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Community & Business Groups

Cognitive Accessibility Community Group

Mission

The mission of the COGA Community Group is to work with and support the Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility (COGA) Task Force  to improve web accessibility for people with cognitive and learning disabilities.

This group supports the COGA Task Force by supplying user needs and feedback.

Scope
The COGA Community Group’s work will include:
- Sharing challenges when using the web and other digital displays
- Suggesting user needs
- Helping with research
- Suggesting ways to improve accessibility for the community
- Reviewing COGA’s drafts
- Outreach and collecting feedback from the community
- Helping with policy and the business cases for COGA guidance
- Having open meetings to discuss these points
Open meetings may be live video conferences or in other discussion formats

Participation

You do not need to be an expert in all topics related to cognitive accessibility to join the community group. The COGA Community Group will work in smaller groups for specific subjects, giving you the opportunity to participate on the topics you choose.

The COGA Community Group will also work together on some topics, brainstorming and building a community dedicated to improved access for all.

Anyone can join this group as long as they follow the community guidelines.

However, the community group will specifically benefit from including:
- people with learning and cognitive disabilities,
people with mental health challenges,
- caregivers, therapists and people who work with people with learning, cognitive challenges and in mental health,
- researchers,
developers, quality assurance professionals, and user interface experts,
industry, looking to share and support ideas, and
policy makers.

Additional details of participation
- Joining the COGA Community Group does not involve joining the COGA Task Force.
- If you would prefer to join this group anonymously, please send an email to ran@w3.org.
- The community group will not publish specifications, but may make suggestions to the COGA taskforce.
- For more information about community groups, please visit Community and Business Groups Frequently Asked Questions.
- Short link to this document: bit.ly/coga-community

Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time

Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.

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Meeting time updates

A big thank you to Hiral for creating a poll to help us identify the best option for our APAC friendly meetings.
This post is an update on what our meeting schedule will be moving forward.

How our meeting schedule will work:

  • We will meet every two weeks
    • AMER and EMEA friendly time, 9:00 am Eastern Time: 1st Thursday of each month — next meeting date: Thursday November 4 at 9:00 AM Eastern Time
    • APAC friendly time, 9:00 pm Eastern Time: 3rd Wednesday of each month (this is Tuesday in AMER  time) — next meeting date: Tuesday November 16 at 9:00 PM Eastern Time
    • While we are not meeting again until November, the W3C’s annual conference, TPAC, is happening now. Find out more and join the public conversations here: https://www.w3.org/2021/10/TPAC/Overview.html 
  • Our meeting link cannot be posted publicly, so you will be able find it in two places: 
    • The Community Group Calendar (you must be logged in)
    • On the Google Calendar event invite that will be sent to public-coga-community@w3.org 
  • On our next meetings, I will teach the group how to use IRC so that we can use this to record notes for our meetings and make them publicly available

Responding to other group requests: 

  • Some team members have asked if we can open up a Slack channel, as well. We can do this, but we need to set that up. Is there a volunteer who would be willing to set this up for us?
  • We will continue using Zoom for our primary meetings so that we can remain within the W3C infrastructure.

See you on the first Monday in November.

Call for participation: Literature review on mental health and web design

The mental health subgroup of the COGA taskforce is reviewing academic papers on mental health and web design. Our goal is to better understand:

  1. What design patterns in Making Content Usable already support individuals with mental health challenges
  2. What design patterns could conflict with the needs of these individuals
  3. What additional patterns need to be added to better support these individuals.

If you are comfortable reading academic papers, then you can contribute to this effort.  The work can be done any time, at your convenience.

We created a Form to submit your notes on a specific paper, study, or piece of literature. I recommend reading over the article once and then go back and complete the form.  We have also  written Instructions on how to participate in the Literature Review 

You can pick an article from the list of articles that need to be assessed (please write your name before the title). You can also locate a related article and work on that. We recommend that you first check the mental health literature review list  to make sure the article has not been reviewed.

All of these details are included in the instructions.

If you have questions, please reach out to Rachael at rmontgomery@loc.gov.

Next meeting reminder, September 23 and 28 (27 in California)

Thank you to everyone who joined our first meetings two weeks ago! We had excellent initial conversations (documented as best we could in our meeting notes), and are looking forward to our upcoming meetings this and next week.

Reminder: first meeting, Group A timezone, Thursday, 9th September, at 9am Eastern Time

Looking forward to our very first meeting with Group A!

Meeting Details

First meetings for the COGA Community Group

We are excited to schedule our first meetings!

In an effort to accommodate as many people, across as many time zones, as possible, we’ve decided to start off with two meetings instead of one. 

Please plan to join whichever one is best for you.

Our first meetings 

  • Group A: Thursday, September 9 at 13:00 pm GMT
  • Group B: Tuesday, September 14 at 1:00 am GMT (note that this is Monday evening in some time zones)
  • I’ve attempted to list out what these times are in a range of time zones in our agenda document

Details, including the agenda, can be found here:bit.ly/coga-community-agendas
Everyone has comment access, so please feel free to recommend additions (and suggest corrections if I got timezone conversations wrong).

Call for Participation in Cognitive Accessibility Community Group

The Cognitive Accessibility Community Group has been launched:


Mission

The mission of the COGA Community Group is to work with and support the Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility (COGA) Task Force  to improve web accessibility for people with cognitive and learning disabilities.

This group supports the COGA Task Force by supplying user needs and feedback.

Scope

The COGA Community Group’s work will include:

  • Sharing challenges when using the web and other digital displays
  • Suggesting user needs
  • Helping with research
  • Suggesting ways to improve accessibility for the community
  • Reviewing COGA’s drafts
  • Outreach and collecting feedback from the community
  • Helping with policy and the business cases for COGA guidance
  • Having open meetings to discuss these points
  • Open meetings may be live video conferences or in other discussion formats

Participation

Join the COGA Community Group (opens new tab)

You do not need to be an expert in all topics related to cognitive accessibility to join the community group. The COGA Community Group will work in smaller groups for specific subjects, giving you the opportunity to participate on the topics you choose.

The COGA Community Group will also work together on some topics, brainstorming and building a community dedicated to improved access for all.

Anyone can join this group as long as they follow the community guidelines.

However, the community group will specifically benefit from including:

  • people with learning and cognitive disabilities,
  • people with mental health challenges,
  • caregivers, therapists and people who work with people with learning, cognitive challenges and in mental health,
  • researchers,
  • developers, quality assurance professionals, and user interface experts,
  • industry, looking to share and support ideas, and
  • policy makers.

Additional details of participation

Short link to this document: bit.ly/coga-community


In order to join the group, you will need a W3C account. Please note, however, that W3C Membership is not required to join a Community Group.

This is a community initiative. This group was originally proposed on 2021-08-09 by Rain Breaw Michaels. The following people supported its creation: Rain Breaw Michaels, Pablo COCA, Rachael Bradley Montgomery, Luce Carevic, Kari Daggs. W3C’s hosting of this group does not imply endorsement of the activities.

The group must now choose a chair. Read more about how to get started in a new group and good practice for running a group.

We invite you to share news of this new group in social media and other channels.

If you believe that there is an issue with this group that requires the attention of the W3C staff, please email us at site-comments@w3.org

Thank you,
W3C Community Development Team