Category: Software

GNOME accessibility, don’t take it for granted

I have been on the road for the last two weeks. Headed back to Seattle tomorrow after a great FOSDEM in Brussels.

While on the road I have heard all sorts of news regarding GNOME accessibility, none of it good. I am angry, I feel like blaming somebody or something, but I am not sure what. Right now I am directing my frustration towards academics who still have funding to continue various assistive technology research that will probably never see the light of day as a usable application while the real bread and butter of an accessible platform is being taken away. It’s reflexive, I know it. Maybe later I will have a clearer picture of how we move forward.

Until then, here are some notes from Joanie and Mike.

While my initial reaction was what a damper this is on our first a11y hackfest, I really hope that it will be an opportunity to regroup, have some good discussions, interact with the wider a11y community, and have some business interactions. So please come to San Diego, you know who you are!

On The Road

Sitting in JFK’s Jet Blue terminal, I could run out and catch a train to my grandparents, but it just seems so darn early, and I am not sure if I want to brave NYC just yet.

Here is a silly badge:
I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting

If you asked me a month ago, I would have said that the next time I get to geek out with European GNOME folks would be in the summer. But it’s not, it’s next week! I only have a vague picture of who will be there outside of the Collabora scene, but I am looking forward to seeing folks. I also really wanted to go to the usability hackfest later in February, but there is just that many times you could cross the Atlantic in a month (once).

The accessibility hackfest is coming up! I’m excited. I hope to have a few moments of clarity when this event is over. It will be useful to have a list of tasks and dates if we want to pull this off again. A special thanks to Stormy, the GNOME board and travel committee for their help in putting this together. I usually spare my pretty little head from logistics and organizing, but it’s good to take on such a project once in a while.

New Job

Collabora Before this news gets old, I figured I should mention it in this here bloggy.

I started working for Collabora! I am really happy to be on board, it’s great to be in company with smart people. I’m already busy with Telepathy once again, after a few years break. I’ll be at the upcoming FOSDEM, and I am looking forward to catch up with my new colleagues.

Presenting at CSUN

So my talk How to Make Friends and Remove Access Barriers In Open Source Software
 has been accepted for CSUN 2010. The presentation is scheduled for 8 AM, I expect high attendance of dairy farmers, since they will probably be taking their lunch break around that time.

Here is a short abstract:

This presentation will consist of two parts. In the first part we will demonstrate the contrasts that exist when developing accessible applications between proprietary platforms and free platforms. In the second part we will become familiar, through real-life examples, with the culture in GNOME, a Free and Open Source desktop environment, and how it provides a conducive atmosphere for accessibility innovation and contribution, by developers, writers, educators, and users.

I am going to have a lot of fun putting together slides and media for this.

Scanning Books: Yet Another Project Idea

While reading Boingboing today, I came across two consecutive posts that made me really itch to do something.

The first one was about a grad student who posted an instructable for building a $300 book scanner. The second is how the US Chamber of Commerce is trying to derail the rights of individuals to digitize their own copy of books, typically to an accessible format.

Does anyone in the Seattle area want to team up and build this? I think it would be a cool service to offer friends and family. Need a book in DAISY or e-book format for your Kindle? Just send it to us with return postage, and we will send it back together with a CD.

I don’t see this as strictly an accessibility issue. I am reading Another Country by James Baldwin now. I could not find a digital copy for it to read on my Kindle. Or more correctly, it exists, but I would need to live in Europe to purchase it. Isn’t that crazy?

So, who is up for this?

eMusic In Banshee

I have been an eMusic subscriber for quite a while, before DRM-free music was cool. It’s always been a bit clunky when purchasing music, you download some weird XML file that is supposed to be handled by their download manager which is a full-blown app. I always ended up downloading the file to my desktop, running a Python script called dromanova.py which would download the MP3s to ~/media, and then import them manually into Banshee.

No more!

Tomboy Plugin: Note Statistics

It is fun to spend a few hours on small projects that yield immediate results.

I use Tomboy for essay writing, I often need to know how much I have already put down, so I will typically paste the note into a terminal and run wc on it, or I will paste it in to gedit and use Tools->Document Statistics. So here is a new extension called ‘Note Statistics’ and it looks eerily like the gedit tool. Below is a screenshot, screen cast, and git clone URL in that order.

notestats

git clone git://github.com/eeejay/tomboy-notestats.git

Browse source on github

What I Did Today Before 9 AM

I needed a non-interactive way of generating PDFs from websites. I really liked Midori‘s output, so I figured doing the same with the Python WebKitGtk bindings would be easy.

So I created a tool called interwibble, you could get it from my github repo.

There are probably other tools out there already that do the same thing, but I couldn’t find any.

This has been something that I have wanted more than a decade ago, when I thought it would be really cool to have a daily newspaper waiting on your printer every morning when you wake up.

Git

Can’t get enough of it. I lurv Git.

If anything is worth doing, it could be done with Git.

Over the past few weeks I have written pre/post hooks and new Git commands for the most esoteric tasks.

I think Git overshadows any other achievement that Linus guy ever had. He should stop working on that hobby kernel, and put more time into Git, I think it has potential.

I need to migrate this blog to being Git based…

CSUN Hackfest and Exhibition: Call for Participation

Volunteer Park Water Tower

On March 22-27 2010, GNOME will have a booth presence at the CSUN conference in San Diego. CSUN is one of the largest and most important gatherings on the topic of technology and persons with disabilities. This is going to be a great opportunity to bring the gospel of Free Software to a space and industry that is largely proprietary, and to a user base with special needs that sometimes could only be addressed with Open Source software. This is going to be über exciting!

Along with the booth and a presentation or two, we will also be hosting a GNOME assistive technology hackfest. The reasoning for this being the fact that this is an assistive technologies conference, so there really isn’t a better place to draw inspiration, both by seeing the “state of the art” proprietary products first hand, and by talking with users who have needs that we could answer.

Are you a maintainer of one of GNOME’s assistive technology modules? Are you developing an on screen keyboard? An alternative means for text input? A magnifier? Some trippy head-tracking app? Voice control? Switch access? Something new and exciting for cognitive disabilities? Are you hacking on new features for Orca? Are you working to provide users with disabilities unfettered access to GNOME?

If the answer to any of the above is ‘yes’, we hope you will consider joining fellow GNOME a11y folks at CSUN this year to help promote GNOME and to hack with fellow AT developers.

We hope to have funding for this hackfest, but we don’t yet really know what that means. We know that we will have to be creative about it to pull it off, so hopefully once you made up your mind to attend, you could help figure out how to afford it, if your employer could pay, if you have student discounts, etc. We will do our best to make it affordable to people who should be there, but no promises. Hope to have specifics about that in the future.

Please contact me if you have questions or interest in participating in this: eitani at gnome dot org