So after having booked almost three months ago to go to the GNOME Boston Summit, I had to cancel. Why was I going to the Boston Summit? Several months ago I came across some potential funding for accessibility and language stuff. I started asking around and realised we have lots of people interested in this stuff and wanting to work on it. I thought that maybe I could tee up those who want to work on it, and fill the gap between the GNOME accessibility developer team and the Australian developers, users, and organisations willing to back it. I am still hoping to do this, but unfortunately due to the summit being announced quite late, most of the accessibility team were not going to attend. I was thinking it would still be interesting, and was going to swing past London to see some people, but then lots of great open source stuff came up in Australia and I thought it’d be better not to go. I was targetting GNOME because almost all the people I’ve spoken to said the GNOME accessibility stuff is well on the way to being really usable, and so a little development and getting some serious feedback from users might be able to take it there 🙂
My interest in accessibility and languages has come from a realisation that Linux is something that cuts across all boundaries – cultural, religious, gender, age, physical, language – and so making it something truly for everyone is such a great goal. It delivers equal opportunity to people in a way that I really love.
Anyway now with the NSW gov tender for open source on the cards, life is going to be quite exciting for a while 🙂 Rock on Australia!