RE: [g-a-devel] Status of IBM a11y

["Deborah Norling" <debee jfcl com>]

Peter comments:
>Separate from all that, as someone who has been part of the GNOME and
OpenOffice.org accessibility efforts since >their beginning (and part of the
Mozilla accessibility effort since the start of the UNIX portion of it), I
very >much welcome any suggestions you have for what I and Sun can do to
further help bring more developers from a 
>wider spectrum of organizations into our community. 

Thirty years ago, as a promising young hackerette, I was offered a job at
Dec which I declined.  They thought they were giving me a real opportunity
-- a real corporate job.  I felt patronized -- like I would be the "token
crip" probably stuck answering phones in the complaint department. 

But today, people see disabled teens as responsible and competent. And
they'll work practically for free. Give some disabled teenagers internships,
or competition for a coveted scholarship, and they will contribute more
open-source code than those of us who now need a regular bedtime in order to
function the next day at work.

I wrote vast quantities of code in my younger years, for the shere pleasure
of it, and had a corporation sponssored a contest where I could have entered
that code, I would have tried very hard for the prize.

One idea that fascinates me is having a kind of cross-polination; a blind
guy writing a software tty for the deaf; a deaf lady coding a GPS app for
the visually impaired.  Encouraging this would inspire young people to care
about people with other disabilities who may not necessarily share their
limitations , but do share their concerns.   And these young people would
grow up to be leaders in disability organizations that would be open to
changes outside the narrow political arena.

--Debee