Announcement 10.13.2006
Greetings.
The Communications Task Force asks that I share the following recommendations from discussions this week.
1. First point: Please use the email distribution lists set up for each individual subcommitee.
Email lists for subcommitees are up and running, including archives. Two of the subcommittees have been using them for a full week now and they are working well. Our thanks to Andi Snow-Weaver and Larry Goldberg for setting such early and good examples. Subscription and other information can be found at http://teitac.org/wiki/Email_lists
2. The Committee Mailing List -- the list this message is being sent to -- is open only to committee members and alternates and is primarily used for announcements. It will supplement, but not replace, information provided by the Access Board. If your committee representation changes (that is, the primary or the alternate representative for the member organization changes), please notify Tim Creagan at the Access Board (creagan@access-board.gov), as well as Committee co-chairs Mike Paciello and Jim Tobias.
All primary and alternate representatives of organizations should be subscribed to the Committee Mailing List. Please ensure that both representatives from all Committee member organizations are subscribed to the Committee Mailing list.
3. Subcommittee mailing lists are open to anyone.
4. The subcommittee work pages are up. Please use them in whatever way you find comfortable. They work as reference, draft work area, and free form discussion areas.
Links to the subcommittee work pages can be found at http://teitac.org/wiki/TEITAC_Wiki#Subcommittees.
Instructions for using the work pages can be found at http://teitac.org/wiki/TEITAC_wiki Once you have registered and logged on to the work pages, you may address any comments, suggestions or questions about the work page to: teitac-tools@list.teitac.org
5. Guidance on holding subcommittee conference telephone call meetings, especially in keeping with the protocols.
The Communications Task Force is looking at other tools, and will provide more information as it becomes available. Subcommittee convenors or chairs must remember that subcommitee telephone calls must be accessible. At a minimum, subcommittee calls must (1) provide captioning and be (2) provide public notice of upcoming subcommitee calls.
To provide captioning:
Ask someone on your subcommittee with a .gov suffix on their email address -- or someone at the Access Board -- to reserve Relay Conference Captioning for your meeting. This takes just a few minutes. In order to make the reservation, the dial-in credentials are required. If the .gov person on your subcommittee is not familiar with the FedRCC reservation process, Access Board staff will be pleased to walk them through the process, it is quite painless. FedRCC requires 48 hours advance notice in order to guarantee availability and is nominally only available 8:00 am to 5:00 pm EST, but they sometimes make exceptions.
To provide public notice of the subcommittee meetings, post all dial-in and RCC information at least two full business days in advance to all of the following:
- Your subcommittee mailing list,
- your subcommittee work page, and
- the Teitac.org Calendar
by contacting Jim Tobias, Mike Paciello, Jared Smith, or a member of the Access Board staff (Bruce Bailey, Tim Creagan, David Baquis).
If no one on the subcommittee can host the conference call, it does not have to be toll free (but that is nice of course), use one of the many free teleconferencing services.
Note: The Access Board will continue to post logistical information about the TEITAC on the Access Board webpage, "508 update". We will refer all persons interested in working on the subcommittees to go to the TEITAC.org site and sign up to work on whichever Committees they wish. Membership on subcommittees is open to all.
Thank you for attention to these matters. Please do not hesitate to contact Tim Creagan, Mike Paciello, Jim Tobias, or Bruce Bailey with any questions.
Sincerely,
Tim Creagan U.S. Access Board
