International telecommunication union

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>> ANDREA SAKS: We are waiting to get the teleconferencing set up so the people who wanted to call in could call in.

>> ANDREA SAKS: Hello. Who is there?

>> Leo speaking. Good morning.

>> ANDREA SAKS: Sorry. Could you say your name please?

>> Leo Lehman.

>> ANDREA SAKS: Oh, Leo. Hi. We haven't really started yet. So hang on one second.

>> Okay.

>> ANDREA SAKS: Okay. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for coming. I am going to open the meeting now. We have a captioner by the    I was told two names. Is it Tina or Cindy today? Hi Tina. You have the ability to put the captioning on your own PC and also there is a chat box if someone wishes to communicate or ask a question via the chat box that can be done remotely because I was told we might have some other people who might be interested in communicating that way.
I am going to start with the agenda which just one second. Wait a minute. Sorry. Oh. Did I not say that?

>> BILL PECHEY: Yes.

>> ANDREA SAKS: Sorry. Bill Pechey is helping me cochair this and he is much better at doing meetings than I am. I will say out the URL for those people who can't see the board it is www.streamtext, one word, dot net/text.aspx question mark event equals itu. There is no space from dot aspx question mark event equals itu. So Leo, if you have got that   

>> Yes, I am already reading what you are saying.

>> ANDREA SAKS: You are reading. Okay. That's terrific. That's fantastic. And Leo, do you have a chat box?

>> I do so.

>> ANDREA SAKS: Well, if you enter the chat box you can make rude remarks if you wish.

>> Thanks.

>> ANDREA SAKS: The introduction I would like to give briefly is this is the joint coordinating activity on accessibility and human factors as originally started as an organization to communicate between question 4 of Study Group 2 which is human factors and accessibility question 26 which is in Study Group 16 multimedia. It was expanded later in 2008 when resolution 70 gave it a bigger mandate to be able to go across the IT border in to ITU D and ITU R. We have representatives in ITU R and we have representatives in every study group within ITU T. And we have Clara Loots who is the Rapporteur in 20. Question 20 is the accessibility question for the developing countries. Clara is not presently here, but because you have captioning as you can see she will get a full report of what happened later and can follow and report on it to her own group later this September.
Excuse me. So what the JCA hopes to do is to take information from one aspect of what's going on either in a study group or IPTV, GSI and communicate it to the rest of the ITU community. Also does a bit of research to help other people find information should they be asked a question and it does have the ability to write to other organizations outside the ITU. It cannot create a contribution.
It can advise with different experts about the creation of a contribution but it cannot do a contribution. Does anyone have any questions they would like to ask about the JCA before I continue? Great. I take that as a no. The agenda is Doc.35 Revision 2 and I just would like you to take a look at that and see if there is anything that anybody would like to add or change. I am going to add that in No. 10, coordination and collaboration outside the ITU, I am going to add ETSI and actually make that 10.1 because we have a guest here. Mike Pluke who attends Study Group 2 and also is the human factors gentleman for ETSI who will speak about the activities that he has been doing. So is that okay, Mike? Right. Okay. Great. Is there anybody else who would like to add anything? Yes, Kate.

>> Kate: I would just like to report very briefly on the new publication from ITC 100 on accessibility issues for audio, video and multimedia systems and equipment. This is a guide for standards developers rather than product manufacturers. So obviously useful to both.

