Monday June 28, 2004

Why I'm not attending JavaOne this year

Programatic accessibility - what I suggest is the third generation of techniques used by assistive technologies to obtain information about the applications running on someones system so it can be re-presented to users with disabilities - was first properly done in the Java Accessibility API. So, with the largest Java conference in the world this week in San Francisco, why am I not attending, and presenting, and staffing a booth?

Because, alas, GUADEC is also this week, in Norway. GUADEC is the GNOME Users and Developers European Conference, where many of the key GNOME developers will be meeting eachother and giving presentions. And GNOME is arguably the gravitational center of programatic accessibility currently, with the GNOME Accessibility Project having not only defined the GNOME Accessibility API (a superset of the Java Accessibility API), but implemented it on the stock GNOME GUI libraries (and also on Mozilla, and Evolution). Our own GNOME Accessibility Architect, Bill Haneman, ably assisted by Marc Mulcahy, will be giving a presentation on the current state of accessibility in GNOME 2.6 and GNOME 2.8, and will also talk about some future directions. Also giving an accessibility presentation at GUADEC is Janina Sajka, who will talk about efforts to standardize open source accessibility infrastructure as part of the Free Standards Group.

In addition to GUADEC in Norway, this time of year is also the Libre Software Meeting, this year in Bordeaux. I'm the co-chair of the Accessibility Track, and will also be giving a number of presentations (trip report to come...).

With any luck, next year JavaOne won't conflict with GUADEC or LSM, because two conferences in two weeks is simply not enough! (2004-06-28 03:45:43.0) Permalink