Meeting minutes
Accessibility and personal data assistants.
janina: APA will also be discussing this in their upcoming meeting, we may know more after that discussion
Accessibility of the Web of Things.
janina: It is not just operation of these devices, but also the configuration and rebooting of such devices
jasonjgw: May need to bring back next week after the APA meeting
janina: Matter and Thread are the developing specs to look at
raja: One important consideration is multimodal accessibility
raja: Sometimes these devices are audio only of visual only interaction modes
raja: For example, the Astro robot has different inputs and output modes, but they only accept one way at a time
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janina: Matter and Thread do not currently consider multimodal interactions, which is something we need to address
jasonjgw: Remote operation will be a key component for accessibility
raja: One problem is these devices have issues with trusting a remote connection and how to authenticate the remote action
jasonjgw: These are interesting problems
raja: Wondering about the difference between the Web of Things spec and connection of Alexa and robots and such
jason: Not clear if the apps follow specific guidelines other than perhaps WCAG
janina: The usual problem is that the intent is to support interoperability, but vendors do not necessarily want to support competitors platforms
jasonjgw: Noticed an article last week about Microsoft researchers using natural language engines to program robots
raja: Interoperability between devices in different ecosystems is what we want to support
janina: The problem of middleware causing the accessibility block
janina: Matter is supposed to solve these issues
jasonjgw: Other thoughts for now?
CAPTCHA and authentication: update, coordination.
jasonjgw: Just coordination thoughts...
raja: Have to leave -- sorry
jasonjgw: Thanks to Scott for recent email
scott_h: In terms of overarching concepts, this new material may be useful
janina: We were UpToDate when we published in 2019
janina: New developments such as FIDO and CloudFare have changes the landscape somewhat since then
jasonjgw: Possession of a certain hardware (like a phone) as well as a pin number/password for multifactor authentication is the norm now
janina: Suggest returning to this after CSUN
Artificial intelligence and people with disabilities - opportunities for further work.
jasonjgw: Early stage research is now in process
janina: For example, Reader mode in Microsoft Edge is implementing some type of machine learning to improve reading layout
scott_h: Have personally found some of these new features in Edge very useful
jasonjgw: Another example is the reader mode will remove clutter from the view and focus on the text being read
janina: Problem is the heuristics may reduce the availability of something like adds that a user may want to read
janina: The interweaving of a semantic tagging approach which can inform the models is a possible direction
jasonjgw: Will be interesting to see how these develop with future training as users interact and teach the machine learning tools
jasonjgw: These new considerations of how to provide inferences to machine learning models is very interesting
Task Force publications and miscellaneous topics.
jasonjgw: Still waiting on more comments on Collaboration Tools
scott_h: Question about the upcoming 2.2 WCAG -- especially removing of pausing
jasonjgw: Probably too late to deal with that one