Re: A11y at GUADEC 2015

[Magdalen Berns <m berns thismagpie com>]

Hi Oliver, (everyone),

Thanks for continuing to stay on the case about this! I too, want to make sure we sort some accessibility stuff out for GUADEC. :-)

Pointed out in another mail [1] to the team that there now exists a
good opportunity to organize (and reserve time) for a accessibility
BOF as the dates for BOFs have been set (August 10 - 12).

We might need to scale back on the previous ambitious plans around
around a11y at this years edition of GUADEC  year.

Scaling back of ambitious plans? Never! :D On a more serious note (though I definitely wasn't joking there ;-)) I reckon it's too early to be throwing the towel in yet though. There's not enough of us to confirm an exact date for GUADEC at this moment in time, that's all.

That said I'm still very open to suggestions/input and would still
want to do some efforts around inviting someone from a relevant
interest group and, or government organization that care about a11y,
still think there would be interest from them to speak to members of
the a11y team.  Are keeping in mind that maybe only a few GNOME a11y
people may attend GUADEC 2015.

1 https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-accessibility-list/2015-May/msg00003.html

Given the state of numbers at the moment, I suggest we drop worrying about that altogether and just focus on coming up with topic ideas which can hopefully draw the numbers in as GUADEC gets closer. ;-) If numbers were to continue to stay this tragic, then i guess we could think about organising a collaborative BoF between accessibility and one of the many teams with a bit cross over (e.g. design, engagement, marketing... i.e. whoever is relevant and seems up for it) or otherwise focus the session on more "cross disciplinary" style topics (like funding for example). Perhaps there are members who are not involved with accessibility at GNOME but who do have some interest in learning something or getting involved a bit more and they could be persuaded to participate for an afternoon or so ;-). 

I noticed earlier today that some members have started creating a dedicated wiki page for a couple of BoF ideas so far and this seems like a more casual/interactive way of engaging community members during the lead up to GUADEC. Here's an example BoF idea page (for another area of interest) which has a format we could think about trying for an a11y event: https://wiki.gnome.org/GUADEC/2015/BOFs/BeingAGoodMaintainer

Let me know what you think!

Magdalen