Jan: The End of Average book. We all have to be better than average, the book says. We are now moving into an age of individualism. It costs so much money to go to college, and industry still can't find skilled workers.
... people will have to change in higher education to meet certifications for certain skillsets. People can't afford that kind of debt to still not have the skills to get a job.
... people should be able to design their own education program.

Jeanne: I met with Jamie Knight of the BBC. We talked a lot about the BBC Mobile Accesisbility Guidelines.
... WCAG needs to move away from the medical model of accessibility and move more toward a social model of accessibility. That people are not disabled, they may have impairments, but it is the environment that disables them. We need to focus on change the environment that causes people to be disabled from what they want to accomplish.
... we need to design and code the web so it doesn't disable people
... his personal opinion is that automated tools don't work, because it makes people think that all they need to know about accessibility is in the audit report.
... I learned that we need to think about the interview and survey process about communicating with people the way they want to communicate.

Shawn: We should start out the interview asking people how they want to communicate. This will be particularly important working wiith members of the deaf community. For example, we can text and write instead of trying to have a phone call.
... we also need to look at the W3C survey tool because many people find it difficult to use. It will skew our results if we aren't getting input from all the groups that we need to.
... How can we adapt this communication for the user, because people can focus on their important points, rather than how to communicate.
... It also shows that we are coming to listen to them, rather than forcing them to exert themselves to communicate with us.

How to look at the social model with Silver

Shawn: I agree with a lot of what Jamie said. Personas that are medically oriented don't address the needs of people who don't have that medical condition, and people with multiple disabilities and situational difficulties.
... I think it is a difficult balance, because people do need to know what to do, but we don't want people to game the system, and just check the boxes.

Jan: I think we should have a value statement of what (for example) color contrast does for a wider group of people than just people with low vision.

'... for example, the aging population where people don't think they have a disability.

scribe: it could be a document that government could use, but it needs to be a useful document for industry to use.

Sahwn: I often use the example of situational impairments that are very common. FOr example, a gray on gray font and background, and I just woke up and I haven't had my coffee yet. Or a person is trying to use an app and they have an upset toddler on their lap. Or you are walking down the street in NYC, trying to find a restaurant and you have to click through 16 screens to find the menu.
... Another example is drunk accessibility testing (joke) because there is vision, cognitive and motor impairments.
... the purpose is to look at disability differently than "some person who uses software you have never seen and is having problems with it".
... maybe Silver can be oriented about having a framework that can expand to different kinds of interactions and then have user interfaces that make those interactions less disabling.
... like an image, that is primarily a visual medium, so you provide alternatives

Jeanne: We need research behind this idea.

Shawn: We need research and experiments with the models.

Jan: If we start looking at disabilities as problems with the environment, we need to educate people to not to make assumptions about the audience and their abilities.
... people don't understand the disabilities, the barriers that are denying them access to good paying jobs/careers
... I like the ability videos that the EO group has just put out.
... I know it can't be in the standard, but we have to make sure the standard point to those materials.
... otherwise, coders wont' realize they are coding a barrier into the product.

Sahwn: OTher platforms make it easy to creat accessibility products. The web does not. The standards that are there to create documents and apps are based on 1995 assumptions of what the web should be.
... on mobile platforms, a simple app is accessible by default if they use the platform conventions.
... on the web, it isn't a platform that is made for accessble web applications.
... making web apps accessible, takes a ridiculous amount of time and resources to do it. That is the fault of the web platform. ARIA takes too much knowledge to use. The web platform is not designed for applications.

Jeanne: This would a great question to ask Tim Berners Lee. I put him in the interview list, because I thought there would be bigger questions that he might the right visionary to ask.

Shawn: It might not be possible. I haven't heard anything from Web Components and Shadow DOM in a while.
... but it still comes down to the flat page model, and it may not do anything to fix that.

Other topics

Shawn: I wanted to talk about the tracker and what needs to happen for researchers. Let's talk about that on Tuesday.
... This was a good brainstorming session.

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Guessing input format: Irssi_ISO8601_Log_Text_Format (score 1.00)

Present: Jan Shawn Jeanne
Regrets: Jemma Sarah Dave
No ScribeNick specified.  Guessing ScribeNick: jeanne
Inferring Scribes: jeanne
Found Date: 24 Mar 2017
Guessing minutes URL: http://www.w3.org/2017/03/24-silver-minutes.html
People with action items: