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. _______________________________________________ gnome-accessibility-list mailing list gnome-accessibility-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
