Meeting 25 May 2020

These are minutes from the (usually) monthly meeting of the Digital Accessibility Eldering Project

Attending

• Mike Paciello (chair)
• Lainey Feingold
• John Rochford
• Doug Shepars
• Mike Gifford
• Sharron Rush
• Alan Cantor

Review of previous action items

Most action was focused on the creation of Wikipedia pages. John submitted a draft article with Lainey Feingold as the subject. Mike and Doug suggested edits to make the article more acceptable to Wikipedia.

Discussion

The WAI wiki sandbox has a list of people we may want to profile. Reminder that the Jim Thatcher bio on Wikipedia was built by Mike to serve as a kind of template as we develop more profiles.

When Wendy first mentioned the need for more accessibility in wikipedia, she noted the absence of its mention in general computing, assistive technology, computer science, disability rights, and other topics where accessibility should be mentioned and cross referenced. Sharron took an action to develop a template for topics. John took an action to write on the topic of Cognitive Disability. In the chat log was this link: Intellectual Disability

Should we move the content of the WAI wiki to Wikipedia and make a sandbox from there? Do we need a 'hub' from which the Wikipedia articles are linked? Doug said the content of the WAI wiki was not really suitable for that. Suggestion to find people interested in contributing and enlist them to write about people and/or topics organically.

Other Initiatives

Lainey inked to the main accessibility eldering project page and a reminder that there is more to the effort than Wikipedia updates:

• Updates on Wikipedia
• Compile Video Archives
• Mentors in Digital Accessibility

Mike noted that these initiatives can help fulfill the goals of raising awareness, developing resources, and avoiding the occasions when our community seems to need to reinvent the wheels of accessibility.

Discussing leadership of these subgroups, the following actions emerged. In discussion of the video archives, Sharron noted the availability of the expert audio describer Celia Hughes who may be persuaded to help.

Action Items

• Mike will ask Wendy to lead the Wikipedia effort. Understanding that her time is constrained, will ask Wendy to make the plan, find and motivate editors, and not necessarily to do the work. Mike and Doug will support as they can.
• Sharron will make a template for topics to add to Wikipedia
• Lainey will lead the sub-group focused on Mentoring
• Mike will lead the video compilation project

Communication

• Monthly meetings for project sub-group updates
• Listserve: elderingproject@knowbility.org
• Eldering Project on WAI-Engage wiki

Email instructions from Mike Gifford 2020-05-26, group email

• To set up a new page you need to find some pages to link from, so I searched for the term in Wikipedia.
• I made sure to just find enough separate references to Digital Accessibility and put them in brackets like Digital Accessibility. Now it’s a thing you can start to populate as a draft.
• If you go from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EN_301_549
• You can now click on: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Digital_accessibility
• And you can then insert Draft: in front of the title to make it clear that you’re still working on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Digital_accessibility
• Then just start putting in references. What other wikipedia pages can you draw in? What other news articles can you see that make the reference? Build the case for the creation of that page by gathering references and linking material together in an interesting, concise manner.
• Some of them are going to be rejected like Joseph Karr O’Connor. It could be that we aren’t going to be able to win the battle to establish that Joseph had sufficient notoriety to be included in this collection.
• Other pages are going to be rejected too, like this one describing professionals in our field: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Digital_Accessibility_Technologist
• I’d also love to see some work done on this California State legislation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:AB_434:_State_Web_accessibility
• That said, if we have a bigger community working on this working on a range of different topics then we’ll get these sorted out too.
• But dive in. Find those topics that you can improve and nudge them ahead. Find others who you know and ask them to do the same.
• ... this is a terrific way to highlight some of the holes in the existing Wikipedia pages that this community has the pieces to fill.
• Another useful thing to do (I think) is to share our Wikipedia usernames
• As far as putting this in a wiki, I do totally think that would be useful. I’d suggest doing something in the user space on Wikipedia, if only to make it easier and more consistent. Could be just added to what I’ve started here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mgifford/sandbox/Elders/Notes
• Any of the stuff in this sandbox is free for anyone to play with. Feel free to add/modify people.