Accessibility Hackfest - Further Planning

[Eitan Isaacson <eitan monotonous org>]

Hello.

The date is coming up, I think it is time for more planning.

While a lot of the recent news is discouraging regarding GNOME a11y, I
hope this upcoming event may be used in a matter that will further our
cause. The attendance is ending up on the lower side, with the ATRC
folks not being able to make it, and Willie Walker's recent ordeal.
So, if there are other folks who think they want to make it, we have
some travel money put aside, and we could hopefully work something
out.

The original plan was an AT developer's summit, where AT folks would
work on expanding the feature set of their apps, get to demo them to
potential users, and get ideas from commercial alternatives. I think
these goals might suffer a bit on the account of not many AT devs
showing up. So here is a new proposal for the event's focus, hopefully
it will also be more relevant to the situation we are in right now:

Schedule
=======
March 23: All day hackfest (need to secure a venue).
March 24-26: Hackfest/Showroom/Conference
March 27: Booth wrap-up.

Hackfest
--------------
* Let's start dog fooding 3.0 in person, iron out kinks and populate
bugzilla. I know for myself, Accerciser needs a ton of work for
at-spi2. It would be cool if we could have maybe a 2 hour session
where in the first hour we all try out this stuff at once an file all
the issues we run into, in the second hour triage all of it. Maybe
Mike Gorse could lead this bit?
* Let's do a similar session with Webkit. Maybe Joanie could guide us
through this. The focus would be areas where Joanie and the Orca team
have not worked already.
 * Would this be useful with GNOME-Shell? It seems like the issues are
known, I don't know if this would be a wise use of our time.
 * What else? How could we use the little amount of time we have in person?

Showroom
----------------
* We will be demonstrating GNOME to the industry and to users. As far
as I know, we are the only ones offering a completely free, open and
accessible personal computing platform, this is huge, and this is why
we are going to CSUN. In better times Sun would be there too
showcasing GNOME, but not this year.
* From my experience in this conference, talk is cheap and many
organizations say generous things, I want us to be able to follow
through with this. While it might be wishful thinking on my end, I
think we need to be prepared for two things:
   1. Some foundation or company that uses GNOME and wants to improve
a11y for it's own use, or it's own sake. I want us to be able to
follow through with this and offer them CVs of dedicated GNOME a11y
hackers. We could play a part in getting the next grantee, contractor,
full-time a11y hackers employed.
   2. Organizations that use GNOME already and depend on it need to
understand that they should get involved, and should join the GNOME
advisory board. When we hear of such orgs, we need to get them in
touch with Stormy. It would be good both for foundation funding and
for a11y interests on the AD board.
 * Ben won't be able to do braille handouts, we should find an alternative.

Conference
----------------
We have four complimentary conference passes. I already know that
Bryen and Mike showed interest in attending the conference. There are
strings attached to the passes, we want to get the most out of them.
Attendees should be reporting back on the conference into the GNOME
community, this includes:
 * Planet GNOME posts
 * Tweets/Identi.ca (I am willing to post daily digests of tagged
tweets to my blog and to the planet).
 * Articles for a future GNOME Journal accessibility issue (didn't
actually ask the GJ folks about this, but they are thirsty for
content, right?).
 * Writing for other FOSS (or mainstream) media?
I blitz of a few days in the GNOME sphere will raise a11y awareness
among the general developers and community, and we need this kind of
awareness for GNOME 3.0.
I and Steve Lee will each be presenting at CSUN, I have not written my
talk yet, any input is welcome.

Cheers,
   Eitan.