Re: Forming an Accessibility Steering Committee

[David Bolter <dtb gnome org>]

Hi Will,

Looks good. Two indirectly related things came to mind as I read your 
email. Can we:

1) create an IRC channel for more interactive discussions about 
gnome-a11y (or linux-a11y, or unix-a11y, or foss-a11y)
2) be mindful of potential KDE resources (harmonization). Maybe some 
stuff belongs on GNOME, and potentially other stuff belongs in a more 
shared space?
3) decide if this is to look slick, or be more developer-ish (see ramble 
below).

I agree with Steve that we should consider Clinicians for the public 
face, but I'm doubtful a live.gnome.org page can ever looked polished 
enough. If we want to send the message that GNOME A11y is for real... 
the "look" of the site will be the first impression. I think 
http://live.gnome.org/Orca is one of the better pages on the wiki, but 
it does have more noise than is ideal (compare with 
http://www.mozilla.com/).  I know we don't have the same resources as 
MoCo... but this is just for illustration. Yeah, I know the GOK page 
sucks... although GOK needs tender loving care before I would call it 
polished enough, so I wouldn't want to mislead ;)

Of course I'm hoping one thing the a11y committee/group can help keep 
tabs on (steer) is making sure we have an awesome alt-input roadmap with 
resources behind it. This will likely involve liaise with Sun and Mozilla.

cheers,
David

Willie Walker wrote:
> Hi All:
>
> Before I invest a lot of effort into getting things going on the WIKI, I 
> wanted to pass some ideas by everyone.
>
> I'm thinking that we want the work and impact of the committee to be 
> very transparent.  In addition, we want to avoid duplication of 
> information as much as possible.  This will also tend to be tightly 
> coupled with the WIKI refactor, which might be one of the first things 
> we want to get done.
>
> So...let's try to work out what we want the GNOME A11y WIKI to look 
> like.  I'll start with a proposal that we can twist/turn/modify.  :-)  I 
> think the first question to ask is "who are the typical visitors to the 
> site and what do they want to do?"  I'm going to guess it will be a mix 
> of mainly the following:
>
>   o End users wanting to know how to get going with a11y support
>   o IT staff making decisions about whether or not they want GNOME
>   o Developers and future a11y developers wanting to know how they can
>     help the GNOME a11y project
>   o Developers wanting to know how they can test their stuff for
>     a11y and how to fix problems they run into
>
> The top level page, http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility, will be our 
> face to the world.  It should be relatively short, clear, and easy to 
> navigate by our target visitors.  Much of this information is already 
> available; we just need to organize it and bring it up to date.  Here's 
> a potential skeletal outline, though it's not short and probably not clear:
>
>    [Logo] -- we really need a good logo.
>    o "A11y 101" (what is a11y?)
>    o GNOME A11y is for Real
>      o Impact of GNOME a11y around the world
>        - Testimonials
>        - Case studies (e.g., GNOME in Spain)
>      o Commonly used apps that provide compelling access
>        - Evolution, gedit, gnome-terminal, ...
>        - Firefox 3, Thunderbird, OOo, Pidgin, ...
>      o Organizations involved
>        - Sun, Mozilla Foundation, Ubuntu, OLPC(?), ...
>        - Steering committee (see below)
>    o Latest news: ...
>    o Active projects and current focus
>      - Orca, AT-SPI/DBus investigation, ...
>    o Future directions and ideas
>      - (achievable tangible projects)
>    o GNOME's built-in a11y:
>      - keynav, theming, AccessX, MouseTweaks, ...
>      - GOK, Dasher, Orca, ...
>      - A11y infrastructure
>        - AT-SPI, ATK, GAIL, GTK+, bridge(s), ...
>        - pyatspi
>        - gnome-speech, gnome-mag
>        - accerciser
>        - External extras: BrlTTY, ...
>    o For application/toolkit developers
>      - How to develop/test for a11y
>      - Matrix of a11y vs. application coverage
>      - Accessibility bugs sorted by priority/severity
>    o For a11y developers
>      - A11y projects for you to help with (see active and future above)
>      - Getting started with pyatspi (or whatever)
>      - Jumping off points to Orca, GOK, ... developer documentation
>    o For operating system distributions
>      - Dependency lists
>      - Short smoketest steps
>        - Accessible login
>        - Quick tests with AccessX, GOK, Dasher, Orca, ...
>      - Integration tips, tricks, and troubleshooting
>
> I'd propose that the 'doings' of the steering committee be held at 
> http://live.gnome.orca/Accessibility/SteeringCommittee.  It will contain 
> our charter (which we need to create), a member list, and meeting 
> agendas/minutes. Representation of the other work of the committee 
> probably should find its way into the rest of the WIKI.
>
> Anyhow, those are some quick thoughts before I need to step out for the 
> day.  Thoughts?
>
> Will
>
> PS - I'm going to be on break next week and part of the following week, 
> but I'll try to keep up with e-mail during that time.
>
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