Re: The Mozilla week at CSUN

> Hi everyone!
>
> Here's my recap of the week Joanie, Eitan, Steve, Chris, Mick, Jamie,
> Frank and I spent at CSUN 2008 conference.
>
> We had a fantastic show. Frank felt the buzz on Thursday, and this
> continued straight on until the end of the show today. Open Source
> accessibility is really taking off and gaining momentum, people are very
> aware of what we are doing, aware of Open Source solutions like NVDA and
> Orca, and it has been acknowledged in very positive comments from the
> audience that dropped by our booth. The impression that I got was that
> especially among the users of proprietary screen readers, there are many
> more Firefox users than the screen reader vendors would want us to
> believe. And the greatest message from those folks was: Those who tried
> Firefox stuck with it and did not go back to IE.
>
> There was also a big interest in more "visible" features like the full
> page zoom, and it was acknowledged that, even without a magnifier,
> Firefox is a very compelling solution for certain types of low-vision users.
>
> Also very strong: Teachers at various institutes, schools, colleges etc.
> that educate blind people, are encouraging them to try Firefox. many
> sighted users already use it, and they are vreacted vewry happily when
> they found out that Firefox works with screen readers.
>
> Linux accessibility was also very well received, we even had a couple of
> people who said "Hey, a blind friend of mine needs to get a new
> computer. I saw the Orca presentation, and I'm going to put Ubuntu on
> the friend's computer instead of Windows."
>
> I gave two interviews with podcasters in the U.S., and one camera
> interview with a student who is using this project to do his senior in
> press filming work. When he's done and got his degree, he'll send us
> links so we can watch the filmed material ourselves.
>
>
> On the swaggy side: Most of the swag has been taken. The
> baby-fox buttons were "sold out" on Thursday, we had to print another
> stack of brochures on Saturday, and even those were all gone by the end
> of the day, the buttons and stickers, and also quite a number of
> temporary tatoos were high in demand.
>
>
> Frank later added:
>
> To add to Marco's comments, the day I was there we also had a number of
> visitors from other vendors (including Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, and
> Google) who came to the booth to talk about various topics ranging from
> Firefox support on Mac (Apple) to getting applications to work with NVDA
> (Adobe, Google) to creating ARIA documentation (Microsoft). It was quite
> a change from two years ago when you took me around to other
> booths to try to get people to pay some attention to Mozilla and
> Firefox. We are definitely being looked to as a leader, with other
> people working to catch up to where we are. As I told the folks at our
> Thursday Mozilla dinner, "it's good to be the lead dog"
>
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