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?

New Beginings

The month of November has been a month of news. That is new in plural, not information about recent and important events.

New Home and house mates

We all moved together into a new green house, with a new chore wheel and a new pergo floor. It’s quite fantastic, I just need to update my mailing address across the board for the third time in 6 months. My house mates are all sorts of fun, and cooler than peppermint patties.

New E-mail

After 15 years with the same e-mail address, I decided it is time to graduate from my dad’s domain name into my own. My new address is eitan at this-blogs-domain-name.

New Bank Account

I have been getting tired of Bank Of America’s mediocreness, especially when it comes to online services, so I started transfering to BECU, a local credit union.

New Bike

I have a new red bicycle. It’s a real head-turner, which makes me concerned about theft. But I am just going to enjoy it anyway. I have almost completely stopped walking to places since I got it. Capitol Hill is just an 8 minute ride away.

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.