July 20 , 2006
Location
Kansas State School for the Blind, 1100 State Ave., Kansas City,
Kan.
Attendees
Chris Audano, Chairman, City of Overland Park
Susan Waters, Mid-America Regional Council
Kreg Cox, City of Gladstone
Sonya Fendorf, City of Shawnee
Dan Davis, Jackson County, MO
Anthony Oropeza, Johnson County Parks & Rec
Bradley Hook, Kansas State School for the Blind
Jim Clarke, City of Smithville
Eric Gruber, City of Lawrence
Discussion Topic
Online Agendas and
Minutes
Everyone shared how their agency is currently displaying agendas and minutes online.
- MARC – PDFs for several committees and the Board of Directors. The supplemental materials for the Board agenda are not available on the Web.
- Gladstone – Large packet of all materials for City Council and Planning Commission. Posted by year in Word or PDF, all manually.
- Jackson County – Many agendas are posted in Word internally, PDF externally. Some forms are actually duplicated in Word and WordPerfect . Looking into XML.
- Lawrence – Converting Word to HTML pages for agenda and supplemental information. Looking for an XHTML compliant way. Also make packets available with .exe and .zip downloads.
- Overland Park – The agenda for City Council, Planning Commission and Council committees is created in HTML via an application on the intranet by administrative staff. Attachments are in PDF format.
- Shawnee – Agenda and whole packet is scanned into one PDF. Some OCR used.
- Johnson County Parks and Rec– PDF manually posted.
Bradley suggested using OpenOffice to export content to XML or Java.
Open Forum
Bradley mentioned PostgreSQL,
a SQL-based open-source database.
Chris suggested ScanSoft for those in organizations that don’t do elaborate things with Acrobat. It costs $100 and creates PDFs.
There is a free screen reader in beta stages called Thunder ( www. screenreader.net )
Linux and Mac OS10 have free screen readers. Jaws costs about $1,400, but you can download a free trial that lasts 30 minutes. There are other, cheaper options, but they can’t do as much – HAL, Windowizer. The newest version of Jaws is supposed to have more support for FireFox.
HTML forms are best to use versus PDF, Flash, etc. when coding for accessibility.
Dan suggested books from glasshaus.com for accessibility and other web professional topics.
Anthony asked the group about an issue he was having with Access and their intranet.
The group discussed which resolutions they were designing for. Most were still doing 800 by 600, some were looking into multiple style sheets or going to 1024.
MAGWeb Web site
Rich had asked that the group generate a few news ideas for the MAGWeb Web site.
Dan Davis suggested featuring MARC Web training classes. Sonya suggested adding
more Web site policies or having this as a topic at a future meeting.
Future Topics
Susan asked the group if anyone was interested in coordinating topics for meetings.
She is fresh out of ideas…and time.
Suggested topics included:
- E-newsletters (August, see below)
- Links – absolute vs. relative, tools to check links, preventing linkrot.
- Tour of Regional Newsroom – a project MARC is working on to make a one-stop shop for press releases of agencies throughout the region. Developed with Xigla Absolute NewsManager.
- Web site policies.
NAGW Conference Update
Hotel room rates are $59 during the conference, and the early-bird
registration fee of $150 was extended to July 31.
So far, approximately 110 people have registered for the conference. The four workshop subjects will be CSS, Flash, ASP.net/PHP.net and ColdFusion. The morning CSS and the ASP workshops are full. Representatives from Google and Ben Forta, a ColdFusion guru, will be at the conference.
Next meeting
10 a.m. Thursday, Aug. 16, at the Antioch Justice
Center, 8500 Antioch, City of Overland Park, KS.
Chris Audano will demonstrate Google Mini, recently purchased by Overland Park. Susan Waters will share some tips on selecting a listserv service/software and creating e-newsletters.
A new secretary to take meeting minutes will also be elected to fill out a term ending Dec. 2006. Let Chris Audano know if you are interested.
Minutes submitted by Susan Waters, MARC