April 15, 2010

GNOME Accessibility at CSUN – More Thoughts

For the last 2 weeks I imposed on myself not to spend any time on GNOME accessibility as I catch up on work that pays, and spend time with friends and family in Israel. Just landed in Seattle last night, so the restriction is officially removed.

The hackfest at the end of last month was a huge success, here is a partial list of summaries written by different attendees:

More is certain to come, Brad Taylor has some interviews to share, and Bryen has been capturing a lot of photos and videos.

We also has a some media attention, I believe. Should have written this all down when it was fresh in my mind. Willie and I were interviewed for Blind Bargains podcast.

Next Year

This might be a bit presumptuous of me. But I think we should have a GNOME presence on an annual basis. The combination of booth, talks and hackfest went really well. What we need for this is dedicated sponsorship (ie. funds that are for the event specifically, and not for general GNOME a11y).

We talked to some really big employers, like social security, who are interested in FOSS and want to see it in wider use in their agencies. Accessibility for them is key.

We handed out a couple hundred OpenSUSE CDs. A big problem with having a GNOME presence in a non FOSS conference is explaining to people what it is and how they should give it a try. We talk their ears off regarding the merits of GNOME and FOSS, and yet we are not backing it up with a service, or even a download URL. So Novell really saved our butts, besides the CDs, Brad was constantly giving out business cards.

Next year, maybe Red Hat, Novell, Canonical or some other GNOME distributor would like to officially endorse are booth, fund the event, and drum up business at this conference. I really think it has untapped potential for enterprise desktop in particular.

March 27, 2010

Phew

The conference is finally over, said goodbye to most people. Sitting in the quiet lobby with Joanie, I really want to continue playing with that Caribou mockup I worked on yesterday, but I guess I need to blog while the hackfest experience is still fresh.

I heard from more than one conference attendee that we created a bit of a buzz, which is great. Might be due to our tweetage, talks, booth or tripping on us when we congregate on the lobby’s bar floor with laptops.

In the past companies like IBM and Sun showcased GNOME a11y, which may have appealed for large customers, but it was nice to have a .org booth this year that really brought FOSS’s grass-roots message to individuals, trainers, agencies and institutes.

My talk was really well received, I only wish it was slated for another hour besides 8 AM. Finally uploaded the slides. Not sure how well it renders on Firefox, apologies in advance. Also they aren’t the kind of slides that are very readable without the presentation.

Yesterday we had a wrap-up meeting, here are some notes Will took, didn’t bother to edit:

Eitan and Mike got Accerciser working with AT-SPI2

Eitan hacked a nice animation for Caribou with Clutter.

Ben enjoyed seeing the other booths to learn more about the space he is working in.

Ben was able to connect with Flavio to share ideas and develop a new collaboration with each other.

Ben was able to meet the SS12 students and follow up with them to get patches for Caribou.

Ke and Li met with Willie and Joanie to learn Orca internals, allowing them to help more.

Ke was able to learn more about various technologies related to accessibility.

Joanie and Alejandro looked at Orca together.

Joanie got good important face time with the Mozilla guys.

Li was happy to finally meet the rest of the team and also go over the bigger picture.

Steve Lee was happy to meet with the SS12 students and get more student input into GNOME.

Mike worked on AT-SPI2. Was glad to have the GNOME3 meeting because it helps us scope out what is needed. Mike also talked with Joanie about the Orca regression tests.

API found this to be a very positive experience to meet people face to face. Got to see that people (all conference attendees) see that open source a11y is important.

Willie thinks the GNOME 3 part is really important, he now thinks we could be successful in achieving GNOME 3 a11y. We also agreed on things we would not do, like the CSPI bindings and GOK. It was good to sit and brain dump Orca stuff with Joanie Li and Ke. On the show floor there were good conversations with people from different parts of the community, a lot of business cards! Talked to profs so they include GNOME in their classes, more HFOSS and PP stuff.

Bryen thought it was a good experience to see what we and others talk about wrt open source. Bryen was happy to meet everyone here and to connect with everyone and thanks us all for all of our hard work. Bryen has a connection with the UK Ability Magazine to write an a11y talk.

Willie and Eitan were interviewed for a podcast – blindbargains.net.

Mike and Brad were interviewed for another podcast.

Flavio was happy to finally meet us face to face! Flavio was pleased to see the effect GNOME a11y had on real end users who were coming by our booth. Helps immensely with self esteem. Flavio and Ben developed a new collaboration (yeah!).

Eitan wants us to blog more.

March 25, 2010

More Accessibility Hackfest

Hi.

Here is another sparse blog post. Luckily, Bryen and Steve really wrote good summaries today. I’ll compliment their posts with some photos.

The talk I gave this morning went well. Hopefully I will have slides up soon, and Bryen promised to caption the video he took instead of sleeping tonight, so you guys could get that ASAP.

