Well we finally reached the day of the ban on smoking in enclosed public places in the UK, bringing us in line with with Scotland. Like the enforced wearing of seat belts many years ago it caused a lot of discussion. The recent terrorist activity and critical security level has hogged the headlines so the BBC website only had a small entry in the health section.

Personally I'm really looking forward to being able to go anywhere and enjoy some real ale or a meal without coming home feeling like a kipper.  As an ex smoker I guess I'm hyper sensitive to smoke but I also worry about my kids being exposed to passive smoking risks. I also find after a night out in a smokey venue that my obstructive sleep apnoea is conciderably worse and I'm wiped out for a couple of days after (as I find after decorating with paint).

I guess if you are stuck for something to distract you from having a 'puffer' you could always solve the Roswell mystery once and for all.  I found exercise and drinking water worked for me.

In this case 'well travelled' means 17,000 miles around the world in 15 years. It seems that after floating around the world's oceanic currents the ducks are due to land on English soil.

'Quackers'

www.traintimes.org.uk is a nice accessible version of the official www.nationalrail.co.uk. from Matthew Somerville of MySociety. Apart from being accessible, cross browser and not requiring javascript you lose much of the clutter like ads , offer links and also those anoying combo boxes. It just does one job and does it cleanly without fuss.

An nice feature is a sort of query by url. For example http://www.traintimes.org.uk/cardiff/birmingham/08:00/next_tuesday shows Cardiff to Birmingham 8 am next Tuesday. That opens up more possibilities.

I hit a few trivial layout issues with Mozilla Minefield on Ubuntu Linux but it works  a treat. A good example of what you can do with screen scraping. I wonder what improvments could be made by applying greasemonkey in Mozilla browsers?

Unfortunately it is not able to simplify the complex (and expensive) fare structure that we have in the UK. Plus you'll wan't to pop down to your local station or use  the annoying www.thetrainline.com to actually purchase your tickets.

The live train google maps mashups are fun to watch. You just have to go 'whoo whoooo'.

There's a pretty picture in Tim's latest post. Firefox 46%, IE 45%. As explained  in the comments although O'Reilly visitors are mainly techy 'alpha geeks' they have previously predicted the greater market trends.

The FAST Annual Parliamentary Report on Assistive Technology Research and Development lists a number of interesting UK Government funded AT projects.

The New Zealand crew, lead by Robert O'Callahan, show what technologies will be coming in Firefox 3.0, including Graphics (canvas and SVG), columns, offline apps, typography (ligatures), animated png and video (ogg Theora). They explain also Mozilla's motivation, including helping the web to develop through open standards.

The video is large, 140Mb and .mov format only. I was unable get the sound working in Totem even using Ubuntus' codec search facility.

Definately worth watching .

A great post from Alax Faarborg has some interesting Mockups.

Possibly of use for OSK and Alt-input operation  where synthetic pointer control has problems.

Frank Hecker has expanded on his previous post and made this proposal.

The proposed Mozilla accessibility strategy encompasses the following three elements:

• making Firefox a showcase for how to address Internet accessibility issues
• building a thriving community of developers and other contributors interested in Firefox and Mozilla accessibility issues
• working with others to extend the Firefox and Mozilla accessibility success story across all major OS/desktop platforms, including in particular open source platforms

The Mozilla project is well-positioned to play a leading role in Internet accessibility. It has one of the most popular and accessible Internet-related products in Firefox, it has a thriving community of people developing Firefox and Mozilla code and related add-ons, and it has the financial resources to make an ongoing long-term investment in the future of open source accessibility.

Our goal is to break [the dependence on proprietary AT software] and to make open source software and development processes as important in the AT market as they are becoming in the wider IT market.

I don't know about you but I find this exciting. Even more so after just finding these comments from Joe Clark, a web author working in accessibility.

You can get involved in shaping web accessibility by joining the Mozilla Accessibility project.

This OSS Watch report discusses Moodle and is one of several contained in a report on Open Source sustainability commisioned by JISC. Moodle is a very popular educational Learning Platform (VLE) and also a flourishing community of developers and educationalists. Funding comes from a mix of royalties and annual fees.  Moodle has become something of a 'poster child' for Open Source' taking on' proprietary solutions and exemplifies the community spirit and grass root enthusiasm of Open Source.

The report written by Moodle's originator and lead Martin Dougiamas details the project structure and how it achieves sustainabilty and governance .

I recently spotted a Moodle at the UCE Birmingham Conservatoire website, the venue for this years GNOME GUADEC conference (see right-most link on the top navigation bar). Guest access is available, though it was down when I tried.

