Re: GNOME Accessibility Team Meeting @ Boston Summit?

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

On Thu, 2006-08-17 at 13:06, Willie Walker wrote:
> Hi All:
> 
> > We need to choose a day for the meeting, and develop an agenda - please log
> > in to the wiki and add your suggestions.

One think that I'd really like to present, and which fortunately I have
extensive materials ready for, is a comprehensive overview of the
accessibility architecture.  I have slides ready with scads of diagrams
for this purpose, which I think could be presented in a little over an
hour, covering a lot of the topics which are necessary in order for
Gnome developers to work within the existing a11y framework, diagnose
problems, etc.

regards

Bill




>  If there's enough support for this
> > idea, we can dedicate a room to it - it might be useful to nominate a chair
> > person to maintain the wiki page and run the meeting.
> 
> I'm happy to volunteer to be chair for this meeting and have support
> from my management to spend time on it.  I've been working on
> accessibility to the X Window System since the early 1990's and have
> most recently been leading the Orca screen reader effort.
> 
> Ultimately the meeting will be based upon what people decide they want
> to discuss.  Looking at what is emerging from the community input on the
> WIKI (http://live.gnome.org/Boston2006/AccessibilitySummit), I propose
> there might be at least three main themes for the summit: 
> 
> 1) Improving the accessibility of the base platform.  This can include
> topics such as the a11y component to the icon theme, magnification,
> keyboard traversal, windows from multiple users on the same display, and
> the thought of getting SpeechDispatcher into the platform.  Possibly
> also a discussion on AT-SPI futures: CORBA, DBUS?
> 
> 2) Improving and providing multiple assistive technology offerings and
> how to manage their selection/configuration/setup.  A concrete goal here
> could be to determine the appropriate user interface(s) that works
> within the GNOME "highlander principle" (i.e., there can be only one of
> any breed in the GNOME platform), yet easily supports distributions that
> ship more than one solution for a given disability (e.g., GOK and
> SOK/onBoard).  Various people are giving some thought to this space and
> this summit could be a good way to reach a consensus and a plan of
> execution.
> 
> 3) Brainstorming how to get the whole of the GNOME community more
> proactive in testing for accessibility.  Prior to the release of GNOME
> 2.14 and now prior to GNOME 2.16, Sun spent considerable time chasing
> down and fixing a11y regressions in other people's modules.  We need a
> better way for us (and ultimately the module owners themselves) to find
> and prevent these regressions.  Related to this, we're working on an
> automated regression test harness for Orca, which I hope is ready by the
> summit.
> 
> Given #3, I'd also like to try expose plain old non-a11y developers from
> the GNOME community to a11y.  My experiences from doing these types of
> meetings many times in the past is that we tend to end up preaching to
> the choir when we often want the rest of the congregation to attend.
> Jeff has suggested that we can do a "accessibility summit report" to the
> larger conference the day after the summit.
> 
> Finally, the Boston area is home to important and influential
> accessibility organizations such as the Carroll Center for the Blind and
> the Massachusetts Office on Disability.  Basing your work on input from
> real live end users is always a good thing (I personally think it is
> mandatory).  If the summit attendees find it appropriate, we can extend
> an invitation to our close contacts in these organizations.
> 
> In any case, these are initial thoughts that can be twisted, contorted,
> and expanded as need be.  :-)
> 
> Will
> 
> 
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