Minutes for Accessibility IRC Meeting of August 12th, 2010

Meeting Log

Alejandro Piñeiro emailed Germán Poo of the Travel committee for an update yesterday. He has not yet heard back from Germán.
Alejandro Piñeiro pointed out that for an upcoming Gtk Hackfest, the organizers have contacted a hotel in order to pre-book the rooms and get a "group discount." He asked Alejandro Leiva if he or others who are local could attempt to do the same.
Alejandro Leiva responded that he thought Juanje had already done so, but he would try again.
A discussion followed regarding the advantages of having a block of rooms, ideally at a discounted rate, set aside for us. (See chat log.)
Conclusions:
- We agree that the Foundation should book the rooms if possible.
- We need to know what the desired hotel is first. We prefer to stay in the city and take public transportation to the venue.
- Alejandro Leiva will pick out a hotel for us "ASAP" (ideally by next meeting).
- Alejandro Piñeiro will follow up with Germán.

Bryen reported that one source is "on track," but that the others he has not heard back from.
Of the four sources contacted, Bryen feels that one will not be able to help due to being at the end of their budget cycle.
Bryen is hoping to have some sort of confirmation from the sources by the end of the month.
Bryen added that the most promising source might be able to contribute $5000 towards the event.

Bryen reported that he is working on the general GNOME a11y poster.
Alejandro Piñeiro reported that he's working on one for gnome-shell. He also mentioned that the conference organizers had sent him some guidelines about the posters.
Joanie requested that Alejandro send her this information so that she can apply it to the Orca poster. Alejandro stated that he would do so.
The deadline for submission to the conference organizers is 31 August.

Testing
- Peter confirmed that Brian Nitz will be attending and presenting on testing.
- Peter suggested that we will need at least two hours for Brian's session, but no more than four hours. He will try to get back to us soon with more specific information.
Outreach
- Bryen stated that he and Steve will be the primary participants of this portion of the hackfest, but encouraged others to stop by.
- Alejandro asked that Bryen fill out the outreach-related "TBD" items on the Hackfest page.
- Bryen responded that he would do so.

Booth Duty
- Joanie suggested that Bryen should keep booth duty scheduling in mind as none of the rest of the team would be organizing it.
- Bryen indicated doing so was premature, but that he'll cover the booth when/if no one else can.
- Peter pointed out that scheduling booth duty should be easy given that it will not need to be staffed for full days.
Materials
- Bryen is working on brochures but does not want to travel with them. He requested that someone in Spain handle the printing.
- Joanie pointed out that Fer is handling accessible documentation. Therefore, Bryen should coordinate with Fer to ensure his brochure gets produced in alternative formats.

Alejandro Piñeiro reported that, based on list discussion, there are 3x3 combinations. However the plan seems to be:
- python 2.0 + gtk 2 + pygtk
- python 3.0 + gtk 3 + pyobject
Alejandro Piñeiro asked maintainers to chime in with their plans.
Alejandro Leiva responded that the plan for Orca was to wait until everything gets defined.
Other discussion:
- Fer asked if the second option involves using pygi. Alejandro Leiva responded that pygi no longer exists. Instead we have pygobject.
- Mike asked if Python 3 has been released yet. Alejandro Piñeiro responded that it was installable in Ubuntu, though Python 2 was still the default. Alejandro Leiva added that 3.1 is stable.
- Fer indicated the ideal thing to do would be release 2.32 based on the 2.30 branch, keeping bonobo, etc. Alejandro Piñeiro responded that this is indeed what most modules seemed to be doing, adding that the mess in question was due to some people having already made the 3.0 changes.

Joseph is on vacation and thus cannot report on gs-mag.
Fer has some proposed changes for the magnification API, including delegating cursor tracking from Orca to the magnifiers for performance, especially in DBus.
Alejandro Leiva responded that "dbus for capturing input events is crazy IMHO."
(Additional discussion followed, available in the log)

Mike reported that he needs to find out from Li if he is planning on making a new at-spi-corba release. The issue being that the current default is to relocate the CORBA-based AT-SPI, which is not something we likely want for 2.32.
Fer pointed out that Mike had also fixed a bug in AT-SPI2 which was preventing Orca from tracking the mouse when using gnome-mag.

Heidi is looking for the proper venue for asking questions about which keyboards are most needed for Caribou. She is especially interested in input from users.
Joanie observed that in this area there is a "cart-horse" situation, namely: GNOME doesn't have a lot of users with physical disabilities using on-screen keyboards. We need feedback in order to develop a compelling solution, but until we have a compelling solution we will not have users to give us this feedback.
Joanie suggested that this would be an interesting area in which to conduct a study, including Centers for Independent Living, so that we can get the desired feedback from those with expertise in what is needed and, from there, develop a compelling solution.
Alejandro Piñeiro pointed Heidi to the gnome-accessibility-list in general, and to this post in particular.
Peter pointed out that there are others to engage: ACE Center in the UK. And the organization in Spain funding the current work.
Additional discussion followed (see chat log), but no conclusions were reached.
Penelope added that the Ubuntu Accessibility Project just completed a large survey of users and will see if any of the responses are applicable to what Heidi seeks.