others)
        docs?
        audio?
        video?
        whiteboard
         
      drawing
         
      text
        
Some of the best (some necessary for
compliance in many cases) practices would include:
        1.
Training the presenter so they know how to explain what is presented visually
(useful to those on the phone only and screen reader users).
        2.
Attach compliant documents (Word/Open doc, PowerPoint, Excel, PDF, HTML,
etc.) used in the presentation.
        3.
Ask beforehand if there are any special needs of the attendees (similar
to in-person meetings).
        4.
Have a live transcription of the audio available.
        5.
etc.         

I believe sharing frameworks like this
are helpful to furthering the "science of evaluation" as well
as helping us educate one another.  If we only simply ask or publish:
"is it accessible" without filling in the rest of the sentence,
we end up creating misinformation, divisions, and mistrust.  The sentence
"is it accessible?- or - It is accessible! - could be replaced with
the following: "Is this version x of this vendor's on-line meeting
compliant with applicable 508 provisions for the presenter? for the attendee?
 for which functions?  and for which scenarios using which assistive
technologies on which platforms?.    

Regards,
Phill Jenkins
IBM Research - Human Ability & Accessibility Center