Steve Lee :: Blog

Last week I attended the AEGIS (#aegis) open accessibility workshop and came away with a sense that something good is happening to European open accessibility. Below are my personal thoughts and a more detailed 'official' report is available on the OSS Watch blog.

In addition to hearing more about AEGIS, the workshop offered the opportunity to catch up with old friends and e collaborators from the Ace Centre, OATSoft.org, aIDEAS & Mozilla as well as being something of a 'tweatup' for those who follow each other on Twitter, including Henni of Opera, Steve Faulkener and Gez Lemon of TPG and Davis Sloan of the University of Dundee. There was woefully little time to chat and I completely missed David Banes of AbilityNet and David McKay of Inference Labs, Cambridge (Dasher is an alternative text input program). I did finally meet Jutta Treviranus, director of ATRC at University of Toronto. Jutta is the boss of long term open accessibility developer David Bolter (e.g. GOK, dojo, ARIA), and we also heard the news that David is taking a years break from ATRC to work on Mozilla core accessibility with Maroc and Surkov.

I was pleased to see a place for the open accessibility projects I have been personally active in. In addition to key projects such as Mozilla, GNOME and NVDA I saw some potential for those I have been closely involved in as a developer; Simon Judge thought Maavis has something to offer in many use cases, and the straight-street.com open symbol set has much to offer. Jambu may also be useful as a starting point for some work. I'm not sure about PowerTalk as it relies on MS technologies but at least that is now included in the EduApps USB stick collection. Greg again mentioned his interest in OATSoft.org as providing the master list of projects, though the announcement of the OAEG seem to indicate it would be providing similar functionality after all.

During the AccessApps presentation at the JISC conference, JISC kindly offered to fund a stick for all attendees. Mine arrived fresh from the AccessApps team resplendent in a Tartan ribbon, possibly Buchanan muted. Nice touch

Wrote an article introducing open accessibility for Open Source Schools at Miles' request.

I attended the JISC 09 Conference ( #jisc09) representing OSS Watch and along with Gabriel Hanganu held camp at our stand, talking about our work and advisory service. JISC funding proposals recommend discussion with us and several people approached us about their work and others had questions about open source in general. We had info packs that include several of the very useful reports on our website and also the OSS Watch National Software Survey 2008 report .

I was also there to meet the AccessApps team and present a report to them on how OSS Watch could help them open up their development of their collection of open source and free accessibility programs (and others) that run from an USB stick plugged into a Windows PC.

The following is a quick summary of my observations on the OATS and accessibility side, which was much higher profile than I expected.

Lizbeth Goodman's keynote is available as a podcast (hopefully video soon) and she mentioned AT and Open Source several times. Also showed Mick Donegan's work with myTobii and COGAIN. Her dance performance work put Drake Music Project and Tim Anderson's E-Scape in mind. Lizbeth is now Reserach Director at Futurelab so we can expect accessibility and open source to be on their agenda as well as all those great games and innovative mobile exercises like Mud Larking in Depford.

The AccessApps team's presentation was fun and introduced open source and free accessibility programs to the attendees. Dasher got a quick mention with another cameo from Mick. They had the great idea of getting people to discuss the programs listed on bits of paper inside a large cardboard USB stick an decide which would be useful. That got the chap next to me very interested and he was only there on a whim (he may include FOSS in his ICT HE teaching, and I suggested contributions like testing/bug reports). Sarah showed me the attractive (and pointy) trophy they won for their work at the Scottish open source awards.

I also chatted to E.A . Draffan and watched her Lexdis 10 min speed demo. Lexdis is an excellent resource, very much a labour of love with much developed by students themselves. I'm pleased to hear it will live on in a "new improved"  form in collaboration with TechDis.  As always E.A had good project ideas and was briming with enthusiasm.

From a brief chat with Sal Cooke, director of TechDis, it seems they are now taking a very broad view and planning to embrace "the cloud" and mobile spaces in interesting ways.

In the space of the week we have 2 excellent guides that will help users of Open Source:

1. Mozilla's Community Marketing guide
2. Stormy's Best Practices for Creating an Open Source Policy

One provide many ideas for telling people about open source projects and the other how to ensure you understand and control how you use and contribute to open source.

We also heard that the UK Government have refreshed their Open Source Policy with a new Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan and aggregating website for the tag #ukgovOSS .

