[orca-list] GNU Accessibility Initiative

[Christian Hofstader <cdh gnu org>]

Hello Orca List People,

Some of you may have heard that I have been appointed to the position of 
Director of Access Technology for Free Software Foundation/ Project GNU. 
To those who haven't heard, GNU has kicked off an accessibility 
initiative to handle a whole lot of tasks from helping to fix bugs in 
orca and other free AT software to handling political and legislative 
issues regarding disability and our point of view.

For those of you who do not know me, I'll provide a bit of background. 
About 15 years ago, I lost the last of my useful vision. I had never 
heard of screen readers so I made my own on a circa 1995 Macintosh but 
thought it was far too cumbersome to use to write programs - the only 
thing that people would pay me to do. So, like anyone else in Cambridge, 
I enrolled in a gradual program at Harvard in English/Creative Writing.

Then a friend of the family, then president of the Vermont Counsel, told 
my father about Window-Eyes. Dad bought me a Gateway laptop and WE, I 
got them set up and, voila!

I found that Henter-Joyce had an openeing for someone with my skills and 
took over the lead position in its software development team, ultimately 
being promoted to Vice President. I left FS over severe disagreements 
with the CEO who insisted we push out releases of all of our software, 
including PAC Mate, with defects that could severely cut into our users' 
productivity. Since then, I've been bumming around the research world 
and doing some contracting.

Last fall, rms (with whom I co-founded the League for Programming 
Freedom back in the eighties) and I started working on a GNU 
Accessibility Statement (you can find it at www.gnu.org) and we started 
working toward what I believe is the most strongly worded statement of 
its kind in any software organization with any real public visibility.

As we were working on the statement, I found myself falling further back 
into the world of free software and, by February of this year, I had 
joined the official GNU team. I am extraordinarily proud of being part 
of Project GNU and, over the coming weeks, you will start seeing 
announcements about many different things that we are doing.

I plan on remaining subscribed to this list along with the one for 
vinux, emacspeak and would appreciate any other lists concerning free 
software and access technology that you can recommend.

I also invite all of you to join the new GNU accessibility mailing list 
by sending a message to: accessibility-request gnu org with "subscribe" 
(sans quotes) in the subject line. We hope that this list will help 
bring a lot of people together who work in many areas of AT to find 
people with whom they may want to collaborate or who have done similar 
things so their may be problems already solved that one can draw upon 
for a different project.

We just got the list up and going last week so it has few members and is 
nearly silent right now. I hope it never gets seriously bogged down in 
too many messages but if such occurs, we'll break it up into different 
interest groups so as not to fill one's mailbox with excessive  clutter.

If any of you have ideas on projects we (meaning the GNU AT team - now 2 
people) can and should work on (we're pretty good at collecting 
volunteers as well, please post them to the accessibility mailing list 
or write directly to me if you prefer.

Right now, my primary objective is getting the GNU commentary on the 
508/255 regulation  refresh. This can have a huge impact on free 
software in the Federal government space and we will be fighting hard 
for some of that territory.

Happy Hacking,
cdh

Christian Hofstader
Director Access Technology
FSF/Project GNU
www.gnu.org
GNU's Not UNIX!