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.

Great work Peter! IA2 next?

So this is really a call to action. It’s time to stop shaking the proverbial fist at PDFs the technology and start taking matters in our own hands. Adobe have worked hard to get accessibility support built into Acrobat (and very soon there may be more resources to help us publish accessible PDF - watch this space), so it’s down to us to start implemening the processes to support the creation of accessible PDF.

The aim of the conference is to break down the barriers between disabled users and the social web as much as giving ethical hackers real world issues to solve. We talked about improving the accessibility of the web for a long time - let's not wait, let's make it happen.

Chris Heilmann

I used Wordpress, having had the intendion to get to grips with it for a long time. And what joy, I'm most impressed by the quality of architecture, UI, features, code and docs. My only possible whinge is how slow organising pages can be but that's what you get when using an GUI app rather than editing a text file. I could think of a couple of ways to streamline the UI but it's basically very good.

I chose the Beast Blog theme that claims to be accessible and it looks pretty good from inspection, including skip links, site map and good markup. I've tweaked it a bit and will do more but editing the theme PHP and CSS is very straight forward and Wordpress provides a pretty clean API that works well for both Blogs and page based sites.

[Update]  Marco Zehe kindly tested it and says it 'looks' good in Jaws and Orca.

I'm hoping that as Jambu grows I can open up the site and use it as something of a CMS. Though I do prefer a wiki  really.

I've just found out that a Ubuntu based LTSP PC network has been set up in a local community centre by a member of our area LUG and could be ideal to start the ball rolling. Udsing to to educate the over 50s in computer use. Then we can move on to encourgaing them to contribute to Open Source projects.

Suggestions welcome.