Accessibility Ra Ra Ra

Just been chatting to Brian about how we can re-invigorate some interest in GNOME accessibility. There seem to be a couple of misconceptions floating around:

  • We don’t hear much about accessibility on the mailing lists any more, and the Accessibility Project webpage hasn’t been updated in a year, so it must be ‘finished’
  • We don’t have to worry about it, because it’s all in billh’s head, and Sun are doing all the work anyway

None of these are true 🙂 While the bulk of the work in making gtk+ accessible is complete, that doesn’t automatically make every application accessible, and especially not if you use custom widgets. And nobody ever bothers to submit high and low contrast versions of their application icons to gnome-themes, for example. The list of currently open accessibility bugs speaks for itself.

We’d be interested to hear what you guys think you need to help you write more accessible GNOME applications. More information on how to test for accessibility? Better API docs? A better understanding of 508 legislation? GOK and Gnoperncius FAQs? More community involvement from the assistive technology hackers? Fire away and we’ll see what we can do.

And you smell like one too

It’s a popular day for birthdays1 among your friendly JDS team today… Laca, our globetrotting release engineer, Robert, our engineering director, and yours truly. Have a good one everybody!

1Although of course most days are, in any modestly-sized group of people… statistics always freaked me out at school.

2That isn’t my my birthday cake, it’s Jorge‘s from a while back– just seemed like an appropriate picture…

Safari? Sa goody! [1]

We took a spin round Ireland’s Eye from Malahide marina with the Sea Safari folks on Saturday. To be honest, there wasn’t nearly as much safari as advertised, just a cursory shufti into a cave on the off-chance that there might be some seals dozing there. But other than that, the hour-long trip was a blast, and the weather was glorious.

Today we were at Croker for our first hurling games of the season… Wexford v Laois and Kilkenny v Offaly. Possibly two of the most one-sided games we’ll see for a while.

1(c) Christoper Biggins Enterprises, 1982

Mini Me

Cool, Antonio made me a new hackergotchi… better than my effort, hopefully Jeff will drop it in when he has a rare minute 🙂

ObPubServiceAnnouncement:

Please mention everyone at planet that I’ll be happy to help
with any new or renewed hackergotchi if they drop me mail at
gnrfan at gnrfan dot org. Cheers, Antonio.

Streaming: mostly awesome

I can only imagine the work involved from the Fluendo guys to get and keep the GUADEC streaming going, and it’s been mostly awesome… but sadly today I’ve missed pretty much everything of interest to me because of connection failures or (as is the case right now, as I’m watching Goodbye GUADEC) video but no audio.

Ah well, good job anyway guys… hopefully I’ll be able to pick up some of it in the archives, and I’ll just have to bully the rest of the gossip out of Gman and yippi when they stop off here on their way back home next week…

Wonderful Copenhagen

Experiencing the GUADEC streaming first-hand this year, in conjunction with running across my presentation from GUADEC2 in Copenhagen while linking to Anna and Pete’s slides on usability.gnome.org, got me all nostalgic for the videos of that 2001 conference. I guess not all that many people might have seen them, because they don’t live anywhere obvious, the files are huge MPEGs, the filenames are useless, and they’ve never been edited.

Undeterred, I tracked down the video of my 2001 talk, and converted it to ogg/theora for good measure. I converted a couple of others along the way, giving them sensible filenames as I was going, just for the hell of it.

Would anybody be interested in my carrying on this little conversion project, or is 2001 just too much like ancient history now? (Or, indeed, would that be the *best* reason to do it..?)