Category: guadalinex

Colaborar en español con la accesibilidad en el escritorio

Sorry to the non-spanish speakers this is an anounce for the people who feel more confortable speaking Spanish than English and all the people who may know people that feel like that.

Muy buenas 🙂

Para quienes no lo sepan, Orca es el proyecto libre principal en torno a las tecnologías de accesibilidad en el escritorio. Últimamente se está haciendo un gran esfuerzo por mejorar este aspecto y se quiere obtener todo el feedback posible.
Como la comunidad hispana es una de las más implicadas en este y otros aspectos del escritorio se acaba de abrir una lista en español para que puedan participar más activamente dando experiencias de usuario. A continuación les copio el anuncio oficial para que tengan la información y la difundan en los círculos que crean conveniente.

Muchísimas gracias 🙂

Nueva lista de correo de Orca en español

Estamos encantados de anunciar la creación de la lista orca-es-list, una lista de correo oficial de GNOME para los usuarios hispanohablantes del revisor de pantalla Orca.

Facilitar la participación a usuarios no-angloparlantes con la comunidad de Orca ha sido durante mucho tiempo uno de los objetivos, no conseguidos hasta la fecha, del equipo de desarrollo de Orca.
Ahora, gracias al apoyo del Consorcio Fernando de los Ríos, la participación continuada de los desarrolladores de Emergya, y la voluntad de usuarios hispanohablantes de Orca de contribuir con su tiempo y conocimiento, el equipo de desarrollo de Orca está en posición de mantener dicha lista de correo.

Para suscribirse basta con rellenar el siguiente formulario:
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-es-list

Estamos muy agradecidos a todos los que han hecho posible esta nueva lista de correo, incluyendo a GNOME por facilitar la infraestructura de hosting. ¡Esperamos verte por la orca-es-list!

El anuncio en inglés en
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2011-February/msg00012.html

–El equipo de desarrollo de Orca

NOTA: El anuncio original de esta lista, aparte de en la lista en inglés de Orca ha sido en este post de uno Alejandro Leiva, uno de los mantenedores del proyecto.

Orca settings

We keep working on a11y improvements for the GNOME desktop. We’re focused on some Orca and OCRFeeder bugs the Consorcio Fernando de los Ríos has ask us to fix.

But when we started with the Orca’s ones we realized that Orca needed a better configuration system and Joanmarie (Orca’s maintainer) invited us to solve this before going on fixing the other bugs.

At this point we had to decide what configuration system we should migrate Orca to. At the first shot, GSettings seemed to be the better choice, but after a second thought it didn’t seem so obvious.

Let’s see some issues we found about it:

  • GSettings is not fully implemented right now
  • Orca is written in Python and the GSettings support for GSettings (via PyGI) is not ready
  • We need those changes available for Guadalinex v7 and Guadalinfo v6 distributions which ship a GNOME version with no GSettings support at all. Backporting Glib for getting that support doesn’t seem to be a good and healthy choice…
  • Some people like to have plain text based files for the settings

That’s why, after some discussions we all agreed to create a settings manager that could be plugged by different config backends (plain texts, old Python based config, GConf, GSettings, KDE settings?, etc). It is not much more work and it would make happier everyone 🙂

The settings manager itself is almost ready and now it is working properly with the old Python based config files. The next step is to get the GConf backend ready to go. Later, when the GSettings support in Python is ready, we’ll create that backend based on the GConf one (it should be easy).

For the GConf backend we are focusing first on defining the schema, because there are a lot of different keys and values to care about and they need to be checked and confirmed. My friend Javi is working on that and he has asked for help to check for missing keys, values or deprecated ones. Any help here will be very useful.

Once he has the GConf schema, he’ll be able to create the backend which will get and set the different keys and values into GConf system.

I know that all this settings manager sounds a bit overcomplicated but the implementation won’t be and we need it, at least for the transition. Hopefully we’ll skip this manager and we’ll let just the GSettings connection at the next cycle.

The discussions were very interesting and explained better than me the needs that made us to take this approach so, I recommend reading them if you’re interesting on this topic.

