Ke Wang's blog

Lying on bed with an empty stomach, the first thing emerges in my mind is the packed meal offered on GNOME Asia 2010.

Right, I’m a little lazy. This post should be written earlier. But now, I find a good excuse for my laziness. Don’t you think the memories, which you can still remember after a period of time, are what really worth a mention? Aha, really good excuse!

The first thing to mention is, of course, my presentation. Tim Miao and I combined our session. Tim talked about GNOME accessibility testing, and I did a introduction to GNOME accessibility development. This is my first time doing presentation on a GNOME summit, so I was a little intense. The whole process ran a little faster than it has been expected. It’s somewhat disappointing that in the Q&A section, there was just one question about development. One reason for this is perhaps the presentation was too fast for listeners to understand. Another reason is probably that there were few developers attending our session. My experience on the summit proved the latter. It is a common issue of the open source world that most people just pay attention to open source than really do development.

Another thing which impresses me deeply is the hard work of the foundation board members. During these days, they always worked until wee hours to discuss the future of GNOME. How to attract more users, how to involve more developers, and how to make more money to support the running of the committee… I think these were all hot topics in their discussion. They are all volunteers. They get no pay from the committee. I don’t know why they choose this “job”, but what they have done really promoted the growth of the open source world.

Oh, my stomach is singing, and I must conclude. Besides the happiness of this journey to GNOME Asia, I think there are much more to think about for the living of GNOME, and even the whole open source world. We need more developers, but only developers cannot keep a company running. We need more ideas to get profit, but this is not the advantage of developers. We should involve more people in marketing areas. I know profiting is not the motivation of open source, but facing with the problem of living, we must change. Just as what the well-known saying in stock investment tells, keep living is the most important.

Just two cents of a person with an empty stomach and a screwed head.

It is my first time to attend CSUN and GNOME Accessibility Hackfest. I’ve been involved in accessibility development since I joined SUN Microsystems on November 2008. At that time, accessibility is just lots of headachy codes for me. I spent quite a lot of time to get familiar with AT-SPI, ATK, GAIL and Java-Access-Bridge. After that I started my way on the development of Java ATK Wrapper, a communication layer independent alternative of Java-Access-Bridge.

This little contribution to GNOME Accessibility gives me the chance of attending this hackfest(thanks to GNOME committee’s sponsorship). On this hackfest, I met many developers of accessibility technology from different countries around the world, Eitan Isaacson, Willie Walker, Joanmarie Diggs, Peter Korn, Bryen Yunashko, Mike Gorse, Ben Konrath, Flavio Percoco and API, whose true name is quite difficult for me to remember. Some of them are full-time employees, others are part-time volunteers. All their spirits to devote themselves to open source development are admirable.

During these days’ experience at the booth of the GNOME community on CSUN Conference, I saw the value of our accessibility development, I saw how our products really help people with disabilities, and I also saw where we should still improve to help more people with various physical impairments. All these experiences will drive me to contribute more on accessibility development.

Accessibility, is now, not just thousands of lines of codes for me. Accessibility is a spirit, which makes people devote themselves without thinking of returns. Accessibility is a powerful strength, which can tightly ties developers all over the world for achieving even a tiny improvement that will better help disabled people.

As part of the conclusion made on this hackfest, I will continue my work on Java ATK Wrapper. Jobs are still needed to make JAW work on AT-SPI2. I’ll also takeover part of the maintenance job of Orca. Thanks to the deep introduction to Orca made by Willie Walker and Joanmarie Diggs, I’ll do my best to help in Orca’s maintenance and improvement job.

More information about this hackfest can be found on Willie Walker’s blog. Willie, forgive me for stealing your ideas 🙂