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My Mozilla 24 Wrap

September 18th, 2007 by seth bindernagel

Returned from Tokyo yesterday after a whirlwind tour… Alex Polvi and I pulled some “almost-all-nighters” working on fun projects and participating in Mozilla 24.

To see all the moving parts of Mozilla 24 happening at once, and to witness the amazing teams in Japan, Thailand, Paris, and Stanford all working tirelessly to pull off this event was both awesome and exhausting and so much more. Repeatedly, I would get IMs, emails, IRCs (is that a term?) mentioning what a creative and interesting event it was while 24 was taking place. Messages came to me from India, Germany, U.S., France, Japan — all remarking on the coolness of what was going on. I believe we have to give a big “congratulatory-blog-on-the-back” to Chibi, Kaori, Gen, Kohei, Masayuki, Eiko, Shimono, and all the tons of others who made this idea a reality.

I took part by organizing the accessibility track, as mentioned in my last post. Pretty much, it happened with relatively few snags. From my location at Keio University in Tokyo, we were using Skype to dial into a conference call that I had set up for all the panelists to dial into so we could have a live phone conversation. Skype dropped our call once in the middle of Tim Keenan’s presentation. Aside from that, everything else seemed to go pretty well. If you are in my timezone in California and did not get up at 4:50 AM to watch our discussion, here are all the presentations (or as much as I can provide):

      1. Video presentation by Dr. Nagarjuna G and Krishnakant Mane from the Homi Bhabha Centre in Mumbai
      2. Video presentation about Access Firefox by Ken Saunders
      3. Aaron Leventhal’s presentation: Aaron L’s Moz 24 presentation
      4. Tim Keenan’s three links about Mozilla’s QA for accessibility:

What were some outcomes of this session?

First of all, it was definitely nice to get a few of the players in the Mozilla accessibility world together for a session. I think having each person chat about their specialties was very valuable. A lot of praise and congratulations were exchanged, and I believe this is pretty valuable.

Secondly, I think we found some developers or contributors in Japan who might be willing to work on some Japanese-based accessibility issues.

Third, the team of panelists has already started planning for future events, including an accessibility hack fest in October and a game plan for participation at the annual CSUN conference.

If you viewed the accessibility track online (thank you!!! I know it was 4:50 AM in California…), then please comment on what you thought. It was exciting to be a part of and congrats and thank you to all of the panelists. They were terrific.

2 Responses to “My Mozilla 24 Wrap”

  1. on 19 Sep 2007 at 3:38 am   Ken Saunders

    Welcome home Seth.
    I really enjoyed the event.
    It was a great honor to be presenting with Mozilla’s accessibility experts.

    I did learn one very valuable thing.
    Gnome is not pronounced Gee nome. Oops!
    Well hopefully the jammin’ tunes made up for it. :)

  2. on 20 Sep 2007 at 1:06 am   Steve Lee

    Seth,thanks for organising it and loosing sleep. I was impressed by how smoothly it went given all the technology and distances involved. I’m sure the few minor glitches will be sorted next time as you learn. I’ve done theater/church tech so no what it’s like when a hitch happens. I thought it was cool to be sitting in the UK watching something in Japan showing something from India or US.

    It’s great that a11y had such a large profile and it was good to see/hear those involved.

    My only comment was that it could be promoted a little better next time. Emails on various a11y related lists would help spread the word about the great stuff Moz is doing. I nearly missed out on it except for spotting your blog on RSS. Perhaps I was just half asleep.

    Cheers

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