HW Minutes Jan 12

Hardware SC 01/12/07 Con Call

Agenda

1. Welcome
2. Topics
   1. Review Action Items from last week
   2. Begin discussion on specific 508 desktop and portable computer requirements from 1194.26.
      1. All mechanically operated controls and keys shall comply with § 1194.23 (k) (1) through (4).
      2. Any further discussion regarding - (k)(1) Controls and Keys shall be tactilely discernible without activating the controls or keys.
      3. New discussion - (k)(2) Controls and Keys shall be operable with one hand and shall not require tight grasping, pinching, twisting of the wrist. The force required to activate controls and keys shall be 5 lbs. (22.2N) maximum.
3. Confirm next meeting

New Action Items:

• Randy to continue to work on matrix
• Rob to post link to Christopher Yukins article “Making Federal Information Technology Accessible: A Case Study in Social Policy and Procurement”
  • Link to Yukins article
• Post 1194.23 (k)(2) into listserv for discussion
• Terry Weaver to begin developing a hardware specific matrix relative to Gregg VanderHeiden’s “functional criteria matrix.

Agenda Topics Covered:

Reviewed a list of items discussed on list serv that may be included in this subcommittee. Some devices were not “computer” devices, but it was felt that they should be included because of the physical interaction element that is a focus of 1194.26.

Major discussion was on two topics – Business cases and productivity and efficiency relative to accessibility.

Business cases – this conversation focused on the continued reference to business cases but the lack of specific examples. There are general business cases models that exist from both the business side “don’t lose the customer” to the civil rights perspective.

Productivity and efficiency – discussed the challenges in creating products that meet the acccessiblity needs of all potential users. Some discussion relative to the achieving access at the individual level, just need to be sure to ensure that the primary system is accessible to the AT.

Transcript:

The transcript for the meeting follows:

Event ID: 615997 Event Started: 1/12/2007 10:37:44 AM ET

Please stand by for real-time relay captioning.

E-mail late last night, he is slammed, ITAA has a big conference coming up. I don't know that he will be joining us today.

I guess other folksing chime in as they join. This is Rob Nerhood, with Dell. One of the chairs for the hardware subcommittee. Thank you for dpiel dialing in. My partner, co-chair Randy Mars den may or may not be here, depending on his schedule. He asked me to go ahead and get started. Bear with me if I get quiet for a few seconds, I am going to be trying to imagine the queue as well as keep notes.

We have captioning up. So I will remind everyone, please introduce yourself prior to speaking, and please try to speak as clearly and perhaps a little slower than you might normally to allow our captioner to keep up with us.

With that in mind, let's go ahead and jump into today's agenda.

The first topic is to review action items from last week.

Sorry, I was out of the room. I don't know Jonathan. Could you say a little about yourself?

Yes, hi.

Jonathan, the floor is yours

I am Jonathan -- trial attorney at U.S. disappoint U.S. department of just just, justice. I am participating to see, basically what kind of, I guess pin, opinion, people are having. I have been going to subcommittee meetings, phone conferences, first meeting you held also. I will be here and there locations, you will probably see me.

Great. It's good to know that the 2K-79 department of justice wants to see where the process goes, so thanks a lot.

Sure.

Anything else?

Welcome Jonathan.

So let's step back, this is Rob Nerhood again with disel, to Dell, to the action items. I am trying to dig into action item one, but having challenges tying down the right people to discuss BIOS, and ways in which it might be deemed accessible or made accessible. Bear with me, it's being investigated, but trying to get the right people in the right place at the right time has been challenging.

Second action item, Randy had taken on to continue to work with the matrix where we looked at requirements currently associated with section -- with the desktop and portable computer section, as well as the various themes laid out for this committee in the first meeting. Randy did not have time to complete that this week, but we expect to have it ob on the WIKI early next week and we will send out a note via the listserve when posted, ask folks take a look at it in advance of next Friday's meeting.final action item was to start a discussion on potential products that would fall into this computer desktop handheld device grouping. I thank Terry Weaver and Tom -- for get thag started.

