On Sunday, the day before
LCA
2008 officially started, Kelly and Rusty asked us first-timers
to blog about events, specifically about what we liked and
disliked. So far, this conference has been really enjoyable and
busy, and I have not found the time to write about its content. The
talk I just heard leaves me without an excuse, so there:
I have recently had a very interesting and enlightening
discussion with a blind Debian developer. When I saw on the
conference schedule that Jason White would talk about
using Linux with
speech and Braille output interfaces, I passed up my
opportunity to hear Andrew Tridgell talk about
clustered
Samba and attended his lecture instead.
Jason covered a great number of aspects: from the history of the
Braille system, and current, Free implementations thereof, via
speech output, to strategies of integrating these techniques into
existing programmes which are generally not designed with
visually-impaired users in mind. He has
a collection of
references on his webpage, to which I shall refer for the
technical content.
His presentation left me very excited and impressed. Excited to
see him giving a presentation with such enthusiasm and energy, and
impressed because his talk (without notes or slides) was
by
far better than the job of the average presenter with access
to notes and slides to display. Jason conveyed a lot of information
in a very well-structured, capitivating report. I think he left
most of the audience speechless (figuratively speaking; there
were good questions).
I feel uneasy with thanking Jason explicitly, or even writing
this blog post. If you bear with me for a minute, then let me
bridge to women involvement in open-source software. My position on
this topic is quite clear: I make no distinctions where they are
not obvious, and simultaneously I think it s awesome that more and
more women are joining the predominantly male crowd (and their
influence undeniably makes the community a more comfortable place).
Every now and then, I would like to comment on that, such as I
think it s awesome that you are working on this,
being a
woman (an oversimplified example). What I am trying to say is
given how few women are involved with OSS, I appreciate all the
more what you are doing. This is non-judgemental, I don t say this
because I am trying to highlight someone s gender or sex. It s a
communication issue, and I am learning, but I d also rather not
limit what I say by making absolutely sure never to offend
anyone. But when I utter such a comment, it might still
greatly annoy someone or yield vicious returns. This is not always
the case in fact, less than it used to be but I ve encountered
it here and there, which made me more careful.
So when I write about Jason s presentation and how great it was,
I want to highlight how it s a greater achievement for him than it
would be for me, because he is blind and I am not. I don t mean to
single him out or put him on the spot. I am simply impressed, very
impressed. And being who I am, I d like to say so.
Thanks, Jason.
Update:
David
Schmitt makes an interesting point:
The important question is now, why are we blind people doing
great presentations more impressing than people with working eyes
doing a great presentation? My personal answer isn t so great:
because I didn t expect it. No wonder people get offended if you
tell em to their face that I m impressed with his achievements,
because I wouldn t have expected it.
I don t agree, or at least I fail to see it. I
was
impressed, I
did not expect it (which isn t to say that I
came in to Jason s talk expecting it to be any less than a good
talk, I had
no expectation! Please think for a second if
this isn t immediately clear!) is that offensive? I didn t know
Jason, had no way to know whether his presentations are great or
less so, but then he pretty much blew me away. The presentation was
better than what I am used to (from anyone), and the achievement is
all the more greater because it seems to me that he has had to put
much more effort into it, purely for accessibility reasons.
I guess
I should know better, but I still, after all these years, have
a problem seeing through the end of it, understanding it. Kant to
the rescue, my intentions are good (I claim), but this goes both
ways regardless: in any communication, one ought to try hard never
to offend. At the same time, one ought to try hard not to be
offended until one can be reasonably sure that offence was
intended. When I brought this up in Adaora Oniya s miniconf talk on
communication challenges, Bdale Garbee recalled the policy in use
when he was involved in protocol design work groups: send politely,
receive with an open mind. I don t remember his exact words, but I
think I got the gist.
Update: I just talked to Jason and got his
feedback on the issue. It boils down to a quote I ll transcribe: I
want my work to be judged by its merit and
not by who I
am. It only leaves me wondering about the situation at hand: I was
impressed by his very well-structured and presented talk
and by the fact that he did such a good job given his
visual impairment.
In any case, I ll close the issue. Jason told me he d happily
engage in further discussion and I stated that he is not
offended.
There is another lesson I learnt: the next time I blog about
someone else in such a way, I should really get his/her clearance
before publishing! Just to be sure
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