Last week, I was lucky enough to attend the 2008 CSUN Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference thanks to Frank Hecker of the Mozilla Foundation. This conference is "the longest-running and largest annual university sponsored conference on technology and persons with disabilities." It very may be one of the largest conferences of this sort, period, as it filled multiple ballrooms in two hotels near the Los Angeles International Airport.
My main duty was as a representative of Project:Possibility, promoting accessibility features in the Firefox 3 browser that make it the most advanced and accessible browser on the planet (and that is fact!).
While not on booth duty, I attended a handful of informative sessions on the most cutting edge technology/topics on a11y (Orca, IAccessible2, Google AxsJAX to name a few), and had the incredible pleasure of meeting up with Willie Walker and Evan Yan of Sun Microsystems.
Willie Walker is the lead of the Orca project, and Evan Yan works part time on Firefox accessibility. In other words, these gentlemen have two of the coolest jobs on the planet—funded by Sun Microsystems and Mozilla to develop powerful open source software that helps people.
Speaking of coolest jobs on the planet, the people I spent the majority of my time with can also claim this fame. Pictured below from left to right, James Teh and Michael Curran of the NVDA Project, Frank Hecker of the Mozilla Foundation, yours truly (me), Steve Lee of Fullmeasure, Marco Zehe of Mozilla Corporation, and Eitan Issacson of Ascender, all whose careers are based in the open source arena.
I was able to attend this conference one year ago as a visitor. It was quite an experience being able to sit on the other side of the booth this year and be responsible for sharing amazing assistive technology with both enabled and disabled persons. I can say with certainty that (1) talking about technology is easier than creating it (massive credit due to the engineers who poured blood, sweat, and tears into Firefox so that I could share it with people in the first place) and (2) Firefox's reputation precedes itself—the words "Mozilla Firefox" seem to naturally brighten people's day.
I am humbled to be associated with both Mozilla and Sun as the work these companies are funding is incredible—cutting edge open source software that empowers people.
One of my personal commitments is to see it that software developers contribute their skills towards similar causes. Software developers really are super-heroes—and I don't say that out of narcissism or self-infatuation! The ability to create technology that empowers others with one's own finger tips, is truly a super-power. I hope that more software developers realize their super-powers, and step up to help make the world a better place. :-)