I will read off what Terry and Tom started with, kind of use that as first discussion point here to see if anybody can brainstorm anything else we may want to consider on this list.

So the list includes: PDAs, digital cameras, tablet PCs, flash or USB memory drives, Blackberries, Trios, and other smart phones or devices, LCD projectors, mp3 players, DVD players, the d VR recorder or player, like aAtive a ttivo, and with app El's big announcement. The i Phone.

I guess I have a list for Terry, with the DVD and the DVR, those jumped out more as audio visual components, what was your thought process?Terry:

GSA, I through them out there because I thought it, devices with mechanical interfaces, the concerns that they are more like hardware than telecom issues. The use of, for instance, more and more they have on screen programming, no interface on the box itself. They have led kind of things, I thought it might be hardware more than telecom.

I am in agreement with that, I think one of the things I would like to see the group work on, making sure we look at the different mechanical characteristics of the system. Very good. Thanks.

Does anybody else have any ideas or additions to this list?

Do you want to open for new discussion or hold off?

Let's go ahead and open it for new discussion.

Okay, this is Tom Al bin from ob urn engineers. I am interested mostly in a discussion about productivity, efficiency, and business cases that I have seen floating around on this list and also on the general list. I guess maybe just a comment that I see a lot of statements that there's business case for adding accessibility features, but I never really see that detailed, and I think at some point someone is likely to call us on that. So I am interested in a discussion of how we prepare for that. A second topic is the issue of productivity and efficiency, I think those are highly desirable, but I start wondering about feasibility issues. So I will throw that out for discussion. Thank you.

Don't everybody raise your hands at once. Terry?

Terry Weaver: I would like to question Tom a little more in terms of the business case. Are you looking for what would be the driver for industry to address this area of adding accessibility to these additional products?

Tom: I would be happy to wait for Jim's comment first before I respond.

This is Jim Tobias: I am very interested in the business case issues, of course, I think they are relevant, to the work of the committee large through whatever guidance we provide on the economic analysis. I don't know if people have had a chance to read that Christopher -- article circulating around. I think he's a law profess or at either Georgetown or George Washington. He has very interesting things to say about the origins and practices of 50 508, some have to do with the economic analysis. I guess my answer would be to try to -- at least the way I would like to frame it would be that there's no such thing as accessibility in a generic sense. Everything's highly contextualized. Even if we break it down into particular features, those features might be easy to justify in one kind of product for a certain purpose and hard to justify in another product used for the same purpose. Or, you know, there might be other complexities to it. I find the business case, there's this kind of executive level business case that basically says well, we don't want to jeopardize federal sales, 50 million people with disabilities, basically we should pay attention to this issue. That's fine. There's a lot of material at that level. It's at the other level that I think there's a real shortage, you know, and then we reach the issue of do we have to justify on a business basis every single feature to the extent 508 is seen, accurately or not, civil rights law kind of implementation of an antidiscrimination movement, you might say. There are going to be some things that won't be justified, but from a civil rights perspective, simply must be carried out, even though they don't prove out in dollars. So I don't know the relevance to this particular committee on that, then I will just say a word about the productivity issue, since you raised that as well. That is that I understand it, that it's important, we may need to prioritize somehow, say that, you know, where a person's main job is focused on a particular function it's more important that that function be accessible than something they hardly ever do or do once. That it also breaks down into whether the accessibility is built into the product at relatively low productivity results, or after market technology does a better job of enhancing productivity.

I find it would be almost impossible for us to measure that. If we were in a situation where federal worker productivity were measured at an intense level like that, then maybe we could do it. But to try to have the accessibility effort drive the metrics of federal productivity, I just don't see that we could accomplish that.