And, of course, any ideas are welcome 🙂

Warming up with the a11y stuff

We still are far from have the Guadalinfo a11y project ready, but we start to warming up 🙂

Our friends from Yaco has already some good improvements on Evince (still waiting for the final patch) and they looks nice 🙂

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FqVp7GYQR0[/youtube]
ORCA reading the text of a PDF document at Evince


Meanwhile we are working on a “import from the scanner” feature for OCRFeeder, which is quite functional and is also waiting to be finished the patch. But also we are working on Orca. We have a few Orca’s bugs we are looking at, but we don’t have time for all of them, so we need to select the ones our client believe are more important.

Anyway, we are working now on a possibility of having keybinding profiles at Orca. There is something working but still need some fixes and some love… probably the lovely Orca’s community will help us with it. I’m very surprised about how active and friendly is the people there 🙂

Well, I think I have no more news by now, stay tuned because (if everything goes well…) there will be some interesting a11y improvements soon 😉

UPDATED: The people from Yaco has posted about their progres here:

http://hoygan.yaco.es/first-results-in-the-evince-a11y-improvements

Accessibility in the Gnome 3.0 Hackfest Marketing

NOTE: This post is not mine, the post have been originally writen by my friend and colleague Félix Ontañón (aka fontanon) which is far more complete than the one I could write, so he let me translate and publish his original one here.

My apologies for any mistake on the translation process. If there are any, they are for sure mine, not his. Well, actually my friend Rober (aka “the guy who fix my bad English” ) was fixing some mistakes already 🙂

The post:

As part of the Guadalinfo Accessible project Juanje Ojeda , Lorenzo Gil (from Yaco) and myself, were invited by Stormy Peters and Paul Cutler to the Gnome 3.0 Marketing Hackfest Zaragoza , an event organized by the Gnome Foundation, ASOLIF, the CESLA and the Governments of Aragon and Zaragoza, where was the place where the plans for the Gnome 3.0 launch: communication, promotional videos, etc. were going to be cooked.

Our objective was clear: to open ways of collaboration with the Gnome Foundation and present our intentions to develop projects, in terms of accessibility for the Gnome desktop. The Consorcio Fernando de los Rios is currently bidding in Andalusia: Improvements, bugfixes and to imitate the JAWS’s behaviors on Orca; image acquisition, improved recognition and export formats on OCRFeeder and reading the text with Orca from PDFs on Evince .

In the event was also present Dani Baeyens from Warp, who will also work in Gnome accessibility projects under the contract of Fernando de los Rios Consortium, improving Caribou (Gok replacement) and functional integrity of predictive text, Presage .

When we arrived at the event, the table of participants were discussing concrete actions on the initiative of Ambassadors Gnome, but we soon could start to present the developments that we, Yaco and Emergya, were involved. In a round shift Lorenzo, Juanje and I told the massive use of Gnome is promoted from the local government in various ICT initiatives: Guadalinex , Education , Guadalinfo and the the Network of Libraries , which justifies a special effort to promote and address the problems of assistive technologies and public services are fully accessible to all citizens.

Speaking about Guadalinfo, we presented the project as a true laboratory of accessibility, because apart from software improvements, a big purchase of assistance devices for visual, cognitive and motor disabilities is being done. Stormy Peters at this time we said if we had any picture, I remembered that Pedro Marín, from the Guadalinfo center of “Peligros” (Granada) had shared on Facebook a few and these were projected in the room:

Attendees were surprised by the examples of use of assistive technology devices with the Gnome accesibility assistances and asked us to hang material on the Gnome 3.0 website: photos or videos of real people using Gnome and devices in the Guadalinfo centers. We had a first task.

At lunch time, we dived into the issue with Vincent Untz and Licio Fonseca who advised us on ways of collaborating with the community to gain acceptance of our developments.

In the afternoon Paul and Stormy sat down with us to see what we could do –the companies- for Gnome and viceversa. We insisted on that the local government has a real interest in supporting accessibility projects, for its projects and that these developments, are given back to the community. If we get visibility and acknowledgement for these initiatives in the community, we are sure more projects will come. We trust in Gnome as a Government-friendly community and that’s how they want to be received aswell. Paul asked us to work directly with the developers of the applications through the traditional communication ways that are usually used in the community: mailing list, irc, etc..

And that way we started, Lorenzo made public its intentions to improve Evince and Alejandro Leiva, from Emergya, ours . The reception is being good, and the community is reporting feedback. This starts up!

UPDATED (10/05/18): Fixed the Lorenzo’s name at the first paragraph and the urls, that were all wrong.

