Background

On March 22-27 2010, GNOME will have a booth presence at the CSUN conference in San Diego. CSUN is one of the largest and most important gatherings on the topic of technology and persons with disabilities. This is going to be a great opportunity to bring the gospel of Free Software to a space and industry that is largely proprietary, and to a user base with special needs that sometimes could only be addressed with Open Source software. This is going to be über exciting!

Along with the booth and a presentation or two, we will also be hosting a GNOME assistive technology hackfest. The reasoning for this being the fact that this is an assistive technologies conference, so there really isn’t a better place to draw inspiration, both by seeing the “state of the art” proprietary products first hand, and by talking with users who have needs that we could answer.

Are you a maintainer of one of GNOME’s assistive technology modules? Are you developing an on screen keyboard? An alternative means for text input? A magnifier? Some trippy head-tracking app? Voice control? Switch access? Something new and exciting for cognitive disabilities? Are you hacking on new features for Orca? Are you working to provide users with disabilities unfettered access to GNOME?

If the answer to any of the above is ‘yes’, we hope you will consider joining fellow GNOME a11y folks at CSUN this year to help promote GNOME and to hack with fellow AT developers.

Venue

The hackfest will take place along with the CSUN conference, at the same hotel, and often in our humble exhibition booth.

Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego One Market Place, San Diego, California, USA 92101 Tel: +1 619 232 1234

A map of restaurants and nearby coffee shops with wifi

Goals

1. Bring GNOME assistive technology developers to an industry conference to showcase their work and get inspiration from state of the art alternatives.
2. Collaborate with fellow AT developers, and work on the AT-SPI transition for GNOME 3.0 (this is where AT-SPI hackers come in).
3. Evangelize GNOME as an accessible platform in our exhibition booth to end users and industry members (this is where we need vocal community leaders).

Pre-event Homework

Everyone attending should have at least two in-person tasks planned for the event, this will assure that the event will overall be beneficial. For example:

1. Meet up with Ben Konrath and work on initial scanning mode in Caribou.

2. Give usability feedback for MouseTrap.

3. Read http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/GNOME3

AT developers should strive to demo their application to as many users as possible, and receive as much usability feedback as possible.

Post-event Homework

I could only think of a good one for AT developers: Add a new feature you discovered at CSUN from commercial ATs to your roadmap.

Schedule

• Students winners of Project:Possibility SS12 are around on 26th and having a poster session on 27th

Relevant sessions

Attendees

The following have RSVPed. We will need to know everyone's projected air fare ASAP so we could propose a budget to the foundation board.

Visit to a Guadalinfo center

Mario Cámara, from the Fernando de los Rios Consortium, has offered an kind invitation to all attendees to the HackFest in Seville to visit one of their Guadalinfo centers to see how they try to make them accessible and to receive feedback from you.

If you will attend this visit, please tell them so in the Doodle poll link at the end of this email.

The visit will be held on Tuesday October 5th at 7pm in the centre located at Castilleja de la Cuesta, 5km from Seville.

We will provide paid transport from the Hackfest place to centre and back to Seville for up to 7-8 people. But more people will be able to attend it if the local attendees share their cars.

Exact details:

Departure time: around 6.40pm. Departure place: Hackfest area

Centre to be visited: Castilleja de la Cuesta, 5km from Seville. Address: C/ Principe de Asturias, nº42, inside historical building known as Hacienda Santa Barbara Google Streetview Beside Hotel Santa Ana/Cafeteria

End of the visit: around 8.30pm. Coming back to the Hotel Tryp macarena or where the beer fest will be held.

Doodle link:

http://doodle.com/em27d2h7vapkxu67

Blog posts about the hackfest

• http://osswatch.jiscinvolve.org/2010/03/25/report-from-the-csun-conference-in-san-diego/

• http://www.bryen.com/gnome-a11y-hackfest-update/

• http://monotonous.org/2010/03/25/more-accessibility-hackfest/

• http://monotonous.org/2010/03/27/phew/

• http://www.bryen.com/coolest-moment-at-a11y-conference/

• http://blogs.gnome.org/wwalker/2010/03/30/gnome-accessibility-hackfest/

• http://www.bagu.org/blog/2010/03/31/gnome-a11y-hackfest-at-csun/

• http://monotonous.org/2010/04/15/gnome-accessibility-at-csun-more-thoughts/