Re: Summer Interns for GNOME Accessibility

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Stormy:

This is AWESOME!  Many thanks for your promotion of accessibility and 
for getting GNOME some resources.

We should talk about this in the weekly #a11y meetings on irc.gnome.org, 
but there's a whole bunch of ideas at 
http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/GetInvolved.

Some of the things on the top of my list are Evince accessibility and 
WebKit accessibility.  Both require a bit of in-depth knowledge, though, 
and would require some strong mentoring.

Another area, which is pretty cool and could use some help, is 
MouseTrap.  It has a good start, and I'm sure Flavio would welcome help.

Other areas include improving the out-of-the-box experience of GOK, 
helping "fix" speech, testing, etc.

In any case, the above are just quick thoughts off the top of my head 
and are not meant to detract from anything I neglected to mention.

Do you have any deadlines or dates where we'd need to get our act together?

Will

Stormy Peters wrote:
> GNOME Accessibility folks,
>
> We have the opportunity to have two summer interns working on GNOME 
> Accessibility issues during the summer of 2009. We just need to come up 
> with projects and mentors!
>
> Background:
>
> At the Grace Hopper conference this year I went to a panel about the 
> Humanitarian FOSS Project, www.hfoss.org <http://www.hfoss.org/>. As a 
> result I met Trishan de Lanerolle, the project director, as well as 
> Professor Ralph Morelli from Trinity College.
>
> The Humanitarian FOSS project is bringing students into software 
> development by appealing to them with open source humanitarian projects. 
> They've had a lot of success over the past two years. They bring all the 
> students together on a university campus, house them, pay them and give 
> them open source software projects to work on. The students have access 
> to each other, professors and remote mentors from the project. Past 
> projects have included working on disaster recovery software, volunteer 
> scheduling software and medical imaging software.
>
> Another benefit from my perspective is that the humanitarian aspect 
> brings in people that might not traditionally have been drawn to open 
> source. (They were at the Grace Hopper conference because last summer's 
> group included quite a few women.)
>
> Their project is 100% funded by an NFS grant right now although they'd 
> like to have companies fund additional interns in the future.
>
> What is being offered to us:
>
>     * Two interns during the summer of 2009, housed at Trinity, paid by
>       Trinity, with professors to help them.
>
> What we would need to come up with:
>
>     * Projects:
>           o projects that a novice coder could get started on
>           o humanitarian focus (accessibility is good)
>           o something they can make good progress and complete in a summer
>     * Mentors
>           o mentoring is done via email and skype
>
> Does this sound like a good idea? Something you are interested in? Thoughts?
>
> Stormy
>
>
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