I was the fortunate winner of two special things in the last local JVP benefit auction: Knitting lessons from Wendy, and monthly music mixes from Mike. Although I am an eager learner, I thought crafty Terah might enjoy knitting lessons a lot. So Wendy is teaching Terah to knit. I am closely watching the progress as the stitches are straightening out.

Mike has put his whole heart in to making personal monthly music mixes for me. The first one, January: Short Days and Long Nights, arrived in the mail a week ago. It has been a joy to listen to, I have it mostly on constant loop. Mike put together a diverse collection of music with subtle hints of the disc’s theme. I put together an internet radio station that plays the mix in a loop for all you out there to enjoy.
You could start listening here.

Last night I went to a Vanadu dinner, or a Vannadinner. I know what you are all thinking, “Vanadu? Is that a van full of commuters who go to work at Microsoft every day together and talk on the way about nothing in particular?”, the answer is yes. Not such a long time ago I used to work in Redmond too. The absolute best part about this period was the commute in Vanadu. So Vince let me know about an upcoming Vanadu social gathering, I was so excited to talk about nothing in particular again. It turned out that I didn’t really get to idle with the folks I knew since Vanadu has moved on since I left, and found other regulars, but the conversations were just as unimportant as usual, so I was not disappointed.
The Vanadinner took place in at Artemis which just opened this fall. The owners, Boris and Oscar, are ex Microsoft employees. And FOVs (Friend Of Vanadu). So it was nice to have it there. It’s also two blocks from my home. From people were saying the food is lovely, it is a lot of meat and seafood, so I didn’t really have anything special, but I bet with time they will discover the hidden demographic of vegetarian foodies. But I found solace in their excellent hot totties.

We just released Accerciser 1.1.5 today.
The learning curve for making your application accessible has just been made shallower. A long while ago Peter Parente created a plugin for Accerciser that would allow different kinds of validation for target applications, the most common use case is for developers to quickly find potential gaps in their program’s accessibility. It has been sitting in bugzilla for a long time. This has been a requested feature for a while, and I am super glad we could offer it.
Extensible extension
This validation plugin is actually extensible in itself with useful test schemas, for now we have only one schema called “Basic” which has a random collection of tests. We hope to expand this to different use cases, for example a schema for Orca developers that would help to quickly discover screen reader a11y issues with different applications.

The rumor is that I am aggregated on Planet Gnome, thanks Jeff for adding me. This is so exciting. Behdad just gave me a tip of the hat (thanks!), so I guess it is time for an introduction.
I have been a GNOME user since some time in the late 90s, and an abuser for the last couple of years. Besides some silly personal projects, my first real code contribution was probably Avatar support for Gossip. Later I spent some time migrating Gossip over to Telepathy, at some point that burnt me out, but Xavier Claessens persevered, and today we have Empathy.
I started my accessibility work when Peter Parente, George Kraft IV, and Cathy Laws took me on board as a contractor at IBM to work on LSR, it was a bunch of fun. When IBM decided to shut down their Linux accessibility efforts, the group introduced me and Scott Haeger to Aaron Leventhal, who helped us secure grants for continuing are Linux accessibility work. Scott since then has made huge steps in helping to make the web, specifically web applications accessible from Firefox on Orca, as you know this Internet thing is very trendy and catching on. In the meanwhile I finished work on Accerciser, joined the Orca team, and raised a rabble. You could read all about that on my previous post.
Working with the Orca folks, Rich, Joanie, Michael, Scott, and Will has been all fun and laughs.
My current project involves contracted braille support for Orca. This is a much often requested feature, and I look forward to making a difference in this space. I spent most of my time until now in Orca’s underbelly (migrating to a new client library, performance work, etc.) and it will be nice to make a real usable difference for a change.
That’s it. I hope you are all at the edge of your seats waiting for the next post.