Michael's Weblog

Recently I've become involved in a move to resurrect the Ubuntu Accessibility team, which seemed to have stagnated until quite recently when Penelope Stowe got involved and suggested I joined too. She arranged a session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit for the next Ubuntu release, Maverick Meerkat, which seems to have gone quite well. The main focus for the team right now is getting organised, and to this end we're aiming to create a set of personas, which are representations of hypothetical users with various accessibility requirements which developers and testers can keep in mind when working on the next Ubuntu release. These personas are going to be developed by a survey which will be dispatched to a host of groups who may have accessibility requirements to get an idea of what the main factors that affect their experience with Ubuntu are, so we can get an idea of the main areas to improve. Hopefully then the work which will take place as a result of these can be sent upstream to the original projects.

My own role in the team isn't quite clear yet, but I intend to help on the development side, if I can, once more work starts in this area. If you would like to help, the team hangs out on #ubuntu-accessibility on Freenode IRC, and there is a mailing list. You can also check out the wiki page which we're working on improving.

A couple of years ago, I think, I became sufficiently motivated by the defectivebydesign.org campaign that I decided to go and join the Free Software Foundation to support them. However, recent events are making me actively reconsider my membership.

They've come up with a campaign involving people signing up for appointments to Apple's Genius Bar technical support questions, and asking them a series of questions with regard to Apple's stance on DRM. It basically amounts to a denial of service attack on their technical support. I, and many others, believe that they are Doing It Wrong on several levels. I tried to sum my thoughts up in an email to them, to which I haven't yet had a response (not that I particularly expected one):

I seriously urge you to reconsider this campaign against Apple. I fully believe it is going to bring you far more negative publicity than actual gains. It will result in people who have a need to obtain service from the Apple technicians being inconvenienced, with the likely result that many of them will learn about the FSF for the first time as being a group of irritating timewasters rather than a worthy cause. It will result in the people working in Apple stores, some of whom I know are active members in local Free Software user groups and other communities, becoming utterly disillusioned with the Free Software movement. It will not make Apple as a whole any more kindly disposed to contributing to Free Software. On the whole, I believe this to be a mistake. I say this as a member of the FSF who joined because of the Defective by Design campaign, though I am seriously reconsidering my position on this - I cannot support an organisation who take the attitude that inconveniencing the general public is a valid way forward in the promotion of their views.

My position is now that if they go ahead with this campaign, I'm going to resign from the FSF. Someone in there seems to have some seriously misguided views about what is and isn't acceptable in terms of getting their message across.