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- From: Chris Hofstader <cdh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2010 14:56:02 -0400
Hi Everyone,
I've been on this list for a number of years now. I've learned a lot
here and, unfortunately, didn't add much in the way of programming
assistance but I think some of my historical input from the inside of
the AT industry and why certain decisions were made and why hopefully
led to a more complete understanding of these battles than before.
As most, if not all of you, know, I have recently taken on the job of
Director of Access Technology for Free Software Foundation/Project GNU.
It's a lot of fun building something new from scratch while having a
serious and well respected organization at my back. We have a lot of
interesting things coming up in the next few months and with the
ADA/508/255 refresh round 1 complete (this was a real big project in
which a number of non-profits, government agency 508 groups, researchers
and free software accessibility initiatives were organized by GNU to
work together on the most substantial portions and ensure that we put
accessibility above all other concerns) we will have time to dedicate to
putting together an accessibility web site and a number of other tasks
that we haven't involved ourselves with because of many other less
visible but more important projects we have going on.
I haven't been too useful a member of the programming blind list anyway.
As Jamal so eloquently pointed out a couple of weeks ago, I
over-promise, under-deliver and need him to mop up for my false starts.
Fortunately, at GNU, my ideas and those of the others contributing in
our accessibility work are assigned to our rapidly increasing group of
volunteers. If a bus hit me tomorrow, any number of real accessibility
stars from our advisory team (including Jamal) could step up and replace
me without much if anything lost in the transfer.
If you, for any reason, want to contact me, you can write directly to my
cdh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx or cdh@xxxxxxx mailing addresses. If, for some bizarre
purpose, you need to contact me immediately, you can get my phone number
from Sina or Ken or any of a number of others on this list.
I would encourage any of you folks to join the GNU Accessibility mailing
list (send an email to accessibility-request@xxxxxxx with "subscribe"
(sans quotes) in the subject line), we're not moderating this one so you
should automatically be added as soon as our server gets your mail. The
purpose of this list is, first and foremostly, whatever the membership
wants it to be; it will be a pan-disability group so I predict
interesting cross-fertilization and I hope people working on lots of
different things may be able to talk about and share technology from one
project to another. We have already a large number of volunteers
involved in the GNU Accessibility Initiative from all over the world
working on a huge number of interesting things and, as they join this
list, I think that the like minded folks can succeed better as a big
team than a bunch of separate fiefdoms.
We are also starting some specialty mailing lists for specific projects.
The only one we have launched so far regards free speech recognition
software which we hope to launch a project regarding relatively soon.
This list today only has two or three members and is totally silent (we
are looking for a speech reco nuisance) and we will be inviting people
to join and start working pretty soon. The first task is to gather all
five or so speech reco programs for GNU/Linux systems and find the one
that would work best with orca and other AT while also finding the best
recognition engine out there. Then, the task becomes making a version of
the software with features to work most comfortably for people with
disabilities.
So, please keep in touch with the GNU stuff and say "hi" once in a while.
HH,
cdh
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