Thank you Jim, Tom?Tom Al bin: I appreciate those comments, let me respond to productivity. I tend to agree it's going to be difficult to assess productivity. Does of the discussion raised about efficiency in the context of usability. I do agree it could be extremely difficult, certainly very intengs tensive in terms of effort, but a discussion in terms of should the accessibility technology, whether that's built into the product or whether it's after market, should that be equally efficient to any other way of accomplishing that task. To me that seems that that would be very difficult to accomplish in all cases, and that as I think perhaps Jim was saying, we probably need to consider some recognition that there may be limitations on technology that don't allow us to achieve full equivalent productivity.

The second part goes back to the business case. I don't think I have seen the article that you mentioned, Jim, so if you could set up a reference --

I will put a link, since we are linking to an external site, is that all right, from a copyright perspective?

I think we are permitted to --

Thank you. Back to you Tom.great, I appreciate that.

Tom: I am trying to, with regard to the business case, I am trying to, because if I were sitting back at a manufacturing company, as a design person, someone came to me and said we need to add these features to a product we can say it's required you have to do that, but the question becomes -- there are all sorts of routes that could take. One, you could conceivably increase the price of the product to the point where the marketing people would say well, we'll never sell enough of these to justify it, we just won't make it. I guess the real reason I started off on this track, I hear a lot of discussion of there's a business case for adding accessibility features to operating systems or to devices or that sort of thing. It's floated as, like Jim said, there are 50 million people, that sort of thing. But I think at some point somebody -- there's going to be a guy with a green eyeshade somewhere saying show me the numbers. I am wondering, you know, if we have those, it would be nice to have those in our hip pocket when that question comes up. Perhaps this article would go towards answering that. Thank you.

Terry?

Terry Weaver: From GSA, again, going back again towards Jim's comment. This discussion in terms of this civil right, where you were going Jim is the way the government has interpreted section 508 in that it doesn't upend other key principles of the federal government. Such as, we are pro prohibited from buying products designed to meet government-only specs. To do that type of -- for instance, I can't go to Microsoft and demand they make a Microsoft version of office that is explicit only to government users. I have to buy the commercial version of that product. That goes back in time to lots of upgrades, different regulations and laws, the interpretations ofy many brains, putting 508 in place, commercially on the shelf. I don't think there's an opportunity or even a desire to change that approach. I don't see that as being something in the scope of what we are talking about here. Some conversations trickled off that way, I wanted to talk to that a little. In terms s of having the statistical data, measurement data, we are woefully short on anything like that. I am not sure it's a big job the Access Board has. I don't know where we will find it either.

Thank you, Terry.

Tom?

Thank you. Tom: Thank you, Terry, that's helpful and I appreciate the information about -- I guess what I would raise for discussion with this group is how would we respond? I am not a marketing expert. I just have sat in on enough of these product design meetings in previous career incarnations to have some feel for this. If this has to be an off-the-shelf product, let's say I am Microsoft, designing an operating system, and I have, I don't know, 15 million users at this given price point, whatever features I add to that adds some cost, whether accessibility or anything else. At some point I know my marketing people are going to say that -- I think they would -- as you start adding cost you might increase the user base but decrease the purchase base. I am throwing that out for discussion. How do we respond to that type of issue? For some things it's probably not going to matter. There are only a limited number of operating systems you can buy, but for some products I'm wondering if it would start pushing things out of the market. I will be quiet, let somebody else talk.

Jim: This is Jim, I seem to be frozen, can't raise my hand, can't see the queue.

Do you mind if Jim goes or --

Terry: Jim, go.

Jim: Let me report on my experience with the industry, it's pretty universal. That is that as intended, the purpose of 508 was to motivate industry to do things for a very large customer that a bunch of individual customers couldn't motivate them to do. I think we see the resistance or reluctance in the non-federal, more entertainment oriented technology. We get really a pretty poor update of accessibility features, even though there's pretty good numbers to demonstrate. I think the thing we have to remember within our limghts little domain that companies doangt company don't do everything profitable, they do the most profitable. Even if we prove out there will be increased sales if we add at an accessible features, increase sales 100,000 dollars, great, but we come up against another person who says for 100,000 I can increase that much just by advertising. They can prove that out. Advertising effectiveness research is very well developed. We don't have to prove better than zero, we have to prove better than anything else out there. That's the challenge.

