http://eaves.ca/2008/06/30/remixing-the-mozilla-manifes

Eitan has started the ball rolling on the much needed equivalent of the excellent pyatspi for Windows called pyia. This could make porting accessible ATs between platforms much eaiser.

Great work Peter! IA2 next?

Congratulations to Mozilla for the record.

We are reaching an exciting time for Open Source in UK education as government interest is increasing and many teachers, support and management staff are using Open Source to greater effect in schools, colleges and universities. Open Source projects like Moodle, Firefox and Open Office are mature offering many features that are high quality, open, low cost, completely avoid vendor lock-in and are community supported. All ideal attributes for educational use.

For many years schoolforge.org.uk has been the community whose mission is to:

bring together individuals and organisations that advocate, use, and develop open resources for UK schools and colleges. 

Schoolforge.org.uk Mission statement

As Richard Rothwell our chairman has just said:

With the introduction of many FOSS laptops and devices, and the slow and painful conversion of government agencies, Schoolforge.org.uk is in a remarkable position.  We have been recognised by the Becta as the defacto voice for the open source movement in UK schools education. Many changes will happen over the next few months, and we will be able to contribute to the direction of these changes.

Richard Rothwell, chair Schoolforge-UK

So if you are at all interested or involved in Open Source and Free software please do join the mailing list and be part of the future of ICT in Education. Richard points out that;

The group is at http://groups.google.com/group/sf-uk-discuss/about, and is open to anyone to join. This will help us in many ways, not the least because we will be able to better reflect the community we serve.

An article by Stallman on GNU/Linux has appeared in the BBC technology section

Nice to see these guys getting right 'up to date'.

via Geekdad.

For some time I've had a bit of a bodged setup to manage my domain emails using gmail. I wanted webmail access with good spam filtering as I get a ridiculous amount. While my hosters UKFSN.org provide a great Open source-friendly service (free to OSS projects and they also fund projects with profits) they are a little light on email services. However I had a working setup with my host email service splitting out 2 accounts and 2 gmail account s getting emails from them (I had to use forwarding before gmail would read other accounts via pop3). You can send as other email addresses from gmail and read the accounts so giving the impression of using the domain with a gmail account.

Anyway I got yet another complaint from a  Microsoft email client user about my emails saying 'on behalf of' due to the way they insist on processing the from and sender headers in a strange non standard way. This person also suggested Google Apps would lose the problem and as I've been meaning to give it ago for a while I had a play.

So Google Apps is much like a normal  google account with Gmail as the centre and Calendar and Docs. The difference is you can use your existing domain rather than a Google account's email address. All you need do is alter your DNS records to map to the google service. This makes Gmail your email system and you get to manage mail  accounts as usual with the addition of a startpage and the other apps including a simple website system. This allows you to set up teams arround your domain.You don't get all the apps available to gmail accounts as Google support apps for small companies and non-profits etc. It provides a very low cost basic hosted SaaS setup to small organisations.

I simply registered my domain, updated my DNS, created some accounts and imported emails from the old accounts. I also  set up to read the old account pop3 as well to catch emails to those addresss.

The only problem I've found so far is that importing an existing gmail account you loose the tags, read status and other metadata. It would be good if google provide a full import from gmail accounts. Irritatingly Google Reader is not a provided app nor is Groups so I'll have to use my gmail account for now till Google add those vital services as well. It's more of a pain for groups as you end up having to register twice.

According to the Spread Firefox weekly affiliates page I have 30 downloads in last week and a total of 63 so I'm at position 235.

Getting real for a moment, the leader is 9,893 with a total of 42,879 so I have a way to go. Still that's much more than I expected from fullmeasure.co.uk, jambu.fullmeasure.co.uk and this blog. I hope they have big cach prizes.

http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=308

A well concidered paper on the inputs to deciding to use OSS in establishments from OSS Watch .

In fact, the real value of OSS is that it allows you to exercise control over how you run your institution's IT department by allowing you to choose a model based on any point of the spectrum that runs from fully self-supporting to fully outsourced. In turn, this allows institutions to choose the extent to which they want, and are able to, take advantage of the strategic organisational gains that accrue from the use of open data standards and the ability to avoid lock-in. 

OSS Watch

Good news for both GNOME and Stormy.

We're seeing a great realisation of the potential of Open Source accessibility and Web 2.0 social software in the excellent WebVisum service as explained in this interview. And there's more interest from the Blind Confindential blog.

Flavio Percoco Premoli has been working hard at developing MouseTrap a head tracking system that uses cheap web cams and doesn't require the user to wear a reflective dot. It's early days but it has been accepted for GNOME's GOPA funding as GNOME accessibility lead WIllie Walker says. This is exciting as we've been wanting low cost head/eye track systems for a while and MouseTrap is moving in the right direction fast.

There's a demo video showing how to draw a shape in Open Office Draw using the latest version of MouseTrap.

 

The key feature of the 1.4 release of GOK is it now works seamlessly with the system pointer. This means that users of mouse simulators like headpointers can use GOK as an On Screen Keyboard (OSK). Previously complications caused by the approach used to  support the X pointer made this difficult (GOK has always worked really well with switch input).

The motivation to finally fix this long standing issue was a result of work to make the GNOME login more accessible and was a great example of an Open Source community in action. David Bolter, maintainer work with the growing number of people interested in alternative input access to GNOME. You can follow much of the action on this bug.

Here's the announcment:

What is GOK?
==============

GOK enables users to control their free desktops without having to rely on a standard keyboard or mouse. It includes a suite of on-screen keyboards as well as dynamic keyboard generation. Please see http://www.gok.ca/ for details.

