The one thing that got me into the Ubuntu community was the desire to improve Ubuntu's accessibility. I originally heard about Ubuntu at the time of the Warty preview release, in September 2004, and knowing that Ubuntu was a new Linux distribution, I thought it was a great opportunity to help include Accessibility as part of the core Ubuntu distribution.

The focus of the Ubuntu accessibility team, is to research any open source assistive technology software, and determine the feesability of including that software into the core Ubuntu distribution, thereby improving the accessibility for people with disabilities who use that software to help them make use of Linux, and by extension, Ubuntu. However, accessibility does not have to specifically refer to technology developed for people with disabilities. The accessibility of an application can be improved simply by changing its user interface to be easier to use for everybody. When one needs assistive technology to use the application, they benefit from any user interface changes that have been made. If you find an application that you use daily, consider how you would improve it, and make any suggestions you have to the application developers. While benefiting your use of the application, this also benefits everybody else who uses that application.

Since early 2005, and with the help of many others in the community, including the upstream projects such as GNOME, and the various assistive technology projects, we are most of the way there. There has existed an accessibility team for Ubuntu, and although small, we have achieved a lot in the last three or so years. However, there is still a lot to do. As the new leader of the Ubuntu Accessibility team, I would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank Henrik Nilsen Omma for his leadership of the Accessibility team since its inception. he always managed to keep the big picture in mind when discussing possible new accessibility features, and mentored several Google Summer of Code projects, which have brought some much needed improvements in the assistive technologies available in Ubuntu today. I hope I can be as good a team leader as we had in Henrik, and I sincerely hope I can help advance Ubuntu's accessibility to a point, where it is usable by everyone, no matter their disability.

I will be blogging about Ubuntu and Linux Accessibility over the coming days. My next post will talk about what technology I used when I was at school, and was unaware of Linux, and only had proprietary technologies to rely on. Future posts will then focus on what the accessibility team have achieved so far, and where I would like Ubuntu's accessibility to go in the future. I will also be blogging about how you, as a member of the Ubuntu community, can help grow the team, and help improve what I believe is one of the most important computing issues that needs addressing to date.