Re: Forming an Accessibility Steering Committee

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi All:

Before I invest a lot of effort into getting things going on the WIKI, I 
wanted to pass some ideas by everyone.

I'm thinking that we want the work and impact of the committee to be 
very transparent.  In addition, we want to avoid duplication of 
information as much as possible.  This will also tend to be tightly 
coupled with the WIKI refactor, which might be one of the first things 
we want to get done.

So...let's try to work out what we want the GNOME A11y WIKI to look 
like.  I'll start with a proposal that we can twist/turn/modify.  :-)  I 
think the first question to ask is "who are the typical visitors to the 
site and what do they want to do?"  I'm going to guess it will be a mix 
of mainly the following:

 o End users wanting to know how to get going with a11y support
 o IT staff making decisions about whether or not they want GNOME
 o Developers and future a11y developers wanting to know how they can
   help the GNOME a11y project
 o Developers wanting to know how they can test their stuff for
   a11y and how to fix problems they run into

The top level page, http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility, will be our 
face to the world.  It should be relatively short, clear, and easy to 
navigate by our target visitors.  Much of this information is already 
available; we just need to organize it and bring it up to date.  Here's 
a potential skeletal outline, though it's not short and probably not clear:

  [Logo] -- we really need a good logo.
  o "A11y 101" (what is a11y?)
  o GNOME A11y is for Real
    o Impact of GNOME a11y around the world
      - Testimonials
      - Case studies (e.g., GNOME in Spain)
    o Commonly used apps that provide compelling access
      - Evolution, gedit, gnome-terminal, ...
      - Firefox 3, Thunderbird, OOo, Pidgin, ...
    o Organizations involved
      - Sun, Mozilla Foundation, Ubuntu, OLPC(?), ...
      - Steering committee (see below)
  o Latest news: ...
  o Active projects and current focus
    - Orca, AT-SPI/DBus investigation, ...
  o Future directions and ideas
    - (achievable tangible projects)
  o GNOME's built-in a11y:
    - keynav, theming, AccessX, MouseTweaks, ...
    - GOK, Dasher, Orca, ...
    - A11y infrastructure
      - AT-SPI, ATK, GAIL, GTK+, bridge(s), ...
      - pyatspi
      - gnome-speech, gnome-mag
      - accerciser
      - External extras: BrlTTY, ...
  o For application/toolkit developers
    - How to develop/test for a11y
    - Matrix of a11y vs. application coverage
    - Accessibility bugs sorted by priority/severity
  o For a11y developers
    - A11y projects for you to help with (see active and future above)
    - Getting started with pyatspi (or whatever)
    - Jumping off points to Orca, GOK, ... developer documentation
  o For operating system distributions
    - Dependency lists
    - Short smoketest steps
      - Accessible login
      - Quick tests with AccessX, GOK, Dasher, Orca, ...
    - Integration tips, tricks, and troubleshooting

I'd propose that the 'doings' of the steering committee be held at 
http://live.gnome.orca/Accessibility/SteeringCommittee.  It will contain 
our charter (which we need to create), a member list, and meeting 
agendas/minutes. Representation of the other work of the committee 
probably should find its way into the rest of the WIKI.

Anyhow, those are some quick thoughts before I need to step out for the 
day.  Thoughts?

Will

PS - I'm going to be on break next week and part of the following week, 
but I'll try to keep up with e-mail during that time.