Although I try to maintain separation between e-Literate, which is my personal blog, and my life as an Oracle employee, I don’t mind posting about my employer every now and then when I think that we’re doing good work that my readers might want to know about. And this is something I’m particularly happy about.
As regular readers know, I’m pretty high on the Fluid project, which is improving accessibility and usability in an increasingly distributed world of online learning environments. My colleague Linda Feng happens to be friends with George Hackman, who is Senior Director, Operations User Experience at Oracle. So the three of us have been looking for ways that Oracle can support Fluid in their important work. It’s been a bit slow, partly because of some bureaucratic/policy hurdles that we hit early on but mostly because all parties involved (both at Oracle and on Fluid) have day jobs, which subjects this sort of collaboration to all kinds of personal bandwidth limitations.
At any rate, George just let us know that Amy Chen, a Senior Usability Engineer working in his group, has just completed what I think is our first contribution (not of code, but of work). There was a question about how to support accessibility for drag-and-drop operations in AJAX toolkits. As you might imagine, we have folks within Oracle who are both experts in accessibility and users of assistive technologies themselves. Amy has been consulting with them and giving the Fluid team feedback on this question. I understand that a follow-up meeting is planned.
Amy has characterized this work as a “small task,” but I am delighted with the precedent it sets. I am hopeful that we’ll see a lot more good work for higher education coming out of this collaboration in the future.