When playing with Google maps mashups last year I coincidently encountered a number of problems on the roads including potholes and flowing sewage. I began to dream of a web service were we could report such problems to local councils and utilities using a map. I got quite excited by the idea and how it could help improve our local community experience. We could see if a problem had been reported and check its status. Coucils would get to hear of more problems as it is easy to report problems. This would be a great way to put cool technology to use.

Needless to say I did nothing about this idea and needless to say someone else had the same thought and a did great job implementing it.

Fixmystreet.com  starts with a Google style  simple page where you enter your postcode. This takes you to a page where you can enter details, using an interactive map to pinpoint the problem. The maps are highly detailed, showing houses, so you can be precise. However they are optional if you don't wont to use them or have images disabled. Once you have described the problem and optionally provide a photo, you submit and then click the link in the confirmationary email you receive. The correct council department are then notified by email. This provides a fast simple way of reporting problems or finding out what is happening about an issue. It's certainly much easier than wading through council webs site trying to find the right contact.

In my case I received a fast response describing the situation and what was being done about the issue. This helped me to feel part of the community and that the council really are working to fix problems that we face. [Update: 2 guys have just fixed the paving slab I also reported. This so much fun I might go around looking for problems ;-)]

The site also provides a list of other problems that have been reported in your area. I even just spotted a RSS feed so you can keep posted on what's happening in you neighbourhood.

FixMyStreet is the latest offereing from the MySociety stable who provide a number of highly useful social, political and community services , all with clean simple interfaces (plus they're Open Source). I have also used the excellent WriteToThem for contacting MPs and PledgeBank for rallying people around a cause.

A friend who works at Exeter University recently told me how most students there and at other universities  use Facebook as a vital part of their daily life. So I was interested in this  article analysing some of the reasons Facebook is so popular by a user (hmm, 'user' might be the correct term as it appears highly addictive). They're human, non-technial reasons as you rather expect for social software.

It's a social network for what my cousin calls "the deadwood" – basically, everyone over 30.

Eeek, and the fact I still buy the odd CD rather more than downloading tracks  is a dead give away. I'd better sign up soon. Right after I suss Second Life......

The recent release of Apple's Safari web browser on Windows caused a fuss over different font rendering techniques as Safari looks fuzzy to Windows users. This amazingly detailed article by Maxim Shemanarev shows something very clever as well as being critical about rendering on Windows. Mac and Linux.

No more horizontal pixel grid! Really! From now on the horizontal grid is 1/256 of a pixel!

Yeah Sure! Do I look a mug? Well just look at this example from about 1/10th of the way into the article. And then use a magnifier to look at what's going on (I used Orca)

Look at it carefully, do you see something strange? Each line has a 1/10th pixel shift, so that, in the run of 30 lines it gradually (gradually!) accumulates 3 extra pixels.

How do they do that? Well I guess we need to read it all and test it. There's more improved text display examples in the article. Will we see improvements coming in response to this?

There's also source code.

air.mozilla.com [re]launched yesterday with a live chat show featuring CEO Mitchell. The site/channel features a mix of ads, interviews and community created content.

Currently using the impressive mogulus live streaming service, the hunt (anti-fox pun unintended) is on for a non-proprietary replacement (Mogulus uses Flash).  Mitchell's interview will be archived in Ogg Theora format, which is  great as I was unable to be at the event.

Birmingham's UCE Conservatoire is the venue for this years GUADEC, the European conference for developers and users of the Gnome Desktop. Representatives from around the world meet up to discuss and improve the fundamental part of Linux that users see and that provides vital services that programs utilise.

Of the several desktops available for Linux, Gnome has a real commitment to accessibility (also known as 'a11y'), not only having infrastructure that allows Assistive Technology to access programs (AT/SPI and ATK), but also a level of awareness and interest in making GNOME the best it can be for all users. Ubuntu's choice of Gnome for what is undoubtedly the leading Linux, adds furhter weight, especially as Ubuntu are commited to accessibility as can bee seen by their addition of accessible boot features for example.

The 2 days that I attended proved to be of high value, and not only as the excellent 'freebies' included 3 t-shirts and a 2G Mandriver USB drive distro specially built with Gnome rather than the usual KDE desktop. The typical collection of stickers, pens and badges were also included with a nice cotten bag. O'Reilly Media had a table with a good discount on their excellent technical books.

As with all these events the real value comes from meeting up with people you work with or know from email, IRC and bug trackers conversations and making new contacts. For me that included catching up with 3 others working in accessibility; Henrik Omma who leads Ubuntu Linux accessibility and is also involved in OATSoft, Eitan Isaacson who created Accerciser, the Gnome accessibility explorer, and who has worked on the sadly shelved LSR as well as Orca screen reader, and also Willie Walker the lead of Orca from Sun (and  uber keen cyclist).

