It's a relief to be healthy again. Being sick also highlighted that I need to quickly finish and reduce additional work, which are now overdue. My personal goals are to continue supporting FOSS accessibility work and continue laying the foundations for Inigo. So I'll have to cut down a lot of additional consultancy work.

If your monitor is turned off, how do you know what app you're using, what you're typing, which button you've selected and the contents of the email you've just received? You' going to need audio feedback.

This is where Orca which is the screenreader interface for Gnome Desktops comes in. It will read the titles of your applications, echo characters and sentences you've typed, read out dialogs and even tell you the checked/unchecked status or check boxes. Turn of you monitor and you will quickly get a feel of how accessible an application really is.

Orca is part of Gnome, so there is no need to install it. You will however need to install the text to speech backend. You have two choices, espeak or festival and I chose the latter for FreeBSD.

Ports you need:

• audio/festival
• audio/festvox-* (voice) I chose audio/festvox-us1-mbrola (female american)
• audio/festlex-poslex (lexicon)

I had a slight issue with the audio/mbrola port, cut had issues with some accented characters in voices.conf. Just delete them, or replace the characters and it will build fine.

That's it, after that just start Orca, you will get a small dialog from which you can edit preferences such as voice, echo, verbosity.

After some tweaking, I managed to be able to edit, load and save text files with gedit with the monitor turned off. To use other applications though like email and browsers, requires a bit more familarity with a range of keyboard shortcuts you need to navigate between panels/frames of the application. Not all applications are accessibility compliant, and even with visual cues, you will quickly get a feel of how difficult it is for applications that are badly designed.

One example is appreciating the fact that Gnome userbility guides says that there should not be any OK and Cancel buttons. This makes using things like Gedit so much easier, as you can hear "Save Without Saving button" being read out. You could get it to read the dialog explanation, but you don't need to. Using the file dialog, I realised that using Desktop and having it read out all the folders and files was a lot easier for navigation. Quite good, it would read out "IOSN Final Report - OpenOffice document" even if the file name was "IOSN Final Report.odt".

I'm going to have a futher go at this over the weekend, and see if I can get a list of friendly apps as well as get used to all the shortcuts that I normally don't use. If you're already used to using keyboard shortcuts, the learning curve will be much simpler. I know I had an easy time with Evolution, lauching apps (alt-f2) and accessing the desktop (ctrl-d and then arrow keys). If you've never used keyboard shortcuts, you will find navigation quite tough (remember you can't see anything, a shortcut is immediate, vs having Orca read out every single submenu).

The computer voice I'm using could do with improvements for prounciation (you can train/replace this through Orca preferences), but overall I could navigate and understand what it was reading quite well. I just need to test further the best apps and usage for common tasks of emails browsing and communication (pidgin/irc).

If you're interested in joining the upcoming workshop to help visually disabled users use IT with FOSS applications, please email me at kaeru@inigo-tech.com. Also visit the event page for more details:

http://foss.org.my/projects/community-projects/iosn-accessibility-rtd

Here's a nice article from Martin Aspelli, who wrote Professional Plone Development book and contributes a lot to Plone. He makes a lot of good points that could apply to other FOSS community based projects.

Oh how we love to hate Plone

It provides nice insights on different views towards community projects, and how it can affect the individuals working on them.

So for those slamming the organisation of say the community LPI exams due to some administrative issues with LPI or something, spare a thought for the individuals working to organise affordable community exams in their spare time. Community things like these are not for profit companies, to help improve things you have to be a part of it or support the community in some way.

Quite often you're benefitting for nothing but your time.

How much do commercial companies charge for MySQL training events?

How much does it cost to attend a MyOSS meetup where a MySQL employee is presenting?

Criticisms are good, but it's best with suggestions that shows good will.

Example,

"It sux, there is no food/drinks and any freebies"

Better,

"Since it's during dinner time, and we don't get much time after work to eat, how about we charge RM5/person so that we can have pizzas?"

Here are some upcoming activities:

• Jan 10th - Meetup MySQL/CouchDB
• Jan 26th - Accessibility Workshop (Visually Disabled)
• March LPI Community Exams - http://lpi.foss.org.my

Surprised I couldn't find an entry for this in Wikipedia.

What is it? It's when you tend to get sick on weekends and on holidays.

An article from Guardian UK elaborates on it more.

Getting sick or just feeling tired doesn't help reduce stress, as work just piles up if you don't recover by the time the week start.  If you're an IT worker, if you're tired, you just can't think and that is a major productivity killer.

For me this mostly started after having kid, I just didn't have any chillout time, and if I did, it ended up being exhausting rather than relaxing.

I already started one of their suggestions which is to ensure you do something to relax/calm down on Fridays. A partial solution for me is to regularly schedule Friday evenings for basketball, followed by a massage.

On massages

For me due to sports, I usually associate massage with physiotherapy. Reading some local cartoons such as "Durian Life or Lat", I often see that in Malaysia massage has sexual connotations eg. massage parlor. Possibly it's why people think it's not a good idea. Trust me on this, if you're having headaches and are stressed out, arrange an appointment it will work wonders.

What you should look for is so call "Blind Massage" centers in your local neighbourhood commerical area. These are clean, simple establishments run by blind people and it's male to male and female to female. It's about RM30-40 per hour for full body massage. I suggest you chose the pressure point (or shiatsu) option, as you will not need to take any clothing off for those that have reservations. Not only is it a good way to relieve stress, you're also helping out the local blind community businesses. It's also a good way for IT people to better understand why accessibility is important.

On accessibility

Did you know that Gnome was presented the Helen Keller Achievement Awards?

Plone also meets or exceeds U.S. Government Section 508 and W3C's WAI-AA standards for sight and motor impaired individuals.