Important info re Accessibility and document formats in Massachusetts

[Henrik Nilsen Omma]

Luke Yelavich wrote:
> I hadn't even thought about what release we would base it on. Breezy I 
> guess as it is stable, but with some backported stuff perhaps.
>   
Depends very much on what the timeline is for this. When a good idea 
comes along, it always seems really pressing and that we should do it 
yesterday. OTOH, there may be benefits of taking the longer way around.

AFAICT, these are some of the benefits of getting an ODF-MA disc out:

1. The MA employees and others involved in the debate will have a 
working example of an accessible desktop to evaluate
2. We, as a team, will have a project to focus on and a useful tool for 
our own testing
3. The wider FOSS (and FOSS-AT) community will see we are doing 
something in the MA-ODF debate, which could help draw in testers and 
developers.

The MA-ODF debate has been quite active in the news recently, but I 
guess it is drawn-out affair in reality. If there is an urgent need to 
make these available by Dec. 14th or Jan 1st, then we would have to go 
with Breezy, but if it can wait until Dapper feature freeze 
(mid-February), then we can go with a Dapper based version. (At that 
point we could evaluate whether dapper was stable enough for a one-off 
Live demo disc of if there is good reason to wait for the dapper release)

If the MA people can wait until mid-feb, then I think we should go 
Dapper, because that will have great benefits for pts. 2 and 3 as well. 
Making a testing derivative is something we should be getting on with 
anyway and  if the MA-ODF issue/story becomes relatively less important 
in a few weeks months then we haven't really wasted any efforts. If we 
rush out a breezy version, that might be the case though.

We should appeal to the wider community to help with pre-release testing 
and distribution. Most FOSS-enthusiasts are familiar with this story 
now. With some publicity it should be easy to get help in the local area 
just burning CD, etc.

About booting and languages: This issue remains unsolved: Could we cheat 
and make separate English and Spanish versions for the MA case? That way 
each could boot all the way to desktop without any questions.

- Henrik