What's changed for GOK v1.3.7?
================================

* GOK now uses the core pointer (regular system mouse) by default
* Loads of improvements thanks to growing GOK community. (More on this coming in a later email)
* Updated translations, and numerous bug fixes.

Where can I get it?
=====================

You can obtain GOK v1.4.0 in source code form here:
ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gok/1.4/gok-1.4.0.tar

Thank you to everyone who made this an awesome release! As always, please report bugs.

best regards,
The GOK Team

 

Informative post on some of the issues of developing with the Mozilla platformXULRunner.

Note to self: check out js-ctypes, ECML script for XML (though JSON is good too)

 

A handy guide to using UTF-8 (UNICODE) in order to support all languages in a PHP produced web site. This seems to collect all little details together in one place.

I hear it should be much easier in PHP 6.

Andrew Kirkpatrick announces draft documentation on Flash accessibility.

A great post by Chris Heilmann at Scripting Enabled about some of the issues of gettting techies and accessibility folks to work together to develop the great accessibility solutions that we know are possible but sadly it seems rarely manage to produce. It's  positioned to drum up discussion for the Scripting Enabled event but makes perfect general sense to me and ecapsulates some of the issues we want to address with OATSsoft.org.

LowVision is a Firefox Add-on from Lighthouse International that according to Usability News will:

...is the first program to enable people with moderate or severe low vision to both view web pages as the original web author intended and read the text on those pages tailored to their own visual needs.

This compliments the existing provision of several low cost Open Source add-ons for  blind people and will help meet the need of many older people who want access the web without the aid of expensive screen magnifing equipment.

Firefox is becoming a rich platform for accessibility with an ever growing collection of accessibility add-ons, while  the accessibility team work closely with Assitive Technology vendors and projects like Orca, NVDA and Jaws in order to ensure easy access to the Open Web.

There are few available details and no screen shots but LowBrowse is expected to be available on the official Firefox add-on site at the end of this year.

I'm working on a touchscreen application for Windows and my Windows PC is a laptop which is not ideal for developing on. My main development machine runs Ubuntu with a reasonable Iiyama screen and while my project is fairly portable and the TouchKit drivers are available for Ubuntu Linux I wanted to try something a bit smoother andIt was surprisingly easy to get the touchscreen monitor working on Ubuntu, giving me a dual screen setup, with Ubuntu desktop on one and WIndows with touch screen on the other.

Here's the recipe:

• Ubuntu Hardy
• Windows XP Pro
• Old dual head Nvidia graphics card (I used VGA connector for the touchscreen and digital for main monitor)
• VirtualBox (I used the closed sorurce version as USB is support required, though a serial option is available with the monitor)
• Iiyama touchscreen with TouchKit drivers and USB

1. Install virtualbox, setup a virtual disk and install XP + SP3 and do updates.
2. Enable USB support in Hardy
3. create usbfs group, make myself member edit fstab adding entry for usbgroup
4. Install and use nvidia-settings to config twinmode with screens side by side (had to hand edit xorg.conf to get monitors the right way round)
5. Plug in monitor and touchscreen signal cable and set up a Virtualbox USB filter for it in settings
6. Run VIrtualbox Windows guest  and install latest TouchKit drivers (those with monitor were buggy).
7. Run Windows guest full screen in RHS monitor and calibrate the drivers.

Files can be copied using VirtualBox's shared folders and I intend to create a small script process to copy updated files from the shared folders on the WIndows guest so I can then develop on Ubuntu and test on WIndows without ever using the mouse on the Windows guest.

Rich Burridge is bouncing back from being RIFed with a useful post on Mecurial docs for beginners. Mozilla have moved over to Mercurial from SVN so this is useful for me when doing custom builds, though the basics are easy and Marco got me going in no time. Mercurial is one of the 3 most popular distributed SCM system, the others being GIT and Bazaar.

Like Rich, I seem to be collecting SCM systems, and I even worked on developing versions based on RCS and Make, progressing to high level config managment tools while at Intasoft.

 

I heard on Radio 4 this morning that George Orwell's diaries are appearing on a blog 70 years after they were writtenin the period leading up to the world war.

Orwell's writing style is exemplorary and the excerpts I heard were facinating, using language that has not dated. There is much more to George Orwell than 1984 or Triffids and his social observation and commentry is powerful reading. I'm very much looking forward to getting these in my RSS feed each day from 9th August.

Hamster is a nice little time tracking applet that is already making my timesheet filling easier. Plus you get easy to read reports. So far it has done all I need but it easy to use.

Somehow I neglected to blog Gary Bishop's recently announced accessibility utitility, Outfox. This Firefox extension alows access to operating system services that exist outside the usual secure and limited web environment, such as speech.The plan is to devleop this into an accessibility platform.

Technically a web page can call the extension code though a Javascript API. The extension code in turn talks to a small server program that being wirtten in Python can access an any platform services it likes. There more details on the project site.

This is almost perfect timing for a project that I'm working on where I would have duplicated much of this effort. Having examined the code and played with it it seems suitable for my needs and I can contribute back to the project. Oh Open Source is just great. Together these projects will help extend Firefox's utility as a platform for creating great a11y solutions, something I've had in mind for ages now.

And Peter Parent has created a nice Outfox + Greasemonkey script to add voice to Gmail inbox updates (oh Peter, I can't help thinking that post title calls out for a brief spell in a jacket ;-)) .

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