Re: Forming an Accessibility Steering Committee

[Luke Yelavich <themuso themuso com>]

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Greetings again.
On Wed, Dec 19, 2007 at 11:52:55AM EST, Brian Cameron wrote:
> I would appreciate it if everybody who volunteered to be a part of the
> committee could answer the following questions.
> 
> 1) How would you like the committee to interact?  Via discussions on
>     this mailing list or via meetings?  If you think we should have
>     meetings, how often would you prefer to meet, and would you prefer
>     IRC or phone?

My first preference would be mailing lists for a few reasons. Firstly, it allows one to take time to think out a reply for a discussion which could get heated. This would allow one to be as calm as possible before attempting to reply to something that someone else has said. Mailing lists also negate the timezone issues that always arrise with realtime meetings involving people from all over the world.

My second preference would be IRC. I idle on IRC on two networks all the time, so its trivial for me to jump into a channel and participate. I can also provide logging of the channel in question if required.

> 2) What would you like to see the Committee be responsible for doing?
>     I would prefer specific and achievable things rather than vague
>     generalizations.

I think just about everything I would have mentioned has been said by Willie already. The one thing I would really like to see however, is the GNOME a11y folks getting more distributions involved. Ubuntu has such a good accessibility presence because a few of us from the Ubuntu community took it upon ourselves to make Ubuntu's accessibility as good as we could, in the time we had. There are other folks doing what they can for accessibility for other distributions, however some of these are not working with the core development teams for their distribution of choice to make accessibility technologies for GNOME and Linux in general, more tightly integrated into the user desktop experience. If GNOME and Linux accessibility is to go anywhere, integration must be a high priority on distribution's feature plans.

> 3) What do you see that is blocking progress (or hindering acceptance)
>     of GNOME a11y.  What do you think could be done to improve things?

We need to educate distribution vendors, developers, and usability experts, and tell them what we are doing, and why what we are doing is important. While this is not exactly what happened with Ubuntu, so many GNOME accessibility users use Ubuntu because Ubuntu has accessibility as a part of the core distribution, from the moment that the user boots the live CD. It would have been no different if another distribution was to have taken this approach. More education at the distro development level means a greater chance that accessibility will become an important feature set, and so on, the snowball effect. In this way, we are also likely to pick up a lot more users who discover accessibility through their distribution of choice.

> 4) Assuming that we can identify a list of tasks in the answers to the
>     above questions, would you be willing to invest time in the Committee
>     to chip in and take on tasks to make progress in these areas?

Yes. I am not likely to be able to give any time to helping GNOME accessibility in general, but I can continue doing my bit to raise awareness, and continue integration development for Ubuntu. Being a part of this committee means keeping abrest of the newest developments, and getting those developments into Ubuntu as soon as possible.
- -- 
Luke Yelavich
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Email & MSN: themuso themuso com
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