Thursday July 19, 2007

Mr. Happy goes to Washington

This week I attended the fifth Telecommunications and Electronic and Information Technology Advisory Committee Meeting in Washington DC. It was a good, interesting, hard, and productive meeting. A colleague who I have tremendous respect for – Andi Snow-Weaver of IBM who co-chairs the Web and Software (and Content and Authoring Tools) subcommittee – took the opportunity to publicly thank me for some of my work on her subcommittee. Specifically, to thank me for being the first person of several who were given the task of reviewing a document format against a set of draft content standards we were discussing (ODF v1.1 in my case).

I've been working on accessibility for more than 15 years now. In that time, I have been honored to receive on behalf of Sun the American Foundation for the Blind Access Award for Java Accessibility work, and the Helen Keller Achievement Award for GNOME accessibility work. I was had the opportunity to speak on behalf of UNIX and open source accessibility at the 2003 Trophee du Libre when the Sun-funded GNOME On-screen Keyboard received the award in the accessibility category.

But I was frankly gobsmacked when Andi presented me with the Mr. Happy award for doing the ODF v1.1 accessibility review. The award is the Mr. Happy character realized as a gel pack you can heat up or chill for use on sprained muscles - especially for children. She stated that it was for the "bumps and bruises" that I might experience working on accessibility standards. I became "Mr. Happy" for the rest of the meeting. It is an experience, seared in my memory, that I will, um, treasure always.

By the way, I want to note here in this space that Andi's work on the Web and Software (and Content and Authoring Tools) subcommittee has been tremendously helpful. In fact, so much so that she reminds me of another Roger Hargreaves character - his Little Miss Helpful.

(Andi, don't say I never thanked you...) (2007-07-19 16:22:09.0) Permalink