Accessibility had a pleasingly high profile and there was a reasonable turnout to the 2 accessibility presentations. Eitan did a great job demonstrating Accerciser and how it could be used to find and fix problems, using the File Open dialog as an real world example.

In his keynote Jono Bacon, Ubuntu community manager and LUG radio Live gang member, got those working in a11y to stand as well as the other high profile project members. Accessibility was also mentioned by Micky Lauer in his Open Moko talk, and he expressed his desire to work with us when Willie Walker commented on it in the question time. Also encouraging was the a11y sticker in the loot bags and I caught snatches of conversation about a11y at least twice when walking past huddles of developers.

We discussed doing some form of practical a11y presentations next year as the need for evangelism has reduced. Henrik mentioned the need to get developers and users working together which is in my view critical and one of the primary goals of OATSoft. I'd like to see a closer meeting of users needs and more innovation resulting from good dialogue and understanding. The fact that GNOME is focused on everyday users and has such a good community vibe is encouraging as is the fact that many developers are now aware of a11y needs and the advantages to their projects.

The other theme I picked up on was the high interest in open platforms for converged mobile devices running stacks that include Linux and GTK and giving communications and pda-like functionality. There are several frameworks such as Access (PalmSource) and Maemo (Nokia). And Intel have just made their bid for a slice of the action with Moblin. As Henrik pointed out it would be great if this time a11y is in place early as there are many exciting applications of mobile technology for people with disabilities and also advantages for new ways of interacting with devices such as speech or switch in mobile scenarios. This interests me in another way as it is many years since I worked on the Mobile data systems for the RAC and West Midlands Fire Brigade. The technology has advanced incredibly. It's strange to think in those days that we were installing the first cellular data radio systems and developing all the code and hardware for simple text and graphics mobile terminals. Now that is all standard infrastructure and the handhelds are more powerful than PC's a few years ago. The great difference is that the software is becoming Open Source. Perhaps the hardware will follow.

Leonid Zolotarev of Maemo showed his new embedded Mozilla browser for the Nokia N800 which is a new version of GTKMozEmbed (thought he also mentioned XULRunner) and not Minimo. The raised some interest but as SVG and XUL are disabled it has limitations. Cairo graphics and pango text has also been disabled for performance reasons.

One of my main reasons for attending was to meet Eitan and pick his brains about how best to access AT/SPI in Jambu. Eitan was a core developer on LSR and implemented Accerciser to use the new pyatspi after discussions between Peter Parente and Willie Walker and CSUN led to this python wrapper for Assistive Technology access to AT/SPI. pyatspi is now part of the AT/SPI package and GNOME 2.20 but I was also considering using the LSR Adapator abstractions as that should lead to portability to Windows, something that I consider important. I have now decided to use pyatspi, partly as it is set to become a standard API for AT and partly as it is light-weight and transparent using as it does Python introspection to give a thin pythononic wrapper. Eitan demonstrated it using the interactive ipython console in Accerciser. Accerciser is a great tool to explore and test as well as sample code, making it almost a 'no brainer'. Porting pyATSPI to IAccessible2 on Win32 can come later and taking that approach means I can get on with making Jambu work without further delays doing yet more R & D.

Jambu is using SVG as the method of describing the UI and I was not quite happy with the way I was doing that using GTK pixbufs. I wasn't sure if this was the best approach or what benefit there is in using Cairo surfaces in custom GTK widgets. There are examples of each, and even some using the now defunct Cairo SVG rendering. Anyway chatting to Eitan and re-visiting MacSlow's cairo-clock (which does much of what I am doing with some extra compositing goodness), and which I had rather forgotten about since initially looking at it before I was sure of what I needed to do. So I have decided to migrate to Cairo though I will probably wrap the SVG renderer, librsvg, using ctypes as the existing module is incomplete and I have not yet found the source for it.

So the 2 days I spent where well worth the time and I look forward to the next GUADEC or perhaps the event in Boston, especially when Jambu has become working code.

I missed the final keynote of the day but the idea of making GNOME an online desktop sounds interesting and is certain to generate much discussion. We need to ensure a11y is kept central, but there are possibilities of giving users with disabilites a good online and social experience

[Update] From  the Gnome Planet it seem Pyro is already in the web desktop integration arena. It is a desktop inside Firefox; yep you got that right. From Alex Graveley's keynote  it appears it just might not be completely bonkers after all ;-). One of the reason's I was reluctant to leave XULRunner as the Jambu platform was that it kept me 'close to the web', something that was obviously important from many angles. These ideas make me wonder if perhaps with a future GNOME I will still have that closeness? 

I also just found MacSlow's GridView for the Elisa multimedia project and the rich media and zoom could be great for Jambu (source code).

