Monotonous.org

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:

• Ben Konrath
• Willie Walker
• Bryen Yunashko (2) (3)
• Joanmarie Diggs
• Michael Gorse
• Steve Lee (2)
• Li Yuan
• Ke Wang
• Flavio Percoco Premoli

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.

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Everyone headed off to hear the CSUN keynote. I am here with Steve Lee looking over my shoulder.

We had some good discussions today, actually a lot of it. My brain is switching contexts on average every minute, I’ll try to be more focused and switch tasks every 5 minutes instead.

I am looking forward to taking testimonies from users we run into and posting it to this here blog.

Hope others fill in the details on the actual discussions soon, or I will have to.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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