Progressing in accessibility

I’d like to have written earlier and more about this topic because I’m very exited about it, but I had an injured in my left hand. Actually one bicycle crash over me and my hand is a bit broken… (that is why people at Zaragoza’s meeting could saw me with a funny hand…)

But two weeks ago some friends and me were at the GNOME Marketing Hackfest at Zaragoza to talk with some people from the GNOME Foundation about accessibility and GNOME. The reason is something I’ve already told in others posts, that a few Spanish companies are going to collaborate between us and with GNOME a11y projects to bring as improvements as we can to our loved desktop.

My friend and colleague Félix Ontañón (aka fontanon), who is leading the part of the project that is being doing by my company has written a very good summary (the original in Spanish) of the meeting.

This project really excite me because GNOME was the first FLOSS project I met about 9 years ago… I was more with the GNOME Hispano team and project which were using GNOME such a custom distros, but GNOME has been always for me a reference as community big project. Mostly because the human factor. It’s like a big family 🙂

For this reason and because a11y is a very important issue which need so much effort, but usually it doesn’t have enough resources, I’m very excited to be able to contribute directly to the project I love the most 🙂

From my company we try to contribute to FLOSS community but the most of the times we don’t have the rights to publish the code we do, so it is like a dream to have a client who specifically ask us to work directly with upstream and to work as the community does. We hope to have this kind of opportunity more often. We really do!

If you have any advise about, just tell me, please. We are very open to collaborations and to any opportunity of write free code and knowledge.

Stay tunned because we will tell you all the progress we make and more good stuff 😉

http://blogs.gnome.org/juanje/2010/05/03/great-gnome-hackers-meeting/

I’m going to FOSDEM 2010

Well, last year was my first time in Brussels and FOSDEM. It was great, but I guess this time, as Barney would say: it’s going to be legen…. wait for it…. dary!!! 😛

This time a lot of friends are going and I hope to meet new not-yet-friends up there.

I’m going with my good friend from Emergya and also great Guadalinex developer, Roberto. Here we are at some spanish FLOSS congress….

Juanje and Rober at the Hispalinux congress
Juanje and Rober at the Hispalinux congress

We are the two guys in the middle… If you are at the FOSDEM we look (kind of) like in the photo.

BTW, If you see the girls you can also tell us 😛

See you there 😉

I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting

Is GNOME 3.0 for users or developers?

This question is walking around in my head for some time now…

I’m the first thinking that the old traditional desktop is that, old. And we need something new.

I like things I see about GNOME Shell and so on, but I’m a geek!

I mean, I do use virtual desktops or spaces, but I like to mess with my system and I always have running my Guake terminal.

I remember when Compiz came up, everyone was so excited with the things it could do. It was so cool, so fancy and that was going to be the right tool to attract normal users to our desktop, because it was a lot of better than Vista…

That was cool, but I don’t really see much people using those effects nowadays… Ok, transparency and smoothness on windows stuff, is used, but no much more.

So now people who are thinking on the next release of their distros for non-very-tech-users (like Guadalinex), are a bit afraid to be forced to use a very new concept, which is cool when you are geek or somebody teach you about it.

To upgrade a few thousand of users to a very new desktop concept is a quite hard challenge… Even having a helpdesk services, online documentation and forums.

I just hope those new concepts be really easy to catch or somebody make any kind of “first use lesson” for them.

Actually, for regular end users I think I prefer something like Litl OS or Chrome OS. That is a change of concept, but into something they already know: the web. And also the mediacenter and web interfaces.

Well, it’s just a personal thought…

Anyways, we’ll see next year… I wish the best for my favourite desktop and their hackers, so let’s have a bit of faith 😉

GNOME Hispano meeting and CISL09

I’ve been in Caceres (Extremadura) the last three days attending the “Conferencia Internacional de Software Libre” (International Free Software Conference), one of the biggest FLOSS events in Spain.

It was a very intense days and I met a lot of friends and new interesting people.

But also was held there the GNOME Hispano meeting with people like Carlos Garcia Campos (aka Kal), Álvaro del Castillo (aka acs), José Ángel Díaz, and others gnomers.

