The Fedora Hardware Project

[Janina Sajka]

I think it important to recognize that all of Sun's excellent contribution is desktop focused--exclusively. There's more to accessibility than that. It has to cover the console, bios, boot loader, installation, documentation, etc.

BTW: Helpful as Sun's contribution has been and will continue to be, they've also left us a nasty problem--their dependency on their Java license. So, their desktop contribution comes with yet more cleanup work for gcj.

I am happy to help move this forward, and I am happy to do so for Fedora. However, we need more than just some accessibility folks. For example, I would hope we can reinvigorate Red Hat's participation in FSG A11y work as well. There is an emerging road map. There are also known issues that should just be addressed, and can be addressed without waiting for the road map. Let's take firstboot as an example. I shudder at the thought of making it accessible given the architecture that underlies it. Can we put on the table the notion of moving it to W3C/WAI compliant html/xml markup? That would make accessibility easier to deliver. Is that worthy of consideration?

Jeff Spaleta writes:
> On Mon, 24 May 2004 17:18:08 -0400, Alan Cox <alan at redhat.com> wrote:
> > 
> > On Mon, May 24, 2004 at 04:12:46PM -0400, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> > > working group as a subcommunity group could be a very helpful thing,
> > > especially if they organized a roadmap and systematically help
> > > developers address accessibility issues in an organized way.
> > 
> > That has been going on for some time. Sun in particular did a lot of heavy
> > lifting to get core accessibility functionality into the desktop and the
> > toolkits.
> 
> But is there a community group that aims to press the accessibility issue beyond
> the desktop? A group that has a battle plan and human expertise to
> help to make the whole process from the moment you drop a cd into the
> machine to start the install accessible?  I'm not aware of a community
> group like that in general...and certaintly not a group of community
> contributors focused on doing this for fedora specifically.  Right now
> and it the past, it seems Janina expects for Red Hat to make
> accessibility very important, as important as she makes it, and I
> don't think that expectation is going to be realized unless someone
> organizes community contributors into a dedicated group whose goal is
> to tackle the accessibility question in a focused and organized way,
> by providing assistance, feedback and code on accessibility issues
> through the fedora distribution.
> 
> Accessibility is important, important enough to pull everyone who is
> interested in making it work well together, giving them a roadmap and
> putting them to work towards making fc6 completely accessible.
> 
> -jef
> 
> 
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-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

		Chair, Accessibility Workgroup
	Free Standards Group (FSG)

Email: janina at afb.net		Phone: (202) 408-8175