GNOME Accessibility Hackfest

Last week Ke and I attended the GNOME Accessibility Hackfest and CSUN in San Diego. This is my second time to CSUN but first time to meet GNOME accessibility community members. People are nice and fun and really care
about GNOME accessibility. We set up a booth, had a couple of meetings, talked about accessibility plan for GNOME 3.0, TOI of Orca and also some bugs. At the end, we discussed how we can do better the next year, including the meeting and the booth.

Below are a few things I think are worth to be mentioned.

Plan for GNOME 3.0

This is the most important part for me at CSUN. Because there is still a lot of work to do to make at-spi2 more stable and usable. We went through every item in http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/GNOME3 to make sure there is at least one people to work on that task. Of course, I am going to work on most tasks which is relative to at-spi2 work (atk, atk-bridge, at-spi2-registryd, pyatspi2, accessibility bus and GAIL). And will also try to find out how do we handle panel applets if there are going to be ported to D-Bus. Mike Gorse who has done a lot of work in at-spi2 and Nagappan can also help on at-spi2 work. And Ke will make sure Java ATK Wrapper works for GNOME 3.0.

TOI of Orca

Since Willie Walker will left, we need to spend some attention on Orca. Ke is willing to do this job. So we invited Willie and Joanie to do a TOI session for Ke and me. Willie gave a brief introduction of Orca including code architecture, custom script, events handling, speech and braille output, code style and bugs status on bugzilla. The session is helpful, Ke will blog more detail.

Booth duty

The GNOME Foundation held a booth at CSUN. Many people came to the booth to ask questions. The questions are not limited to “What is GNOME?”, people came to the booth to ask about the problem they find when using GNOME. It is great that we can talk to the end users to introduce our feature and to demo how it is accessible. Without these people, our work will be meaningless.

Making friends

During the GNOME Accessibility Hackfest we met people which we only knew their name and mail address before. We made the GNOME 3 accessibility plan together, worked on the booth together and became friends. It is very great to see you guys there.