The beginning was actually quite moving for some of us, because José made a retrospective of GNOME’s history and how GNOME Hispano was born. For those who were that night, when GNOME Hispano started this made them draw a smile in their (our) faces 🙂

I couldn’t attend all the sessions, because I had to attend also to the other conference, but they told me they were interesting. There was stuff like “GNOME Fails“, “Introduction to the Desktop course“, “The migration of GNOME Hispano’s services to OpenSolaris” and the other two sessions where I was: “Software development using git” and “GNOME and the distributions” (which, actually was mine :-P)

My talk was about how what developers make can be affected by changes on the distribution or by third party people who need to integrate their software with the desktop and more software. We were also talking about the very end users and how is more important to them some small and silly bugs than the next big and fancy feature.

We’ve learned from the experience of thousand of users in Extremadura (GNU/LinEx) and Andalusia (Guadalinex) that the very end users (people from little villages, childrens, old people, and so) don’t care so much about the new fancy stuff but they really do care about crash when they try to perform an email search on Evolution or some dialog is untranslated.

Some of those errors come from the distributions but others are responsibility of the upstream developers. I know it is much funnier to be working in a fancy feature or dealing with a very tricky bug, than take care of a hundred of silly bugs, but it’s probably that a lot of people won’t see the super-feature, just because one those silly bugs… I can tell you…

Anyways, the talk was interesting, the people was participating and we all learnt some lessons, I think. I’d like to write some conclusions to see what do you think as well…

I’ll probably do 😉

CISL09 and GNOME Hispano

I’m packaging my stuff to leave to Extremadura. There, in Caceres, takes place the Free Software World Conference this week, one of the biggest FLOSS’ event in Spain.

I’m very excited because it’s my first event in my new position at Emergya and because there you can always find interesting people and interesting projects.

Good place for networking 😉

I have also to give a talk about GNOME and the Linux distributions there, as part of the GNOME Hispano meeting. It will be about the problems I’ve found several times trying to integrate GNOME with other software into some distributions.

I’ve been working on distributions based on Debian and Ubuntu for almost 8 years and there are some issues that are still there.

Actually, it’s much easier than before to integrate the desktop, but there are always some things hardcoded or not very well documented that make us made some tricky hacks.

Well, these are, mostly, experiences from the past, because now it’s much more better, but I hope this help to be more aware of those things for future changes.

I’ll tell you more after the event and I hope to see any of you there 😉

Back to the community

It’s been awhile since my last post. I’ve been busy with my personal life and some changes on my professional life…

Actually, I left my last company (Emergya) because I was needing a change and I had the possibility of start to work on Guadalinex (Ubuntu based distribution from Andalusia, Spain) full time. Guadalinex is a very important project for the Spanish FLOSS community and It’s very important for me as well.

There were some problems to start at my new position and I’ve been something like two month off, waiting for my job.

Meanwhile I’ve been a bit disconnected of the GNOME, Ubuntu, Debian and floss world in general, and I’ve been more focused on recovering and improving my health. I came back to doing climbing, running, Ninjutsu, some parkour, I’ve been eating more vegetables and fruits, I’ve been visiting my physiotherapist… You know, trying to fix a bit my sedentary life.

But there were more problems with my new position which made me worry about my future and my economy… :-/

Then my previous company offered me another position, this time it was a very good job, the one I was looking for last time I was working there. And because of several reasons (which weren’t easy decisions at all) I took that job 🙂

So, I’m about to start a new stage of my personal and professional life and that is very linked to the FLOSS world 🙂

They call the position Community Manager, but it’s not “online community manager“. It is not about create online community around our products and so, it is about build (or to get stronger) free software community inside the company and putting the means for our developers to be able of sharing knowledge with people from other communities (GNOME, Ubuntu, Debian, Drupal, gvSIG, Redmine, Rails…).

We’ve been very focused on looking for good clients, growing up as a small-medium company and we have a bunch a good developers with very good skills and know how, but not all of them come from the free software world and they need to know how to share all that knowledge and how interact with  the community. The rest, just need tools and opportunities for working as they want, in a open way.

Connect our GIS people with open GIS projects, our Drupal hackers with the Drupal developers, our distro experts with Ubuntu, Debian and GNOME people and so on, plus a few more things is going to be my life in, at least, one year from now.

I’m very excited about this and I think is going to be great for all of us and, I hope, for the communities we’ll try to help. We’ve been receiving so much from them and it is time to give a bit back to them.

Well, this is all by now, but I’ll come back here to tell you all our progress and to share knowledge and experiences.

Thank you folks for read this boring long post and:

Happy Hacking! 😉

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 España
This work by Juanje Ojeda is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 España.