Advocacy and evangelism [was Re: Forming an Accessibility Steering Committee]

[Aaron Leventhal <aaronlev moonset net>]

We need to get some movers and shakers in the industry (VARs, rehab 
specialists, etc.) excited about what the open source community has. 
They will be our harshest critics and greatest evangelists. Many of them 
come to CSUN.

The traditional CSUN "talk" is interesting but no one leaves feeling 
like they really understand the apps we talk about.

This year Mozilla plans to concentrate on a hands-on open source 
accessibility room at CSUN where users can try this out. We'd like to 
share this with the Gnome community. The idea is to have 3-4 machines 
with various open source software on it that users can actually try. 
We'll need knowledgeable volunteers to help staff it and answer 
questions, and I think we'll also need cheat sheet cars in large print 
and Braille. Joanie had mentioned she would help with this.

On the Windows side we'll be demoing NVDA, and of course we'll want to 
show off Firefox and Thunderbird on both Linux and Mac.

We can even have some closed source apps and ATs to work with as long as 
part of the equation is open source. We can show the community isn't 
purist in that way. For example, I expect to show 
JAWS/Window-Eyes/ZoomText with Firefox as well as show open source 
screen readers with any proprietary apps they work with.

Ideally I'd like to have this next door to a developer/hacking room, 
similar to what we provided to the community last year.

Should be fun! Anyone besides Joanie volunteer to help set this up and 
run it?

- Aaron


Jason White wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 19, 2007 at 07:34:29PM -0800, Peter Korn wrote:
>
>   
> > This is definitely useful.  But cost is not the only key
> > dimension/differentiator.  Taking control of ones own destiny is
> > another.  Jan Buchal has spoken eloquently on the free-as-in-freedom
> > aspects of open source accessibility.
> >     
>
> Correct. Free as in freedom, as Richard Stallman puts it, is the most valuable
> aspect. I think there is more work to do among those committed to
> accessibility in shifting from advocacy to direct participation in the
> communities responsible for developing free and open-source software.
> Fortunately, there is much more such participation now than there was ten
> years ago, thanks to the efforts of many people; but this is one area in which
> there could still be further improvement.
>
> At a personal level, I don't enjoy advocacy work and tend to avoid it, which
> is why all of my contributions have been to standards committees and free and
> open-source software communities where everyone is collaborating to create a
> piece of software or a standard. This is a very different mode of
> participation from trying to convince corporations or governments to adopt
> (or, more often than not, retract) a policy. In essence, doing real
> development work is much more interesting than trying to persuade other people
> to do it.
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>
>