The Fedora Accessibility Working Group met up for the first time yesterday, Tuesday, 3rd October. Thanks to everyone that was able to make it. Our next meeting is scheduled for Nov 7, 2023 and will take place on Jitsi. Here is the Fedocal link.
For this meeting, I opted for using Google Docs as an accessible alternative to Hack MD. It was discussed and agreed that Etherpad is an open-source alternative and will be used going forward.
The use of Google Meet also arose some concerns within the community. We agreed to switch over to Jitsi for the time being. However, if a member joins that requires closed captions, we will switch back to Google Meet.
The group is planning to conduct a survey to assess the accessibility of Linux distributions. A draft of the survey, created last year, is being revisited and optimized. There is also a discussion about distributing the survey to other communities, including those outside of Linux, to gather a broader audience’s perspective.
Open Floor
What is our operating model and goals? As a group, we will collectively decide on what our objectives are. A planning call might be useful for this.
@steiner: For me the long term objective would be to grow this into a group that can have some saying in the development of things and/or a place for people to share their pain points and find people to solve them.
That’s all for now! Thanks again for those who attended, and we welcome anyone out there that would like to come along next time
Thanks @ekidney for chairing and sharing the recap here! I am really excited to see this effort kicking off. I was out on personal time this week but hope to catch the next meeting.
This seems like a great introductory task for the group. I imagine getting more feedback and perspective on the state of accessibility in the Linux space would be insightful. I know we have many experts in our group already, but I predict there would be good learnings to come from a user-focused survey.
What are the next steps for the survey? Would the questions be finalized by the next meeting?
This is something I would be glad to help with. There are a few communities I know of that this could be promoted in.
Drafting vision and mission statements could be good places to start. I like starting with vision and mission statements because it helps get everyone on the same page about the purpose of a group, what work is considered “in scope” and what work is considered out of bounds. A vision statement is the “why” and a mission statement is the “how”.
If this sounds helpful, I could elaborate more or open a GitLab issue to track a discussion. Let me know if that helps.
I like the idea of this group being a common forum for accessibility issues in Linux. Fedora does not necessarily drive development work itself, but Fedora is an integration point where many different technologies meet. We integrate several upstreams into our desktop, from desktop environments to terminal emulators and so much more.
So, I lean toward this group being focused more on identifying issues and bringing them to the right people who can help fix and improve them. And if we have developers ready to help, we could possibly do some of that upstream work ourselves too. Working upstream is the Fedora way, after all.
I set up an epic on GitLab here for tracking the survey.
For timeline, we could aim to have the survey launched for the F39 Release Party. This would get a good amount of exposure there from the Fedora Community. From there we could keep it up for a month - this would give sufficient time to get a good amount of shares and responses.
I have the current draft of the survey questions here and is open to be edited. We can review them at the next meeting and decided if they are ready to go.
That would be very helpful! If you could do that, that would be great
Thanks for your insight in this, Justin, and I look forward to seeing you at the next meeting
I am really excited to see this effort kicking off. I was out on personal time this week but hope to catch the next meeting.
