Archives for category: Technology

Mono And Virgins

July 16, 2009 //

I really can’t get myself worked up on anything RMS says anymore.

By reading the blogosphere in the week after GCDS, you would think that the only thing that went down there was RMS’s silly comments. While I am a long-time free software user and advocate, I have a hard time staying in tune with the FSF that spends most of it’s time telling us what not to do, what not to use, and generally informs us of the world’s evils. Sitting at the registration desk at GCDS we got a sticker dump from Stallman, besides a “Linux/GNU” sticker, all the stickers informed us about what is crap. This is not how you build a movement.

In the past decade I have seen some fantastic and creative FOSS. While RMS has played a historic role in this movement, it is time to thank him for the tool chain, invite him to keynote, if you must be polite, and move on. Write code, write documentation, compose music, in any platform you choose. But most important, don’t get caught up in this guy’s rhetoric, it’s just not worth it.

Sexism

While it would be convenient to self righteously point fingers at an infrequent keynoter’s sexist joke, the real work needs to be done in the IRC channels, the planets, and mailing lists. With ourselves. We have issues with sexism, big ones.

Categories Personal, Software, Technology

Bye Summit

July 12, 2009 //

I almost didn’t make it to the desktop summit this year, but I am really glad I did. It has been a great week. I enjoyed catching up with people and complaining about accessibility issues. Being a generally shy person makes it hard to hang out with other introverted computer geeks, but the relaxed beach atmosphere, and the free booze helped.

Ara presenting Mago

Ara Pulido gave a fantastic introduction to Mago. It made me very proud to have taken part in that project, I really hope it takes off with expansive test coverage.

I am now back in Seattle. In a new home, with a new green towel. Can’t wait to use it.

Categories Accessibility, Software, Technology

GNOME 3.0 Accessibility

July 6, 2009 //

Mark Doffman gave a briefing of the state of GNOME accessibility towards 3.0. If I could recall the few slides from memory they included:

AT-SPI

This is probably the largest body of work that has been done recently on the GNOME a11y front. AT-SPI currently is the biggest bonobo interface we have, and it’s migration to D-Bus, mostly by Mark and Mike Gorse has been a major undertaking. The first release is due shortly.

gnome-mag

Gnome-mag did not have a maintainer until very recently. Now we do. It must be ported to D-Bus too.

gnome-speech

Text to speech is a hot topic. Mark didn’t go into detail regarding this, but we are dealing with multiple issues. First, of course, is it’s use of CORBA. Second, the fact that it leaves the sound device output up to the synth engine makes results inconsistent with different synthesizers. This is especially noticeable when major sound subsystem changes are occuring, specifically around PulseAudio.

Luke “TheMuso” Yelavich is currently scrambling to get Speech Dispatcher into shape. Speech Dispatcher uses raw sockets and it’s own protocol, it does not use D-Bus, as Mark suggested. It would be really nice if it did, and if it were D-Bus activated, but it isn’t. On a non-accessibility related note, I think we would all benefit from a desktop speech service.

GNOME-Shell

GNOME-Shell and Mutter currently use Clutter for a lot of their graphics, this makes AT-SPI support tricky and non-trivial. This will obviously need to be resolved before GNOME 3.0 since as the name suggests, this will be GNOME’s shell!

I am going to eat ice cream.

Ok, I am back. I forgot what else I had to write, so I might get back to this in another post. Or not.

Categories Accessibility, Software, Technology

Tel-Aviv Barcelona Tel-Aviv Seattle San-Fran Seattle Gran-Canaria Seattle

May 28, 2009 //

I am up and traveling more than usual this summer. Which is great, although I really would like to spend as much time as possible up in the North West before it gets cold and dark again.

I am now at UDS Karmic (come say hello!), and it takes a while to explain to folks where I live, and what is up with me. I moved out of my Tel-Aviv apartment last week, and I am couch surfing (thanks Emily!) in Seattle next week, looking for a home. Oh, and once I land in Seattle, I will go right back to the airport and spend the weekend in the Bay Area for a JVP conference.