March 18, 2010

I Love It When A Plan Comes Together

If you haven’t done it yet, you should probably start lobbying your local iMax theater to screen the new A-Team film when it comes out later this year.

After what feels like an eternity of anticipation, the first GNOME Accessibility Hackfest begins next week. To put this into perspective, this won’t be a casual event. It’s a large conference riddled with many sessions of interest, a huge showroom packed with a milling crowd, 14 GNOME a11y contributors trying to get the most done together in the space of a few days, and countless hordes of cute (yet unpettable) guide dogs.

If you plan to attend, make sure to visit the ever-changing wiki page.

I would like to thank sponsors such as the Mozilla Foundation, for being a steadfast supporter of FOSS a11y in all it’s forms, the Mike and the Paciello Group for help with the venue, and of course the GNOME Foundation. The CSUN organizers have also cut us some slack in a largely expensive event, so thank you organizers.

And thank you Hylke for the awesome logo.

More soon.

March 3, 2010

Networking Question

I work out of coffee shops. It just depresses me to sit at home and not see a living soul all day besides the occasional house-mate.

There is one shop that really allows me to get into my zone. It might have something to do with the liquor license, the ping pong table and loud music. The problem is, they somehow blocked all non-web traffic on their wifi hotspot. Since my day primarily revolves around IRC, XMPP, SMTP and SSH, I really can’t sit there for too long before I need to find somewhere that will allow me to push my git changes.

So I thought I was being all clever when I set up OpenVPN on my private server and configured it to listen on TCP port 443. Does anyone have tips for tunneling arbitrary protocols through port 80/443? I thought the OpenVPN setup was especially nifty because it only required one NetworkManager click.

February 26, 2010

Explaining Refugees

Since the Israeli government is having a very hard time explaining it’s aggressive, defiant and abusive policies abroad, it is losing international public appeal very quickly.

The Israeli ministry of Hasbara (propaganda), recently started a campaign to reach out to Israeli travelers abroad and expatriates, and provide them with resources for “explaining Israel”. They are recruiting citizen ambassadors, if you will. Supposedly, if you are a Hebrew speaker boarding an El Al plane in Israel, they will actually hand you a resource pamphlet that will help you make friends abroad and somehow justify Israel’s abominable behavior.

I finally bit the bullet, and visited the ministry’s resource site.

The first section I perused was titled “Israel Abroad: Myth vs. Reality”. The first 4 myths were benign, things like “Israel is a large country” or “People only eat falafel and hummus in Israel”. It’s these amusements that get you sucked in, it is also the myths that they highlight in the televised campaign. I scrolled quickly down to find something a bit more controversial than hummus and camel riding.

One supposed myth is that “Israelis don’t really want peace”. First off, by saying Israelis and not Israel, they are off the hook from explaining government policies, and could get away with a vague (and arguable) public sentiment. By following links under that “myth” I got to a page dedicated to the green line. The initial facts were mostly accurate, but then later in the page it digressed into legalistic interpretations of resolution 242 and cherry-picked quotes of Lyndon Johnson.

Did you guys ever wonder what Israel’s official perspective is regarding Palestinian refugees? I know I did. So I was delighted to find a page dedicated to the refugee topic on the site. The refugee issue is seen as a topic with the potential of undermining Israel’s legitimacy, so it is often not touched with a ten foot pole.

Anyway, on the top of the page, they offered the following itemized list:

Arab Refugees: Facts and Figures

800,000 Arabs lived in pre-state Israel before the war of ’48-’49.

170,000 Arabs remained after the war.

100,000 were permitted to return to Israel for family reunification.

100,000 middle and upper class people were absorbed in their host Arab countries.

50,000 foreign workers returned to their countries.

50,000 Bedouins were absorbed by tribes in Jordan and Sinai.

10,000 – 15,000 were killed in the war of ’48 – ’49.

Total refugees: 320,000.

Wait, what?? If you were reading that like I was and got to item number 8, you probably didn’t understand this as a subtraction exercise either. Did they just take some 8th grader’s homework and post it on the site? UNRWA alone reported aiding 711,000 Palestinian refugees back in 1950, and today has over 4 million beneficiaries – descendants of refugees from 1948.

Also, what is with the 50,000 foreign workers? Who are they talking about?

Before we explain the issue of the refugees of ’48, it’s important you understand this basic fact: Israel’s Arabs from before the war settled in the country as refugees from other Arab countries.

They go on and talk about Egyptian draft dodgers who came in 1831 to Acre, and cite British geographers from the 19th century. I don’t really feel like translating all of this disinformation, sorry.

To the point, I’ll paraphrase Israel’s excuse in a nutshell: We only displaced 340,000 Palestinians. It’s not us who told them to leave, their leaders did. They weren’t really Palestinian anyway.