How most companies -- the big word they use is jeopardy. Not the game show. They don't want to risk any potential official sale. They know that even given the best resources a federal procurement officer has, the best information flow, what have you, they can't predict that some carefully modulated level of accessibility is going to help them win the sale. They kind of have to go whole hog. Say we don't want to risk anything here, tell us what we need to do, find out what other companies are doing, where are we in the pack? If we are leading let's press the accessibility button when a federal sales person is talking to a procurement person. Not leading, we will respond to questions, do the best we can. It really is the jeopardy thing. They don't want to lose a billion dollars in sales because they didn't invest that additional 100,000 in accessibility.

Thank you, Jim. Terry?

Terry Weaver: From GSA, if you look at the purest essence of purchasing for the federal government, we are required to define our requirements, conduct market research to make sure there are products in the commercial space that will meet our requirements, and then to make the best value decision in purchasing them, buy them at the best price, which means effectively, the trade-off between value and low price, then purchase that. When you add in what does it mean to do all of those things it gets much more com complicated. In defining requirements, in a clean-slate environment, which no one lives in, looking for a operating system, requirements for 508, I will look for products that meet the mandates I am supposed to be following, but I realize I have to mesh them together to get there. The driver behind 508 is that since the federal government doesn't give the most dollars to businesses, but there is no one other single buyer that is bigger in our estimation, that we make things easier by defining requirements that people can shoot for and we encourage them by making acquisitions.

I have no historical installed base, no users, data files to be converted, I can simply look, say here's my check list of must use, the products available, and when I do my assessment of what I can ask for because there's competition I come up with this set, the competition, including 508, look for the best price purchase. Very pure. When you start talking about the fact they exist in environments where you have an installed base, documents created, people trained, hardware platforms, all of the software and operating systems that run beneath them, it gets much more complicated. So the essence still of 508 is trying to draw people towards -- alternates a carrot. This is what the government wants to buy, but it's something where we have to look at the commercial availability area, make sure we are not requiring something that doesn't exist commercially yet, otherwise we can't do a procurement.

Thank you, Terry.

This is Rob Nerhood. I put myself in the queue. Step outside of my moderate or role a moment. I want to step back a second because we have been talking about different markets, at least from my perspective, in the sengs of sense of the way the standards are written now we are meeting specific requirements. One area within the design folks I deal with here is a challenge. That's meeting demands with different customer sets. If you solely design, for example, to the way I interpret 508 to be written, all of your devices would have mechanical controls, buttons, switches, etcetera. However, if you step into the consumer space there's a very very strong drive from that pretty large segment of the market towards higher tech -- not the right word, but let's call it jazzier or blended type of technologies that allow for smaller form factors, sleeker designs, having to ensure you allocate 10 mm of diameter and 2 mm of depth on a rubber dome or momentary switch. What I am throwing out, one of the things we want to make sure in the development of this standard, continue to allow some flexibility. If we have a product that, say, from a vefnd or Vern's perspective vendor's perspective, we can do our best from accessibility perspective, but in the end it will still, if the government wants to adopt that particular technology it's their choice in the sense of recognizing that that device may not have switches. Tom Brett's e-mail called out the i Phone, that's a touch device. Will it work its way into the government? I don't know. Better answered by Terry or Jonathan. From a 508 perspective how do you deem deal with it? There's no switches or buttons. I turn it over to Tom.

Tom A: Thank you, that helps define how the government procurement process works. My understanding from what you said, Terry is if no assistive technology was commercially available the government would not be in a position to say that had to be added to a product. That helps bring closure to some discussion we had earlier about whether or not a product developer would be responsible for closing a gap in assistive technology.

