As Stormy mentioned, we will be exhibiting at CSUN this coming March. Besides the opportunity to offer users a free and accessible alternative to proprietary platforms and assistive technologies, we hope to take advantage of the gathering for a GNOME accessibility hackfest.
CSUN is a great place to meet vendors, users, and other AT developers. I think such an experience would be beneficial for our own AT folks. We often draw inspiration only from the limited resources surrounding us, and don’t look at the “state of the art” products out there that many users depend on daily.
So, budget permitting, I hope to see as many assisitive technology hackers as possible this March. Still too many unknowns right now, but I hope we will have more details regarding this hackfest soon.

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.

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 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.

It is really great to see Raphael Nunes persist with his GSOC project from two years ago. Speech recognition is an often overlooked assistive technology on GNOME. His GSOC project, GNOME-Voice-Control, is a good proof of concept to what is possible with available speech recognition technologies like Sphinx. Unlike last night’s personal demo, the demo during the presentation worked, and received applause.
There is a lot more work to be done, but Raphael has a lot of enthusiasm and ideas. Now that he has more time on his hands, I hope we get to see more and more compeling features, and perhaps, maybe, have software that would provide full speech control of the desktop.
Overall, I am very pleased with the accessibility-related talks we had this year. I counted so far Sandy‘s UIA talk, API‘s Cally talk, and Raphael’s speech talk. There might have even been a few that I missed. This is an improvement from the last GUADEC I was at, when I was the only one with an accessibility-related presentation.