The new Full Measure office is open and I'm enjoying the space and having a place to 'go to work'. I was supposed to be in March but at least I made it just before the long school summer holidays start tomorrow. I'm really pleased as it is a great working environment and we have room for another desk if ever required.

There's still a little bit to be completed and plenty of sorting out to do, but for now I'm settled enough to concentrate on Jambu (and Tux is happy on the window sill along with his blue stegasaurus mate).

There' a rough video tour on flixn and piccies on the entire process on flikr.

Here's a list of some of the stuff that went into it

• Builder - John Pearson & subbies (John +1), recommended (did our loft conversion a few years back)
• Electrician - Steve Plaine, good but very busy
• Door and window - double gazed
  
• Wood frame ('noggin' was new word for me)
• insulation - celtex floor and walls, roll on ceiling
• wall + ceiling - plaster board and plaster finish
• floor - chipboard
• New armoured cable to house (and new regulations require extra earthing and new cutout, shame to lose the antiques)
• 8 x 13A 2 gang sockets + extractor fan - unbranded
  
• 3 wall uplighters with energy saver bulbs - B&Q, 3 way switch
• No heating (I generate enough hot air)
• 4 x Network sockets, 2 x 4000 series sockets and cat cable 5e from excellent cablemonkey.co.uk
• Phone line from BT, cable and 2 wall mount extension sockets
  
• broadband - Nildram reliable and fast
  
• router,switch,modem + wireless access point - older Netgen
  
• 48 x carpet tiles - B&Q classic tonals, Sienna, Ok but some joins are rough
  
• Desk - Ikea Galant in 4 sections birch - great value
  
• 2 x shelves - Ikea Billy birch
• Filing + cuboard - Ikea Effektive birch
• monitor shelf - Ikea Galant desk top + capita legs
  
• Paints from Wilsons Paints Exmouth (best place around for price/quality/advice), matt emusion + eggshell, white and cream (10B15), primer undercoat.
• Blinds - Mostyns 'cheap-o' PVC mini venitian

 Cost: unknown as I haven't had all the bills yet. But should be under £5K for build and wiring. Furnishings about £700.

As Frank Hecker announced on the Mozilla accessibility list Aaron Leventhal is one of 5 winners of the prestigious Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award award was announced at OSCON. Aaron gets the award of Best Accessibility Architect.

The five winners (Aaron, Karl Fogel, Pamela Jones, David Recordon, Paul Vixie) were selected by a commitee of highly respected members of the Open Source communitiy. This was the first year that the nominations were open to the general community. 

Aaron fully derservs this public recognition of his tireless, and at one time lonely, work on Mozilla accessibility. He has not only ensured that Mozilla has the most accessible web browser but Aaron has been working with other Open Source projects (e.g. Orca and NVDA), standards bodies (W3C) and commercial AT programs (e.g. Window Eyes, JAWS). Working with Frank Hecker and the Mozilla Foundation board Aaron has encouraged many to help improve accessibility though the Mozilla accessibility grants and I personally have him to thank for providing funding for the work on Jambu. The beneficiaries of Aaron's unassuming yet highly effective leadership are all who find accessibility and assistive technology make access to computers and the web easier, or indeed possible.

This award is also great news for everyone involved in Open Source accessibility and OATS, whether developer or user. Such a high profile accolade can only help the cause and ensure more innovative and low cost accessibility tools are available to users, something that Aaron clearly indicates he is keen to see.

As the GNOME crowd might say, we now have a 'rock star' in Open Source Accessibility.  As if to prove his stardom Aaron made a great Oscar-style speech on the list.

Thank you Aaron and 'well done that man'.

SVG is usually used for vector graphics drawing (hint in the name) but the <image> element allows the inclusion of other files such as raster png or jpeg. This interesting little demo from Vladimir Vukićević shows a way to interactively transform images in a svg page (which acts like a web page). The interaction is done using javascript to update the DOM (and none of the SVG animation facilities). In case it's not obvious (hint look at the source ctrl + u) the mouse can be used to click and move (centre of image) or scale and rotate (drag corners).

While showing images may be an unusual use of SVG the example does indicate what can be done with SVG in Firefox. Indeed I spent some time invetigating Firefox as the host for Jambu's SVG widget as it takes care of so much of the interactivity, events and redrawing. In the end I rejected it due to problems, concerns about general device access and as it's tricky to have a Firefox SVG UI controlling itself and other apps as a general AT. In addition I wanted Python (not that Javascript is not up to the job). Jambu is now using a GTK custom widget with librsvg doing the rendering. I do plan to allow images (and other media formats) but have not yet tried that in rsvg. This meant another learning curve for me and the need to implement interactivity and redrawing that Firefox does so well but I hope that a rich client solution will be more general purpose.