[OLPC-SF] Notes from Saturday's meeting (Sameer Verma) - XO for visually impaired

[Greg Smith]

Hi Sameer et al,

I want to clarify a little on item #6 below.

I wasn't suggesting Braille specifically. All I know is that there is a 
school in Addis Ababa with 20 - 30 visually impaired kids who have XOs. 
They asked if we have any software which would be useful for them.

It could be anything (text to speech, braille, something else). I got 
several responses on the accessibility list for ideas.

Unfortunately, I can't be the lead person coordinating this. I can make 
an occasional suggestion and help get you in touch with the school in 
Ethiopia if/when you have some software available.

If people are interested in working on this, my suggested steps are:
1 - Pick a person or two to coordinate the effort.
2 - Build a small group and identify skills (e.g. developers, testers, 
project managers, all around workers, etc)
3 - Start looking for target software to include or adapt and write new 
SW as needed.
4 - Test the software and show it works.
5 - Contact the school in Ethiopia and see if they are interested.

Related threads include this on the accessibility list: 
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/accessibility/2008-October/000198.html

Maybe this one on Speech to text: 
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-September/019136.html

The first note here on community news about a group The Netherlands 
which may have experience with relevant software:
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/2008-October/000152.html

Sorry to pass the buck. I'm not as free to work on whatever I please as 
I used to be. This project could create a very rewarding relationship 
between kids and developers, so the potential pay off is big. The only 
down side is that it will take a lot of hard work.

I suggest that we do not contact the school at all until we have a very 
solid grip on what might be possible.

Thanks for your interest and let me know how it goes.

Thanks,

Greg S

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> Today's Topics:
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>    1. Notes from Saturday's meeting (Sameer Verma)
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> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2008 23:19:10 -0700
> From: "Sameer Verma" <sverma at sfsu.edu>
> Subject: [OLPC-SF] Notes from Saturday's meeting
> To: "olpc-sf at lists.laptop.org SF" <olpc-sf at lists.laptop.org>
> Message-ID:
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> 
> We met at 10 am on Saturday, Oct 11, 2008. The conversations were around:
> 
> 1) OLPC Jamaica: Four weeks of starting up the group. Photos are at:
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/olpc/sets/72157607392432344/  Wiki at
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Jamaica Report coming soon.
> 
> 2) Tom Daly's experiences in East Timor with FOSS software machines.
> Most FOSS machines revert to Windows (pirated, of course) when left
> unmanaged. Installation does not imply implementation. How can these
> be sustained? Tom works for Sun Australia and has strong interests
> with OLPC for East Timor. Tom is visiting the SF Bay Area. We spoke
> about various school server placement options, hardware combos,
> bandwidth availability, etc.
> 
> 3) School server activities on platforms other than Fedora. What is
> happening? Other distros such as Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE,
> OpenSolaris. What can be done? ISP hosting alternative solutions. What
> takes up the most CPU cycles? RAM (squid, ejabberd)? Storage approach
> - backing up the journal automatically, pushing out updates to XOs via
> the school server seamlessly.
> 
> 4) Meet in a library. Suggestion: SF Public Library. Centrally located
> in SF, public, visible. Marketing to the library and visitors. Maybe a
> table at a museum (Mel Chua's experience from MIT Museum)?
> 
> 5) G1G1v2 ideas. Minimoo cards, t-shirts, bumper stickers, etc. New
> ideas: t-shirt that says "Do you XO?" or "Got XO?" InfoCards for
> country deployments.
> 
> 6) Braille request that came from Greg Smith: What kind of devices do
> they have? Are we talking about screen readers and magnifiers or
> actual USB/Serial braille machines?
> 
> 7) SF-LUG python classes. As an afterthought, I am throwing this in.
> SF-LUG has started Python classes. Asheesh Laroia is teaching some
> basics. Given that Sugar has most of the code in Python, it might be a
> good idea for some cross-pollination.
> 
> That's it for now. Next meeting in November!
> 
> Sameer