Closing a Chapter: stepping down as Drupal's accessibility maintainer
For some time now I have been trying to find an elegant way to step down as the Drupal accessibility maintainer. I will say that the experience of working with the community over the past 3 - 4 years in this role has been nothing less than life changing. I have formed lifelong friendships, helped to raise the communities understanding of accessibility, and have helped to create a product that disability related organizations around the world are adopting as their CMS of choice.
This past weekend was a blast. I had the opportunity to participate in the first day of Drupalcamp Toronto, the second annual Accessibilitycamp Toronto, and the first ever Drupal a11ySprint in Toronto. It was excellent to see participants from one event cross-over to one of the others.
At a11ySprint I asked a friend and colleague to author his first Drupal Core patch, to remove my name from maintainers.txt. It is time for me to pursue other interests, and technical challenges, within the Drupal community. I will still be around if someone would like to ask me a question, but would like to investigate other ways in which I can help build communities and teams around the needs faced by the community.
As I have yet to choose my next pursuit, I asked webchick, who committed the patch of my demise, where she believed there was a need for someone to form a team around a topic / problem area with Drupal. She gave me some interesting responses. I'd love to hear from others where they believe that Drupal could use some team building initiative and leadership.
5 Comments
I didn't get a chance to say
I didn't get a chance to say hi this weekend. But I'd like to say thanks for all your accessibility contributions. I wouldn't have anywhere near the accessibility understanding were it not for all the issues you've brought up over the years.
Involvement
Hey Everett,
I am sad to know that you are stepping down, it has been an amazing road and I learned a whole lot. I hope you choose to once write down your tips & tricks on reviewing a patch for a11y, for others to continue and learn upon.
There are many area's you could get involved with, clearly I am largely biased. But our tools for content creation are still poor at best, and few people get involved in the harder API parts such as workflow. Similar in the area of performance, we still need a true framework to make sure there are no regressions. I can probably name a dozen area's that you could help out on :) - but I'd be interesting to know what area's you think are interesting to see if there are any matching needs.
Outside Drupal coding, we still have a major gap in awareness, in marketing out product to outsiders. As you probably experienced with A11y, there is no clear selling points within d.o that focus on explaining to clients why Drupal is the right choice when it comes to A11y.
Other than that, I can only suggest to also take a look outside Drupal and take a deep dive into one or two other opensource projects. I have done that in the past year, and found it very exciting to learn new dynamics and technologies.
Regards,
Bojhan
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Thanks.@Anon Sorry, I'm still not seeing any adaantvge and using email address instead of web page still seems like a step backwards. Firstly, a web page is something you can get whatever information its owner leaves there on-demand, whereas email autoreplies suck. Secondly, not everyone who uses the internet has email any more. That may seem strange to old fogies like us, but that's the way it is. Finally, people can easily obtain a personal home page and delegate that identity to whoever works for them for now, changing it later.It's interesting that you say you could implement BrowserID server-side without JavaScript. Maybe if I saw that code in something like python, perl or php, I'd have a better idea of how it works, but I only found javascript on browserid.org and I don't want to waste our JS guru's time on something that looks like pain for no gain. If there's native browser support, how can you trust that BrowserID means a valid email address?Anonymous disposable OpenIDs still work for what I need them for. I don't think BrowserID is any better for it, nor why you'd know you have a working email address for them : what stops someone deleting their email address after commenting?These seem like fairly forseeable FAQs to me, but doesn't answer them and there's only Is this article helpful? Yes / No rather than any way to ask there. Ask the community Support Forum doesn't let you ask about BrowserID. Sites like support.mozilla.org make me feel like I must be really stupid!
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I mean that it looks like BrowserID does the email verification slhuffe once and then you can close the mailbox but keep on using BrowserID with no assurance that the email address still works. Maybe I've misread something.So far, it's mainly Google and Yahoo that don't give any sort of a homepage address for their users in the openID login process although they often actually have pages for many of their users, including on Yahoo's Flickr and Google's Blogspot. Even the specific ID services like claimID and MyOpenID seem to provide useful homepages.There are usability issues with HTTP and certificate authentication so far, but they are completely fixable by Mozilla for their browsers. Thank you for sharing the link to the toolbar login control: I'd not seen that before and it seems OK but it doesn't seem to integrate HTTP or cert auth. It's still rather frustrating to see them promoting another half-arsed login method before making what they already have usable first, then seeing if BrowserID is still needed.No, I don’t plan to be one of the early adopters.
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Hi James,The right place for your questions would have been the Selenium Developers Google group not the Selenium Users one.Since you have found the anwesr to your first question, I will anwesr the second. You can do anything you like using the user extensions, if you look deep enough. If I understand correctly, you have created an Action command doLoadProject, but you would rather not have this command in a test script, and instead select it from an options dialog? I would suggest you follow the Selenium IDE plugins tutorial. It should help you to create an options dialog for the plugin that you can use. Feel free to drop me a comment if you cannot figure it out.Cheers,Samit
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