I think that what Rob said about feasibility and flexibility are also important. That may be kind of what I am struggling to explore. I was thinking about what Jim said about jeopardy, and certainly that's true; nobody wants to lose a large customer. I guess I am wondering -- I heard Jim say there are good numbers for -- the business case. I am trying to sort out for myself, when does adding more and more features to a product to satisfy one customer's demand start to jeopardize the remaining customers. So I have no idea what percentage of a market the federal government might represent for a hypothetical. If it was 10% of the sales, again, at some point along the lines of some of the things Rob was saying about the bling appeal of a product or price point, those sorts of things, I could see at least hype hypothetically where that customer could in turn jeopardize sales to the other 90% or 70% or whatever it is. Thank you.

Rob: Jim, the floor is yours, thanks, Tom.

Jim: I am not sure I can respond to the points that both Rob and Tom raised, the reason is I don't understand enough, and we hope to be able to address this in the February face-to-face meeting. Understand enough about how procurements actually work in the different product categories, segments in the different agencies. I think this is, the discussion we're having is more relevant to hardware than to any other category. Let me carry something over from the telecom world that I think the Access Board made a clear -- an agency is buying a phone system. In that phone system there's kind of a central box, like a PBX box of some sort, then all of these desktop phones, wide variety of desktop phones, all of which are sold by the same vendor, all compatible with the system the agency is buying. Well, by chance some of those, well, maybe not by chance, but somehow there are different accessibility features on those different phones. Let's say one phone has a light that flashes whenever it rings as well as the ringer. Does the agency have to buy only phones that have both the ringer and the flasher or can they buy a mix depending on the needs and preferences of the workers and agency, as long as there is the option of purchasing one with a flasher so that a Deaf or hard of hearing employee can be notified a call is coming in? I think the Access Board went ahead and said yes, that's fine. We don't require Jaws on every pc or accessibility on every phone, and the phone is being purchased as a unit, a whole, choices within it will meet the needs of the employees. It was kind of drawing a line that said this is still within the purview of 508, if a vendor offered a phone system with no phones with flashers they would not be compliant and this phone does offer that, is compliant, not to be seen as personal accommodation for the person with a disability. If that's a principle we can extend -- this is the big question, I think. If other -- purchased in similar ways, let's say the contracted sale to buy computers, maybe the individual -- here's where we need -- I certainly don't know anything, maybe the committee as a whole can benefit. If the user can pick a Dell, with a user accessibility, by design the power button is prominent, and on oorpght another model it's not, picking at random. Is that sufficient? As long as any given federal employee -- I want to emphasize I am saying this speckulatively. I can see people from the ad advocacy objecting wildly, but is that sufficient as long as within the contract all of the standards are met in such a way the products are identical in what they can accomplish? That is, we can't be talking about a contract that includes a disel PDA Dell PDA that can't run Microsoft office, we have to be talking about computer, laptops, desktops, that can run all the applications the agency needs to run.

Having said that I am really really worried about the response on this call, off this call. I would like to hear what people say.

Terry?

Terry Weaver: I am more than happy to respond back to that. Jim, this is Terry, I am in strong agreement with you on this. But I will push back on one thing. One of the problems we have right now with existing standards, particular lie ly in the telecom, the way it is written, we had early interpretation problems, every handset acquired had to meet all other requirements. That caused exactly the type of problems you spoke of. Additionally, it didn't talk at all about what was behind the wall. You could have a handset that met the need but you didn't put a signal to make certain things work. Talking to all of our telecom people in the early days of 508, they said look to see what provisions apply. I am buying switch boxes, doesn't apply. We had to push back hard and say those phones won't work unless you fix it in the wall. One problem with the existing standard, it is silent on -- technical spec, not some of the system stuff behind it. The second thing, what's the best solution for a given user may not be the best for a different user, with or without disability. To say generic, this is what you all need, regardless, we run the risk of finding people looking for ways around 508. We talked a little about this last week also. Is there a way to talk about a set of provisions that apply for a certain set of disability requirements, and that you would need the solution that's proceeded, not the single product, but the solution needs to address that. The government buys more and more solutions, not just individual products. That maps back to our shopping techniques, but I think the bare bones of the specification seems to be everything must be all things. We tried to address some of that in the FAQs on the government website, similar conversations, once I heard from Doug wake field about accessible photo copiers, do I have to do -- accessible ones tend to be bigger, have more energy requirements. Do I have to have every one, or some subset. Doug's response was you can do a subset. That an inn interpretation not clearly identified as feasible, do-able or allowable in the standard.