>> ANDREA SAKS: Thank you, Kate. I will put you after ETSI then. We will do that straight away. That will work. Thank you very much. Okay. Okay. Great. So do we have approval of the agenda? Fine. Thank you. One of the things that we haven't been able to do is item No. 3. We did have two vice conveners and Floris sent his apologies. Floris Van Nes is the Rapporteur for question 4 in Study Group 2 and unfortunately or fortunately depending upon your view he is having a new hip. So he is unable to be here. He will also get a copy of the captioning. We lost a vice convener a year ago, Bill Jolley who came from Australia who was a person with disabilities. He was blind and he was an amazing character and we have yet to replace him. If anyone knows of anyone who would like or want to take that position, that position is open. Do we have anybody who would like to take that position on in this room? It doesn't have to be someone from ITU. It can be someone on the outside. Yeah, I was just noticing, I am watching just for the benefit of people who are not in this room Beat Cleve has just pushed Christopher Jones and said why don't you do it in a way and that's a thought. Christopher or Beat, you could do it and Beat has put his sign hands behind his back. Would you be interested in becoming a vice convener, Christopher? Yes? Great. Right. I think we might have solved our problem. I am very happy about this idea. I am going to put it to the vote. Would this group like to appoint Christopher Jones from the UK as the new vice convener replacing Bill Jolley? That's been approved. We now have a new vice convener. Thank you very much.
(Applause.)

>> ANDREA SAKS: Fabulous. All right. And it works very well.

>> ANDREA SAKS: Did somebody else want to make a comment? I see giggles and smiles. That's great. Okay. Now we are going to do liaisons. We have moved on to No. 4. Now the next document Bill is wonderfully helping me with these, is document 36. And Kate, this might be    actually this might be a good place to pop you in rather than down at No. 10 because this is dealing with   

>> Kate: No, no. TC 100.

>> ANDREA SAKS: Oh. I am glad you corrected me. Got it. Don't worry. It's fine. Okay. This was a liaison sent by JTC1 regarding the joint leadership meeting between ITU T and ISO. The group had    I was actually at the group and represented the accessibility access part of ITU. And there was a decision regarding that event. There were different areas where we all overlap and the part that pertains to us is resolution 4 and resolution 12. Documentation and documents are difficult for everyone to access if they have a disability which prevents them from doing so. Alternate formats are often helpful. Most people think of Braille but also pdfs are difficult for all screen readers to read and Word is easier. So this was    I think this is a very important step that this was something that we all agreed upon that we should make alternate formats available to persons with disabilities and that was a unanimous decision. The resolution 4 was a request to joint directives and a maintenance team regarding accessibility. We need to incorporate the following statement in the upcoming revision of the ISO IEC directives. ISO and IEC will work toward eliminating barriers to accessing or participating in ISO and IEC in the body of work and especially for people and older    should be persons but never mind. People with disabilities and older users. The JTMT, should the JTMT not accept this request for incorporation of the next version of the ISO IEC directives. SWD is instructed to ensure that this statement will be included in the next possible resolution. SWG A, JCT encourages the SWG A to continue and maintain their documents in outreach activities and JTC1 entitles development of specification that meet the identity and user needs. It has two parts to it. It has the documentation of all the accessibility standards and standards with accessibility features in it. As they are done and there are hundreds, aren't there, Bill? Just many, many of them. And also there is a secondary part of this group which deals with user needs which is constantly being updated as people communicate. So that was unanimous. Are there any questions on this particular liaison that has been sent to the JCA? It is for information and I don't think we need to reply other than we could    do you think it would be appropriate to say we support the resolutions that have been passed? Okay. We can just send a reply that we have taken note.

>> BILL PECHEY: Did you want to send the liaison to the ITU T liaison office or do you want to send it to the JTC1?

>> ANDREA SAKS: That's a good question.

>> BILL PECHEY: Because this comes from Olivier Dubuisson.

>> ANDREA SAKS: I don't know the answer to that. You are much better on policy than I am and procedure. What do you recommend, Bill? Because you are better at that. We are going to acknowledge that we received and we appreciate the communication.

>> BILL PECHEY: It is an acknowledgement. We don't need to reply at all.

>> ANDREA SAKS: Okay. Then we take that advice on board. A little less work to do. Okay. That's fine. Okay. So that's the only liaison statement. So we will move on to No. 5. The review of the JCA AHF activities since the last activity of the JCA December 2 meeting in 2009. Now I just gave a brief overview anyway. So I won't do that again. I am going to be a little bit more specific and if you would look at document 37 and what the JCA is to try to find what is going on within the ITU and with other organizations that, in fact, are dealing with accessibility.

