Meeting Minutes: December 3, 2015

Present

  • Stephen Blosser, Chair
  • Graham Pierce, Vice Chair; Webmaster
  • Caleb Sandoval
  • Darryl Steele
  • Dave Goodrich
  • Divya Venkatesan
  • Emilia Marcyk
  • Jeff Swada
  • Lydia Tang
  • Michael Ezzo
  • Mike Hudson
  • Nate Evans
  • Paul Heberlein
  • Steve Jowett
  • Todd Ring
  • Tyler Smeltekop

Minutes

  1. Blosser called meeting to order at 1:00 PM
  2. Steve Jowett discusses touch panel accessibility issues
    • Working on developing voice recognition technology for easier accessibility
    • Plans to pilot new technology in a few locations before next fall
    • Issues regarding XPanel compatibility with certain apps and smartphones
    • Nate Evans working on site that will give information on the ongoing progress of the project
  3. Making Learning Accessible Conference
    • Representatives from various departments attended the conference
    • Future plans to expand the program and have earlier advertisement for event
    • Plans to talk to College of Arts and Letters regarding financial support
  4. Current and future plans for accessibility software
    • Plans to talk to head of classroom support to discuss topic of adding more software
    • Potential of NVDA, which is beneficial, because it is free
    • Alternate reading software development
    • Nate Evans talked about accessibility evaluation process for purchasing
      • Plans to make evaluation processes more user friendly by changing the language and including vendor questions
      • Plans to work with vendors to increase their liability for accessibility issues (this has potential for push back and may increase difficulty/time of contract process)
      • working on form to report inaccessible content
    • Lydia Tang presented observations of accessibility concerns
  5. Plans for future meetings
    • Invite Angela Sebald to discuss e-texting
    • Get more obvious signage around campus
    • U of M Library Accessibility group coming to next meeting
    • RCPD working on navigation apps (available as Beta)
    • Four Winds to have presentation in January on digital signage
  6. The meeting was adjourned (Pierce) at 2:30 PM

Respectfully submitted,
Divya Venkatesan