I am for bling, use ability, whatever the word is, the fact that not all users are best served by a single device. In fact, more disservice than service, possibly. End of statement.

thank you Terry, Tom?

Thank you Terry and Jim, those were again, very helpful. I tend to agree. My training as an er gone mist gone owe mist tells me there's no one solution that one fits all. I think I agree we do need to, at least is seems to me we do, need to think about how we can deal with the situation where we have this issue of productivity, efficiency again, where perhaps we have a situation where it's possible to produce an effective acceptability feature. That is, it works, but maybe it's not as productive as the typical format. Do we then recognize that there may be some business case reasons that a large manufacturer to build for the entire market would not be able to do more than add limited accessibility features. Recognizing what I think Terry was saying, that was perhaps to have some sort of handshake with a more limited -- I'm not expressing myself very well. Could we recognize there may be instances where it just won't be feasible to provide 100% efficiency in some accessibility features, that those may have to be achieved via the use of after market AT devices. I disbs that's what guess that's what I was questioning. Thank you.

Rob: I need to step in, in my moderate or role, it's 10:52, I need three minutes to run to another area on campus, this is I guess the five-minute warning. At this point in time are there any other comments regarding this very interesting discussion we have had on productivity, efficiency in the business case elements of accessibility?

Terry: Is there a possibility -- I have been playing with this in my head, I definitely don't know how to make an accessible table, but when I look at the product characteristics view that the general committee has developed, Greg Vanderheiden, Jim, you started helping, then Greg took it, ran with it. Went through, talked about the different interactions, I guess, people have with technology. When I look at those, I say gee, I wonder if you could group these by technology interface. If I was trying to design the input interface, these things I need to consider, for these categories I need to consider these provisions, maybe straighten it out saying this is important to someone with hearing loss, but not somebody with low vision. Could we start looking at some sort of matrix that talks to provisions now, getting the categories started, trying to map the things towards a decision table for buyers, designers.

This is Rob: I know it was would easier to communicate to engineers if I say this is the type of problem we have with this interface, instead of going to say try to do this, this, and this. If we can give them more interface type of challenges that 345EU actually lead to innovation. How would you make this accessible for this type of user?

I guess the question is any volunteers who want to start that matrix. I have some things to finish up first before I can jump in.

Tom: I want to second that idea. I think that would be very worthwhile bullet but I am not sure I want to raise my hand to take it on.

This Terry Weaver: I have a support contract or behind me, they are trying to attack that, I will not get back to you next week with it.

That's fine.

Rob: All right. Let's go ahead and with that, kind of start to close things out. The action items that have arisen out of this meeting so far are I will find and post a link to the article mentioned earlier from the legal pro profess or at George Washington. Since we did not get to one of the topics around the discussion on 1194.23 K 2. We were going to talk about the next control and keys requirement. I was going to start a listserve topic on that, those of you, as you have thoughts, comments about it, can please add on that so we can continue to keep the conversation going. Terry has graciously volunteered to build the, let's call it the interface matrix based upon Greg's 's functional criteria matrix.

Thank you for doing that Terry.

Very much so.

With that other comments, needs wants?

I will do my best to have notes posted sometime Monday afternoon. With that I thank you all for your time today.

Thanks a lot, Rob.

[Call ends]