Thanks to the GUADEC travel committee, I will be attending Gran Canaria! I didn’t really plan to attend this year, but now that I am, I need to take advantage of the time there to the max. I’ll be cheering Ara when she presents the desktop testing project, and I will be unofficially unvieling LDTP2. I also want to catch up with folks on the a11y front, there has been some excellent work lateley: D-Bus AT-SPI is taking shape, UIA, Orca is becoming slick, and MouseTrap is neat. There is also plenty of chllanges ahead, namely WebKit and the audio/speech stack. I’ll also try to make myself as useful as possible to the event organizers.

Categories Accessibility, Personal, Technology

LDTP – Take Two

May 5, 2009 //

Recently some brave individuals started working on an upstream automated testing project for GNOME. This is exciting.

I say brave because we had a discussion regarding this a couple of years back, and if I recall correctly we stalled when it came to choosing an automation library. Anyway, it was decided that we will be going ahead with LDTP, big step.

LDTP is a mature library, and being such it had accrued sets of requirements from the different utilizers. The core is threaded, and written in cspi, which is unmaintained today, and uses a raw socket to communicate to the client end.

With Nagappan‘s blessing, I started work on a Python rewrite of the core. The main goal being to simplify the code-base and prepare LDTP for the eventual migration of AT-SPI to D-Bus. We also chose to use higher level protocols for communication: XML-RPC. Also, this new version does away with threading in favor of an event loop that plays nicely with AT-SPI events.

After a week of work, I became fairly pleased with the shape it has taken. I used introspection wherever possible as not to duplicate the API both on the client and on the server. The introspection also helps in generating ooldtp’s API, the object oriented interface to LDTP.

The code could be checked out from my github tree.

Categories Software, Technology

Another Speclenium and Pyia Release

February 11, 2009 //

I am trying my best to start a new project on Monday with a clean desk. So I made another Speclenium release.

This release does not have much new, the big changes are in pyia, the Python MSAA library, I added the option for unlocalized role names and states. This fixes some bugs when testing on localized desktops.

Pyia is really nice, if you have any use for MSAA in Windows, and you could use Python, use pyia.

Categories Accessibility, Technology

Apples And Pairs

December 17, 2008 //

Speclenium has come of age…

It is now possible to extract pretty interesting comparisons of browser accessibility API implementations.
Here are a two comparisons between Firefox nightly builds, and Internet Explorer 8 beta 2.

The comparison view only works on Firefox, I do not dare try it on anything else.

Here is comparison of the browser chrome between Firefox 3.0.4 and Firefox nightly.

I hope you have as much fun comparing as I did!

Tags specular

Categories Accessibility, Technology

Video Chat Now!

November 13, 2008 //

I have been praying to see video conferencing work on Linux since Quickcam came out with their first camera. We have had such an application in GNOME for a while. But the missing piece has always been, how do I convince Mac and Windows using friends to jump technical through hoops so that they could see my pretty face.

It seems like soon all the kids will be using Google Talk’s video feature. And now more and more laptops have integrated cameras, so people don’t have to fish around for the dusty webcam in the cabinet.

I am glad to see that Empathy has finally been accepted as a GNOME module, so my only hope is that by the next GNOME release it will inter-operate with Google’s application.

Categories Technology

Scripting Enabled Seattle

November 2, 2008 //

Spending two full weekend days here in Adobe’s conference center with a group of web accessibility folks.

The Google guys seem to have a lot of fun, their effort is to bring usability to the web now. As opposed to spending all their energy evangelizing and wagging their fingers at access issues they find in house and on the wide web. The UW folks here got straight to work on a Facebook AXSJAX extension, and the Amazon.com guys started debugging and improving the existing Amazon.com AXSJAX extension.

Ryan Benson pointed out some Facebook keyboard navigation issues, and showed some tips for making Firefox more keyboard friendly, for example, making the focus rectangle more visible, and enabling caret mode.

Jeff Bigham and other UW folks presented their current projects. I thought the different web usability research metrics were interesting. I have yet to try WebAnywhere.

There was a large representation of Amazon.com folks, which was great. Especially since accessibility is not in their job descriptions. It is really wonderful seeing them invest a weekend in this.