I've just spent an inspiring week in Boston with a group of friendly hackers and others who are working hard to ensure that Mozilla Firefox and Linux with Gnome become highly accessible. You can read the minutes of the Gnome Accessibility Summit and Mark Pilgrim's blog on the Mozilla Summit so I'll recount my personal impressions. Update 17 Oct: now also blogged by Shane Anderson of WebAIM.

Aaron Leventhal, the lead of Mozilla Accessibility invited me after we had some discussion about how I could get involved and Mozilla generously paid for my flight and expenses. I am in their debt for what is one of the most enjoyable and stimulating times in my career, and that's not just the food and beer. It is patently clear that this group are determined to help users who require more than the standard mouse/keyboard/screen access. In addition to learning about other projects, sharing ideas and reaching consensus on several issues some serious work happened resulting in new focus groups, finding bugs and designing new features.

I've personally come away with a clear vision for improving support for users with motor problems and the initial plan is to work to ensure that switch users can access web sites and services through Firefox on Windows. The long term goal is to develop it into a cross-platform solution and provision for control of Linux via various input streams such as head-mice and speech. Conversations with the GOK maintainers David Bolter and Bill Haneman revealed it to be a serious tool for switch access with many advanced features. It will be an important part of the future switch developments and it is hoped to provide a clear way forward.

I arrived during day 2 of the Gnome summit to attend the Accessibility Summit chaired by Will Walker (Orca lead) and held in one of the MIT Media buildings. We decamped to the 'map room' after a presentation on Sugar, the OLPC core software. Sugar looks interesting, having a simple and attractive look with some interesting social features. There may be some accessibility issues to address such as the reliance on colour.

We crammed into the map room and a lot of ground was covered at some speed as noted in the minutes, We could have done with another day. There were several members of the blind community and Massachusetts ITD present who all provided much input. It is clear that  the ITD AT group under the guidance of Joe Lazzaro are  ensuring that Open Standards and FOSS are part of the commonwealth's accessible IT provision. The day offered me a concentrated learning experience, providing a broad overview of the subject, projects, players and issues, including an introduction to ATK/AT-SPI from Bill Haneman. Lunch arrived in the form of an impressive quanitity of Pizza boxes and soda bottle in true hacker style.

In the evening many went to the Cambridge Brewing Company offering a chance to catch up with folks in a relaxed environment. I met Peter Korn (Sun accessibility blog) and Joanie Diggs (Caroll center for the blind and Orca hacker supreme) as well as others who I got to know better later at the Mozilla event. Peter and Joanie were exploring the  range of beers brewed on site via sample glasses. Joanie kindly tried to fix my broken Ubuntu sound but the chance of a good Tapas lured her away. I finished the evening over beers and discussion with Bill Haneman and  Mike Pederson. I highly recommend the porter.

The next day was relaxed, spent with Aaron and a couple of others discussing a few topics before the Mozilla event started on the Tuesday. Actually we spent much time trying to get wireless connectivity and it's reassuing that everyone has this problem. The Hackfest, as it was originally called, was hosted by IBM in building that seemed half deserted. I heard rumors that Google were operating an aggressive employment strategy but later conversations revealed that IBM are flexible about working patterns for this research group.

Day 1 started with introductions to the many projects that Mozilla are supporting and that Aaron is skillfully coordinating around Mozilla Accessibility. They cover a range of technologies and the 3 main platforms. Frank Hecker (director Mozilla Foundation) joined us and treated us to supper at Cambrew. On day 2 we split into 2 focus groups, one on the important upcoming Dynamic HTML accessibility extensions for Ajax (WAI-ARIA) and I attended the DOM ATK / AT-SPI discussions. Much useful work was achieved in these groups. Day 3 was very relaxed with work on XUL accessibility guidelines between Shane Anderson of WebAIM and.Mark Pilgrim with others hacking and surfing on accessibility. Aaron asked me to present on switch access so I provided a high level user-focused overview and we discussed possible projects. This was followed by an example of what is so great about Open Source, namely other developers freely sharing their time and expertease, quickly providing me with clear ideas for architecture and technologies to use for switch access. Charles (FireVox) introduced us to Brain Pong as a possible alternative means of control for switch users.

Food and drink throughout my stay were excellent and I made the most of the Boston sea food, Going out in a friendly group most nights is in stark contrast to my last time in the States when I went to work for a certain large software company in the NW who never once took me out. On arrival we breakfasted on coffee, pastries and fruit, Lunches included Buritos (and Aaron remembered to count himself for the second order ) and Thai. Coffee and cookies kept us going in the afternoon. Fish suppers included Blue Fish, Oyster, Shark, Lobster, Linguinni, Sea bass and a lobster (not all eaten by me). One evening we found the resturant from the future in the Italian sector, Well at least it had received a good food award in 2007.

In summary then this was a stimulating and affirming time for me. I came away with increased conviction in Open Source as a great solution for end users and firm reassurance of Mozilla and Gnome's commitment to Accessibility. The ideas that we have been promoting at Oatsoft.org are being made reality in the main stream Linux Desktop world. I have a possible project and a clearer vision. Watch this space......
 

If you are in any doubt about the level of commitment to Accessibility coming from the Open Source community then look at this Gnome Accessibility Projects list and also the Mozilla Accessibility Projects list. Both are a result of the activity at the recent Accessibility Summits in Boston.

It's good to see specific projects for People with Learning Difficulties,  cognative disabilities or Dyslexia. They're a group who are often left out of attempts to improve accessibility.

For these needs to met by real solutions that benefit users we need people to work on these pages and the projects themselves. To quote Aaron Leventhal:

...getting this document polished with crisp project ideas is the next step. Can someone volunteer to do a round of work on it? We need to organize it into something [people] can come into and know a little about each project.

So please climb aboard and join in, it promises to be a fun ride.

It's official and you can read the press release and release notes. This is the most accessible Ubuntu yet thanks to the great work of Henrik Omma and the teams on the Ubuntu accessibility project, the gnome accessibility project, the mozilla accessibility project and many others. The myriad improvements include selecting Orca as the default screen reader and better boot accessibility.

He's an idea; Open Source can be profiled  by 3 Cs; Commons, Community and Confidence. 

Commons

This term, used by Simon Phipps, Sun's Open Source Evangelist, evokes images of the land shared by villages in days gone by. Perhaps 'grazing rights' is a concept not to far removed from the rights bestowed on everyone by Open Source Licences (at least overgrazing isn't such a problem). The code commons contains not only the code, a project's most important asset, but also other artifacts such as the mail lists archives, wikis, tests, build systems, bug trackers. In short all the created assets, tools and encapsulated knowledge developed and managed by the:

Community

The heart of open source is the people who congregate around the commons and use it, tend it, put items in and/or use the contents. Users, developers, testers, documenters, graphics designers, teachers, students, researchers, journalists etc who use modern communications to collaborate. Working together in global citizenship with some common goals and some at odds but with mutual:

Confidence 

Confidence in continuing viability of the commons and its contained resources. Confidence in members of the community and in the techniques and practices being used to develop. User confidence in the quality (servers just keep working), developer confidence that working practices create great code, business confidence to base commerce on the low cost commodity software. Confidence in security, quality, maintenance, stability and  the responsiveness of community. Confidence in the rights maintained by the protection of the licenses.

The above is from the point of view of software development and support but these ideas are applied in other areas such as the Creative Commons for artistic endeavors and now publishing (wikipedia.org), jornalism (digg.com) or politics (www.mysociety.org).