Accessibility Summit Minutes

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi All:

On October 8 at the GNOME Boston 2006 Summit, we had an Accessibility
Summit comprised of a large number of developers and users working
together.  What a great day.  We had a great discussion and came away
with several leaders signed up to move things forward.  Yeah and thanks
to those who had the "courage and conviction" to sign up for
things.  :-)

Many thanks to the community for coming together on this, and many
thanks to Jeff Waugh for suggesting it in the first place.  Many thanks
also to Bill Haneman, Peter Korn, Mike Pedersen, Peter Parente, and
George Kraft for demoing and leading portions of the day.

The "hot-off-the-presses" minutes from this summit are available at the
following URL (thanks Peter Korn for taking the rough notes - they
helped a lot):

http://live.gnome.org/Boston2006/AccessibilitySummit

I plan to go through this in the near future to add more URLs to
external components (I'm at the Mozilla Hackfest for the next few days
and wanted to get *something* out ASAP), but the gist of the day is on
the WIKI right now.

There are some follow on action items that will be (or are already
being) raised for discussion by the developer community.  This includes
migrating gail into GTK, getting a good model in place to support
testing, and enabling the accessibility support by default for GNOME
2.17 development builds.  Way cool.  (PLEASE DO NOT respond to this
message to engage in those discussions, BTW.  The appropriate
discussions will take place on the appropriate lists.)

I'm also psyched about the testing work and 'glint' ideas that came out
of this session.  This is much needed work and will be of great use to
the community.

Finally, having people sign up to help with an end-user focus is
awesome.  For example, more approachable end-user documentation,
usability labs for users to kick the tires, etc.  Great stuff.

Thanks again to everyone for your participation.

Your happy chair,

Willie Walker
Orca Project Lead
Accessibility Program Office
Sun Microsystems