>> Thank you. This area has actually been something that has been looked at in Study Group 12 for many years. They started off with voice transmission but we have always had an interest in hard of hearing kind of aspects and now that's been extended a little bit more to looking at video and multimedia aspects. The particular area that we are interested in Study Group 12 is we don't design equipment or we don't develop equipment specifications but we are interested in defining the performance characteristics for that equipment in terms of QOE, quality of experience, as perceived by the user, as perceived subjectively. So we are very interested in the particular areas of quality and experience that would be required for people with disabilities, hard of hearing, poor vision and interested in    we don't have complete answers to all of these aspects yet but we would be very happy to take in to account any new work which is related to how people with disabilities limits on their perception and things like that and we would be happy to incorporate that material in to our recommendations, such that they can then be used in specifications for new equipment.

>> ANDREA SAKS: Thank you, Paul. You just covered paragraph 2 and paragraph 3 of my report, which basically says exactly what Paul has explained. The new bit of work is dealing with the network car. And Mr. Chuck Devorak who is the study group chairman and also the focal point for the JCA was very interested in the fact that we needed to have more than just audio for emergency communication. And that    but in that    when we did have audio that good clear sound was necessary. And they were aware of this particular requirement. We have been talking about in question 26 in a document about the fact that lip reading could be used in the network car. And we were talking about the fact that we did get a liaison about that, that the requirement would have to be more than 12 frames per second.

>> MIKE PLUKE: That's scarey. I forgot to mention yesterday when this subject came up at the last ETSI human factors meeting these Swedish regulator, a representative of the Swedish regulator came along and he raised the issue that the perception he was getting from user groups was that the    for hard of hearing people they    situation seems to be deteriorating and seems to be more problems arising where people find the speech quality unacceptable to them and he was encouraging perhaps that we propose some work to look at that situation. That meant that might occur but it still seemed to be as it is reflected here as well as a common perception.

>> ANDREA SAKS: Mike, may I ask if you do get that work started or that work becomes a reality to copy or send a liaison to the JCA so that can be forwarded to Study Group 12 in addition to other study groups? Thank you.

>> MIKE PLUKE: That's not likely to happen very immediately that's for sure unfortunately. Certainly something we will discuss again at our next meeting I think.

>> ANDREA SAKS: Well, I have made a note of it and I may ask you.
(Laughter).

>> ANDREA SAKS: Thank you. Okay.

>> BILL PECHEY: While we are talking about Study Group 12 I would like to mention that at our last meeting of question 26 we sent a liaison asking for their advice on how to measure the accuracy of conversions between speech and text, whether done by a human being or by a speech recognition machine. We needed this information for our work on relay services and we had a very comprehensive reply from them and I would like to thank them publicly for that. It is very interesting information. We will certainly be using that in our future work.

>> ANDREA SAKS: Thank you, Bill. Okay. Going back to my little graph, we did have a meeting and I won't go in to detail because what I am going to be going through the other aspects. I have covered the ITU ISO ITC JCA leadership tech already. WIPO and ITU had an accessibility workshop and the lady that organized that workshop is Alexandra Gaspari who is the secretariat to the JCA as well as the accessibility officer for the ITU T. I would like    I did warn you I was going to do this to you. I would like Alexandra Gaspari to give a brief report on that particular workshop. Thank you.

>> ALEXANDRA GASPARI: Thanks, Andrea. It was beginning of February this year we had this training for web accessibility for all the UN staff involved in web designing and web development. And it was really a big success. We had over 150 participants from all the UN agencies coming over to Geneva and it was really a technical training on programs and templates and how to use different programs that are used for the web development and web design. So that is a first step. It was a big hit because we could do it with another agency, specialized agency, the WIPO, world intellectual property agency. Maybe I can speak about other things later on. Okay. Thanks.

