Jamming in the UK
This weekend was the Ubuntu Global Jam, a kind of focused but unstructured effort to get stuff done on the Ubuntu project. In the UK we held a virtual day of workshops with IRC chat and a voice over IP server running Mumble (hosted by our company)
We started by doing a tidyup of the UK team wiki pages, we made a big list of all the pages on our etherpad server http://pad.ubuntu-uk.org/ListOfUKTeamPages and went through one by one reviewing them and updating or deleting out of date stuff.
Next on the list was an install of the latest version of Ubuntu in development, after a bit of messing about I got a KVM virtual machine running a public VNC server and we installed Natty in that so loads of people could connect and watch screen by screen and we looked for bugs and oddness in the installer. We raised a few and bumped in to a few that already had been reported.
After the run through of the regular installer we did an install using the accessibility option of a screen reader, so the idea is you go through the installer with an audio commentary and you should be able to do it with no screen, or no vision. This was not a huge success and we filed the following bugs:
- Launchpad bug 749642 in casper “no audio cue to assist getting to menu for accessibility options” [Undecided,New] https://launchpad.net/bugs/749642
- Launchpad bug 749646 in casper “”space enter F5 3 enter down enter” is not a discoverable key sequence for the screen reader install” [Undecided,New] https://launchpad.net/bugs/749646
- Launchpad bug 749649 in ubiquity “screen reader install is not welcoming” [Undecided,New] https://launchpad.net/bugs/749649
- Launchpad bug 749653 in ubiquity “radio buttons in partitioning page of installer have horrible names for orca to read” [Undecided,New] https://launchpad.net/bugs/749653
- Launchpad bug 749659 in ubiquity “installer wizard pages not labled for orca to read” [Undecided,New] https://launchpad.net/bugs/749659
- Launchpad bug 749662 in ubiquity “no audio feedback that the install has actually started” [Undecided,New] https://launchpad.net/bugs/749662
- Launchpad bug 749671 in ubiquity “”Detect keyboard layout” is invisible to orca” [Undecided,New] https://launchpad.net/bugs/749671
- Launchpad bug 749695 in ubiquity “”eject media and press return to reboot” is not read out” [Undecided,New] https://launchpad.net/bugs/749695
- Launchpad bug 749691 in ubiquity “”Ubiquity slideshow HTML content!” is the last part of the screen reader install” [Undecided,New] https://launchpad.net/bugs/749691
- Launchpad bug 749700 in orca “Default button should be “help”” [Undecided,New] https://launchpad.net/bugs/749700
If you happen to be doing a Natty install over the next few weeks, just have a go at pressing space after the bios, select your language then press F5 for the menu of accessible install options. Pick one at random and install as you would have done anyway, and file bugs if anything doesn’t work. You end up with the same system you would have ended up with anyway (except you might have the screen reader enabled by default but this is easy to remove) and it is an easy opportunity to do some valuable testing.
The final item we did was an update of the LoCo governance documents surrounding election processes to be proposed to the team for confirmation at the next online meeting.