SightCity is Germany's largest show of technology and equipment for people with sight impairments (in the UK we have SightVillage which I believe is larger, despite the name). Marco Zehe, Mozilla's accessibility QA engineer, Gijs Kruitbosch (Chatzilla accessibility, long time community member) and Ben Millard (HTML 5 table accessibility, our newest member) and myself were manning a stand/booth at Frankfurt, The reason we were there was to let people know about Mozilla's accessibility activities and the many great features in Firefox (and indeed other programs like Thunderbird that are built on the same core technology). We also promoted other related projects such as NVDA (which has received funding from Mozilla) and Orca who work closely with us.
Marco has already posted his report and Ben the 'mega scribe' is working on a very detailed blow-by-blow account, so you should read those as well.
My overall impression was that this was a successful event for us and it raised awareness of our activities and features to a wider audience. We had a range of discussions from what Firefox is, what accessibility features it has and why we were there, to technical details of the various accessibility APIs. Interestingly as Marco and Gijs noticed, being an atypical exhibitor raised interest and yet many seemed to say, 'oh Firefox; we know all about that' as they walked past. The former is as we were neither selling nor had specialist assistive technology on offer and the later may well be due to the 35% market share that Firefox enjoys in Germany and was quite pleasing, though it did mean we missed opportunities to explain more.
We were fortunate in that while the room we were sharing with 5 others exhibitors was off to one side of the exhibition space, our stand was directly opposite the room entrance. We took great advantage of that by making sure the enormous FatHead Firefox sticker was highly visible (these were available from the US online store, but I currently can't access it to check). You can see it my photos of the event.
As a team we soon developed an easy camaraderie with occasional gentle 'ribbing' of each other (oft' about my age). I flew with Ben and our ultra geeky conversation had people running to another seat or laughing uncontrollably. Ben is a real details man and knows much of the minutiae of HTML, CSS and accessibility issues so I'm sure he will be doing very useful work. He soon got 'stuck in' helping people on the stand and I hope he found it a great way to get into the community and up to speed.
It was great to catch up with Gijs and Marco again and discuss much of what is happening. Gijs was remoting into his home PC trying to fix a really annoying Chatzilla bug while helping people. Meanwhile Marco seemed to know almost everyone who approached the stand and now owes me 'many beers' after I decided he'd donate one for for each person he knew. He has been in the accessibility field for a long time and so has developed many contacts and friends. This is yet another reason why Marco is so much the right man for his role, not to mention his boundless enthusiasm, good nature, plus his great technical and personal understanding of accessibility </suckingup>.
During one quiet movement when we were discussing Firefox advantages, Patricia Fraser who is sales manager for Quantum Technology, makers of Braille devices for children, piped up with a good example from her stand opposite us (security I think). When I jokingly offered to pay her if she came over to our stand she beckoned me over and showed my that she was using Thunderbird on her laptop for email. It turns out she uses Firefox and prefers Linux unless she has to run Windows.
I also chatted to the ZoomText technical guy, the RNIB team and the maker of glasses for macular degeneration. Ben asked several people about helping with his table accessibility research and got one vendor to sound interested which is good news if they follow up. I discussed Firefox accessibility and Mozilla activities in depth with several people. Software engineer (Rich) is just getting started in accessibility and wanted the big picture view of accessibility APIs on various platforms, so I borrowed Ben's pen for a quick diagram [note that's 'borrowed' not 'stole', Ben :-)]. Steve Bennett of Dolphin wanted to do a joint press release, so I passed his request on to Jane Finette who explained how Mozilla now do things in much more on-line friendly and efficient ways with blogs and the like. We also had several conversations with Paul Blenkhorn, a founder of Dolphin, creator of Thunder and long time accessibility developer. Initially Paul was angry about the complete lack of support he had received from a large Open Source project but I hope we convinced him of how seriously Mozilla take such requests, how Firefox is a treated as an Open Source 'product' and that Mozilla are committed to equal access for all. While Paul has a firmly proprietary viewpoint I think we managed to clearly represent Open Source practices. Paul was also interested in the Straight-Street Open Symbol set that I am involved with and Gijs demonstrated his eye tracking work.
For the next outing we discussed having business cards and I suggested a poster that summarises the accessibility features and work so people can quickly see what were are doing and hopefully ask more.
As Gijs will be in London next year doing his Masters we all made provisional plans for a Euro accessibility meeting for hacking and/or conferences.
On more personal note, I was concerned that my lack of even basic school level spoken German would be a problem but Marco kindly explained that many Germans speak good English and that was indeed my experience. However in the one or two cases where I had real difficulty making myself understood I could not help feeling that this was a useful experience for someone working in accessibility. Something that impressed me was that though we bought weekly tickets for the train there were no ticket machines or inspectors at all, an interesting and refreshing sign of trust (or perhaps public service disinterest). I also discovered all food comes with meat or sausage (annoyingly I didn't get to try the currywurst) and there seemed to be a constant smell of Frankfurter. OK so that's an exaggeration for comic effect. I really enjoyed my first trip to Germany and while in a somewhat artificial environment I appreciated the hospitality and friendliness I received.
On they way home I was wearing my Firefox tee shirt and played my favourite game of collecting people who recognise it. This time I managed the Passport Inspector at Frankfurt Airport ('Mozilla Firefox'), The BA hostess who kindly shepherded us to our replacement Lufthansa flight ('ah you have the Firefox logo') and best of all the Captain of the Lufthansa plane as we got off ('Ah Firefox'). Not a bad days hunting.
Keywords: Accessibility, Frankfurt, Mozilla, SightCity