>> ANDREA SAKS: Thank you, Alexandra. I did attend the first day of that and I found it really interesting. It mainly dealt and most of the people there were dealing with issues that dealt with the blind. But we were able to institute something briefly about deaf participation in web accessibility and regarding realtime text which is important because a lot of the issues that we have in communication over the web deal with instant messaging but that's not really realtime. Because if you push anything to send it you are transmitting and it is not realtime. So that was one thing that I was able to point out but it was an excellent turnout. You had more than 200 people, is that right, Alexander, that came?

>> ALEXANDRA GASPARI: 150 overall.

>> ANDREA SAKS: And they were from many different UN organizations. So there was a definite interest in trying to make the web accessible and, of course, the other aspect of web accessibility is captioning for all videos. That hasn't sunk in yet here or in other areas unless we stomp our feet, but all videos that go on UN websites should be captioned and that's partially due to finance constraints and also due to a lack of awareness and we are still trying to work with people here within the ITU to try and make that a reality, especially for the ITU accessibility Web pages. But it is happening eventually. But it is taking time as these things do.

>> Kate: I wondered since we were talking about web accessibility it is worth mentioning that British standards have just published a code of practice for web accessibility, which is BS8878 2010. I don't know whether people here are aware of that code of practice. But it was put together by representatives of disability groups and the disabled persons expert group within BSI. So I just would like to make you aware of that. I believe you probably have to purchase it. But it does exist as a code of practice. It has been extensively revised from an earlier one and the first draft was thrown out by us experts as not acceptable. So it is an improvement.

>> ANDREA SAKS: Thank you, Kate. I have taken note of that and Alexander, perhaps we can try and obtain that so that if    yeah. That would be good. Possibly we could make that available to the web people here at the ITU. Thank you. That's very useful. I will put that in my report as well.
Kate, would you like to be known as Nine Tiles?

>> Kate: (Off microphone).

>> ANDREA SAKS: I know that, Dear. Well, all right. I will do it as you. That's fine. Thank you.
(Laughter).

>> ANDREA SAKS: Okay. Right. Are there any other comments regarding web accessibility that would    that anyone would like to make? Okay. So we have the TSAG, the standardization advisory group. Now TSAG gave the right for the JCA to exist. And it is the telecommunications standardization advisory board. All this means is that I went there and made a report on what was going on. It also probably needs to make more use of accessibility information in writing its own guidelines for new people who come. And that is a project that is an ongoing one that we try and do. But again we need to have people make contributions to that area and the JCA can't make a contribution to that area. And that's a place that needs work, I think because when they discuss guidelines for new members, they should really emphasize accessibility, universal design and how people who come to the ITU should perceive accessibility in their work.

>> ALEXANDRA GASPARI: IGF was 10.6.

>> ANDREA SAKS: Thank you. It was there. I didn't see it. So technically I have covered the IGF. So we don't have to do 10.6. Okay. Now we do have    we did have a meeting with the radio advisory group. It is like TSAG. It does the same thing as TSAG does for the radio and ITU R. We do have a person who has been appointed to that who I presume is coming later today, is that correct? He said he would come because he was going to    oh, you are here. ITU R is here. Thank you very much. That is    oh, my God, your name has gone out of my head. Mr. Yamaguchi. Mr. Yamaguchi, when we come to the part about future workshops you are going to give us a little dissertation about the ETU. He was appointed from ITU R to here. That's a good accomplishment. UNESCO, it dealt with a joint effort between JC and UNESCO to try and see if there were ways we can work together. UNESCO is beginning to become accessible as well and they had a meeting with many different people within the different organizations again from all over the world and they invited us to come. Their main thrust seems to be education and that was an extremely interesting thing for me because though we don't deal with children's education or education of teachers the UNESCO people do, in fact, deal with that and that was a very interesting thing for me to learn about.