Good luck with that message, citizen ambassador! I hope you find out sooner rather than later that students on foriegn campuses know full well that you don’t ride camels at home. Growing up in Israel does not provide you with innate historical knowledge, you are confusing that with the indoctrination you received your entire life.

February 23, 2010

Morality Plays in Accessibility

Besides being a great designer, Seth Nickel is a really good writer. Maybe that’s what it takes if you want to pass on your vision and ideas to stubborn developers. He wrote one paragraph yesterday that resonated with me:

…we’ve been framing the hacker<->designer conversation around low level usability. Maybe we could get more done if the default conversation was different? If it happened earlier? If it was about deep design rather than surface bodangles?

This is exactly how I feel about the designer<->accessibility-advocate conversation. Accessibility is too often an afterthought that is divorced from the design process.

In the past I did some contract work as an “accessibility engineer” on a certain project. It went something like this (at the risk of encouraging an annoying meme):

NO

projectmanager: It is soooo important for us that this application be really really accessible, and support ATK really really well. And that people with disabilities have really really good access to this. Also, if you could make sure your ATK support is good enough for automated testing, that would be greeaaaat.

accessibilityperson: I would love to help. I noticed that the color theme is hard-coded, this is problematic since users with visual impairments have different needs regarding color and contrast.

artsyfartspants: The color scheme is deliberate and has been very carefully thought out. And besides, it is white on black, which is technically high-contrast, so anybody could read it.

accessibilityperson: I also noticed that animations in this application are hard-coded and cannot be disabled. This is an issue since people may be very sensitive to animations and get motion sickness. The application should respect a system-wide animation-disable toggle.

artsyfartspants: Please see my answer above. The animation’s effect and timing have been very carefully thought out. This is old news, I wrote the design spec 6 months ago, you are wasting my time.

accessibilityperson: The user notification is transient, and disappears after a few, hard-coded, seconds. Users with cognitive disabilities, slow readers or users who are not native speakers of the interface’s language will have a hard time understanding the notification before it disappears.

artsyfartspants: By design, see above.

accessibilityperson: The user notification appears, hard-coded, in the upper right corner of the screen. Users with bad peripheral vision will miss these notification if their gaze is not set on the screen’s corner.

artsyfartspants: By design, go away.

accessibilityperson: But..

artsyfartspants: Bye!

A week later

accessibilityperson: I completed adding ATK support to the application, you could grab my branch and try it out. I have other concerns regarding accessibility issues in this application that need to be addressed.

projectmanager: Great! Could we now do automated testing on our POS and increase it’s quality a lot?

accessibilityperson: Sure. I also wrote an Orca script for the app so that screen reader users have a pleasant experience using it.

projectmanager: k. Write automated tests.

Do I have a good solution to all the accessibility issues I brought up? Not necessarily, that is why we have good designers.

YES

designguru: Here is a writeup and a few mockups for the app. I did my best at universal design and included a diverse array of users in the use cases I designed for.

hackmaster2000 : This looks good! I will implement this while making sure that mechanism and policy are separate so that edge-case users can be accommodated for without intrusive patches and hacks.

projectmanager: Great work guys! The universality of the design, and the modular implementation will allow us to make some extra cash as we deploy this app for mobile devices and e-readers with little modification.

accessibilityguy: Lookin’ good. I have a branch with ATK support, I am currently testing this app with different assistive technologies. Could I suggest just tweaking this and that?

projectmanager, hackmaster2000, designguru: Absolutely, making sure our software is accessible is very important for our project. We support all our users, not just the first 80%.

projectmanager: I can haz magic testing now plz?

Postscript

Máirín’s writeup about the accessibility discussions at the UX hackfest really made me happy. So glad Willie Walker made it there, I thought of going, but Willie really knows how to drive a point home.

My friend just came by and asked if I am blogging about Open Sores. I guess so!

February 17, 2010

Telepathy Debugging

I have been working on different Telepathy pieces for the last month or two. And have been thinking a lot about how I run and test the different components. One of the first things I did was put together a script based on one in telepathy-glib to start a new session bus dedicated for testing with an alternative service directory. This allows me to use Empathy for communication uninterrupted by testing.

When I was working on Gabble. I had a python test client I would run against it, this meant I had to have two terminal windows open, one for the client, and one for the CM. Last week I started working on Mission Control too, and found myself quickly drowning in open terminal windows and debug output. What I needed badly was a debug log viewer.

There already is a log viewer in Empathy, but I found it tedious to restart it between Empathy runs, and it was missing some basic things like copy/paste, search, and category filtering. So over the weekend I hacked up a quick and dirty UI that does all of the above. Hopefully we could add these features back into the Empathy viewer, and make it possible to run outside of Empathy.

You could grab it from my git repo.