[Accessibility] List Kick Off: Introduction

[Paul Kelly]

Hello list,
My background is in Electrical/Electronic Engineering, although I have 
always been more interested in the software side of things. I have quite 
a lot of C programming experience and am an occasional developer for 
GRASS GIS and have also contributed to the GDAL and PROJ.4 libraries. I 
first came across OpenStreetMap four years ago in a talk by Steve Coast 
at the UK Unix Users' Group annual Linux developers conference in August 
2005 in Swansea, Wales. At the time I wasn't very impressed by it 
because there didn't seem to be any structure to the data and it just 
appeared to me to be a load of GPS trails that people had uploaded to 
the same server. But I am really impressed now to see all this 
discussion of detailed metadata and the quality of the features. It 
looks like it has become a really useful and valuable resource.

My interest in this list comes by virtue of the fact that I'm currently 
employed by Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland to work 
full-time on the EC-funded "HaptiMap" project. We are developing a 
software library to make it easier to use non-visual methods of output 
of mapping data and location-based services on mobile devices. This will 
include support for things such as tactile and vibratory feedback and 
mobile haptic devices, as well as audio sounds and speech synthesis (and 
conventional visual output too, for completeness). The project is only 
just starting and there are a couple of years' work ahead until we have 
something usable. We intend the library to operate on a cross-platform 
range of mobile devices, and we are programming it in C as this matches 
our existing expertise and is most portable. At the minute there are no 
plans to use OpenStreetMap data (since it is the defined role of some of 
the institutional partners in the project to provide data) but that 
could easily be an addition at some stage. A very useful addition, I 
would think.

Also as we are developing in C our library won't be directly compatible 
with Via-Dux, either. However I think there are a lot of areas of mutual 
interest, particularly with regard to user requirements. I have been a 
subscriber to a couple of the German lists for a while and the 
contributions from ordinary users there are very interesting.

So I look forward to similar useful ideas on this list!


Paul K