Committee Notes: February 10, 2006

We met today at Jesse's site, the Lexington Library in St. Paul. Jesse showed us the assisstive tech station and demonstrated three programs: Jaws, Magic and Kurzweil. He also showed us some of the Windows XP keyboard shortcuts that he uses in combination with the three programs.

Questions to answer:

• how much does a reasonably equipped accessibility station cost -> possible line item for WiFi benefits agreement.
• What are the hardware requirements for an accessibility station? -> possible line item for WiFi benefits agreement.

CTCnet conference in July
Ken is looking for a way through his connections (and supernatural persuasive powers) to find financial help for our committee and the programming committee to present at this conference. We are all excited about this--it's looking like it might really happen.

Our Committee Work: Review & Accomplishments
We discussed a possible presentation that would highlight our accomplishments as a committee: our trainings, toolkit, structure, working styles, etc., and what we can hand off to next year's committee. This could be a multimedia project--maybe presented at the CTCnet conference?

Our Blog
We need to beef our blog up in the next two weeks! Ken will send potential supporters to our blog to show off our work and convince them to help us get to the CTCnet conference in July. That means we need to start putting up annotated--and accessible--links to resources about accessibility and usability. We also need to ask Catherine to update the link to our blog on the CTEP web site and make the Alt tag more meaningful.

Outreach -- how to assist Jesse with his outreach at Lexington Library.
Jesse has made lots of progress already in raising awareness about the assisstive tech station at the library. We had a short brainstorming session to find other ways to reach new immigrant communities. One idea is to start by asking for connections. Rather than approaching a site or group cold, it's best to find out if anyone in our Corps can recommend a contact. We will use the message board as a first stab at finding connections. Jesse is looking for an introduction to the Courage Center.

Tool Kit
We decided to build up our toolkit gradually--rather than in large deadline driven chunks. Each member will bring two resources to every committee meeting, and post them to our blog. For now, we will collect what we find of interest and later in March assess what we have and fill in the gaps from there.

One category we can add is "practice activities," and include Jesse's activity for Feb 17th Corps training.

Mini Trainings
February 17th
Jesse has put together some awesome stuff -- an activity to start, discussion to follow and then a demonstration to the Corps on the tools he showed us this morning.

Preparation:

• Lindsey - print copies of Jesse's Shortcuts documents
• Jesse - print copies of the activity and answer sheet
• Linda - (optional) develop & print handout for Mac keyboard shortcuts

Roles:

• Lindsey - introduction; our trainings, where we are headed, expectations
• Jesse - presentation
• Lindsey, Lauree & Jesse - floaters during activity
• Linda - take notes throughout

Ideas for March and April Mini Trainings

• March: Employment and Disabilities (disclosure, and other common employment related questions)
• April: modes of communication -- audio, video, web, paper, etc., (use one of our Fact Sheets as an example)

Fact Sheets / Handouts
Discussed how our fact sheets are shaping up. Final drafts due on February 28th. We will email our final to committee members the morning of the 28th. In the meantime, share our work in progress and ask for feedback (be specific!) via email. Fact sheets will be shared with the Corps on first Corps day of March.

Formatting standards:

• fit on one piece of paper (can be double-sided),
  
• use Times New Roman font, and
  
• include a footer at the bottom of the page that reads,

"Community Technology Empowerment Project (line break)
Accessibility and Usability Fact Sheets (line break)
February 2006"

Font size, margins, header sizes are up to each of us. We can add (relevant) pictures if we like.

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