After a recent ADSL outage at a critical time I decide I needed a backup and Mobile broadband seems reasonable now the price has dropped and there are some OK pay-as-you-go deals around along with wider 3g network coverage for speed. A limitation is that it's not shared between computers as you have a USB dongle modem (though I see 3 do a router that you can plug the dongle into). The other limitation is it not going to be fast, only reasonable where 3g coverage is available, painful where you have only GPRS. Still that will be OK for emergency backup use and occasional trips like for the weekly OSS Watch lovein.

Anyway after looking around I settled on T-Mobile's PAYG plan (UK) as having the best deal for my usage: £39 for the USB modem dongle, £2 per day with £7 per week and £10 a month options, all with a 3GB monthly fair use (i.e they send you a letter, not cut you off). Vodaphone were second with non time-limited topups. In all cases you can ignore the speed claims (I'm getting 530/265 at home according to speedtest.net so that's equivalent to first generation ADSL). T-Mobile also wins for giving access to wifi hotspots in places like airports and Starbucks (but I've not tried them yet and it looks like it might need a plan extension). A caveat is that VOIP like Skype is blocked unless you go for a more expensive plan option.

As for use in Ubuntu it just works with the Network Manager in 8.10 Ibex. Just plug in the dongle, select UK, T-Mobile and that's it (go to the network manage applet in the top panel if you don't get a dialog).

Anyway here's a few notes that might save you some hassles

• Buy the modem from the T-Mobile online shop. It's £10 cheaper than all the shops I saw it in.
• There's conflicting information as the shop says the stick is a 110 but its actually marked as a Huawei E160 and Network Manager thinks its as E220/270. Still it works.
• In order to use it you need to link a credit card to your account and top up the account. The official way is to register the account on the myt-mobile website (from an existing Internet connection). You can phone tech support as I ended up doing when I did not spot the phone number you require to procede. The phone number DOES exist for the modem, look for the 07**** number with a barcode on the packaging and even the despatch note. You get emailed a pin for first login but this can take up to a month (so I was told, but cannot quite believe) and I certainly didn't get mine, again tech support sorted this out.
• As always get past front line support - it sucks. The Technical support (0845 4122993) are a great help, knowing most things and they even set up my account and credit card etc.
• It's going to cost you £2 just to test it out so plan to use it on the same day if you can risk leaving it till then (ok so I'm tight).
• In order to get the week or month you need to get a pass by texting a number using the software they supply. Yes, you knew it. it's only available on Windows (fail). However despite the 'sod you Linux and Mac users' notes in the manual, I'm told you can call support and get them to do it assuming you have a enough in the account. I just spotted a web app for texting on the myt-mobile site so perhaps that will work.
• You'll want to call support to remove the content block
• Pictures are compressed (so look grainy) apparently the software can change that, but that's not available on Linux/Mac. There must be an API on the modem so hopefully someone will fix it.
• Oh the myt-mobile registration form is an accessibility travesty - tab doesn't work and there's a great example of a non accessible CAPTCHA.

Last week the SS12 code-a-thon at UCLA went ahead and was a success with the students learning about and getting excited about accessibility.

You know using eval in web or XUL javascript client code is often a tempting quick fix and hey it even feels a little cool being so dynamic but the are some very good reason not to use it.

Read this post by Wladimir Palant and avoid a 'public spanking'.

Exwick is a newish residential development in Exeter with a population of some 9,000 (I think). The 2 yr old community centre held an open day which features the launch of the new Ubuntu LTSP Thin Client system which offers low cost computer and Internet access for the community.

Rob Beard of our LUG and Rick Timmis a local businessman offering Open Source business solutions are responsible for getting the technology going and the CC Chairman had made some excellent cabinets. The project was funded by Gemini FM our local radio station and using 8 yr old PCs for the clients kept the costs right down. You can see the kit in the photos that Rob took while I was there.

I was suitably impressed and noted it was very popular with the children for playing flash games in Firefox. I guess adults will soon find out about the facility and enjoy using it as well once the kids move over.

The spare loot I took (Firefox CDs and stickers , Ubuntu CDs, Linux Format magazines) seemed reasonably popular and I left it with the centre to ensure it gets into peoples hands. Had a nice chat with a chap who used to use Unix and program in COBAL and said he is going to give Ubuntu a whirl when he gets home (he liked the command line terminal session).

I'd say a successful event and a great way to get some great FOSS products out there in the wider community. Well done Rob.

Unlike my previous unreview Accessify have done a decent review of this excellent introductory book. And what's more I largely agree with it and the 8/10 mark

Buy a copy for all your collegues and friends and then no one will have an excuse for not having good accessibility.