Embroidery and resilient software freedom in 2025
by on January 6, 2025
CC-BY-NA 4.0 Sage Sharp
I spent most of 2024 recovering from a spine injury after a car accident. I’d love to share my new insight into free software accessibility, and how both free software and embroidery helped me build resiliency. I’ve been working on a special embroidery that I’ll send to a donor who gives to Software Freedom Conservancy on January 8. We hope if you are able to give you’ll consider donating!
Outreachy Team AMA
Please join me on January 8 for a Q&A session with the SFC staff and contractors who run the Outreachy internship program. After the Outreachy organizer Q&A, join me for a crafting session while I work on the SFC logo embroidery.
There will be two Q&A sessions with the Outreachy team to accommodate time zones. You can join us on BigBlueButton at the times below (information is also in the attached .ics files):
First chat on Wednesday:
- Wednesday 8 January 2025 at 9AM (09:00) US/Eastern (-0500)
- Wednesday 8 January 2025 at 6AM (06:00) US/Pacific (-0800)
- Wednesday 8 January 2025 at 3PM (06:00) Europe/Central (+0100)
- date -d "2025-01-08 14:00 UTC"
Second chat on Wednesday:
- Wednesday 8 January 2025 at 9PM (09:00) US/Eastern (-0500)
- Wednesday 8 January 2025 at 6PM (06:00) US/Pacific (-0800)
- Thursday 8 January 2025 at 1PM (13:00) Australia/East (+1100)
- date -d "2025-01-09 02:00 UTC"
My healing journey
In February 2024, my car was rear-ended. The impact damaged the nerves from my shoulder to my hand.
I had pain and tingling in my fingers for 6 months. Everything I touched felt like picking up a cactcus.
It was painful to type on a keyboard. Touching my phone, either to swipe or type, hurt.
This chronic pain made it hard to do my normal work tasks as Software Freedom Conservancy’s Senior Director of Diversity and Inclusion, and an organizer for Outreachy internships. Most free software communication happens via email or text chat. Which meant a whole lot of very painful typing for me.
Luckily, free and open source software helped me find a more accessible way to work. I dreaded looking for accessibility software because I knew it’s usually both expensive and proprietary. I was so excited to find speech to text free software like vosk for the Linux desktop. For my phone, I found sayboard, a speech to text Android keyboard that uses vosk.
Free software allowed me to switch away from using my hands to write, and towards using my voice to write. I wrote this email using those tools. I am so grateful to the free software developers who helped me avoid hand and shoulder pain.
Accessibility in FOSS
My injury also gave me a new perspective on the gaps in software accessibility best practices. Very few free software projects offer options to accommodate people who have pain whenever they touch a screen, use a keyboard, or click a mouse button.
Free software developers rarely think about how many actions it takes to do a particular task. How many mouse clicks does it take to find information on a website? How many phone screen touches does it take to use that new feature?
When I have to go through five software actions to do a task, my brain translates each mouse click, phone screen touch, and keyboard press into feeling like a needle is poking my finger. Extra actions to complete a task are literal pain points for me.
I encourage other free software developers to explore how many touches, clicks, or key presses it takes to do a common task. My fellow Outreachy organizer, Anna e só, mentioned there is a whole field of Human-Computer Interaction research around minimizing software task overhead.
I encourage other free software developers to study their project’s gulfs of evaluation and execution. Identifying the extra actions it takes to execute a task may help you understand how software contributes to chronic hand pain. Anna recommends reading the book “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald A. Norman to get started learning about this field research.
Community support and accommodations
Even with somewhat improved free software accessibility, I still needed time to rest and recover. SFC staff and the Outreachy team helped me reassign tasks that required a lot of typing or mouse movement. They encouraged me to find verbal and audio-based work. I also shared knowledge and processes so that any team member could do critical tasks.
I am so grateful to SFC and the Outreachy team for their flexibility and accommodation of my short term disability.
While my body was healing, I thought a lot about the right to repair, both for software and for physical objects. Why do we decide an object is beyond repair, and must be replaced by something expensive and new? Why do companies put out products that easily break physically, or will become obsolete or insecure due to a lack of software updates?
In a world of shiny fragile tech toys and easy to consume fast fashion, I felt out of place. I felt like my healing body would be viewed as imperfect, broken, and disposable. I worried that opening up about my invisible disabilities would cause people to view me as needing to be replaced.
My identity as a free software contributor was so dependent on using my hands. My outdoor hobbies involved climbing over rocks or gripping a walking stick for a long time, both of which caused hand and back pain. Who was I, if I could not use my hands in ways I was used to?
Resiliency and Embroidery
While I was healing, I needed to be more gentle with my physical self. I also wanted a hobby that would help me rebuild my hand dexterity and nerve sensation. So I took up embroidery.
When it came time for the SFC fundraiser, I knew I couldn’t be on social media as much because it would cause additional hand and back pain to be so online. Instead I decided to create an embroidered art piece that would encourage people to donate to Software Freedom Conservancy.
Other SFC staff were excited about my embroidery project, and crafting became a theme for SFC’s fundraiser. SFC’s yearly post card features SFC’s tree logo re-imagined as a cross-stitch. We also created a special t-shirt design (available if you become a sustainer ) this year that features a work-in-progress cross-stitch of SFC’s logo. In both free software and crafting projects, there is always something to more improve or work on.
I’m so excited to send my embroidered art to an SFC donor. My embroidery is an artistic take on Software Freedom Conservancy’s tree logo. It features the words ‘Grow Software Freedom’, and ‘2024 Sustainer’.
A tree cannot thrive without good water and sunlight. SFC cannot thrive without your support. I encourage you to donate today at https://sfconservancy.org/sustainer/.
Donate for Embroidery
Your donation to Software Freedom Conservancy will help us grow software freedom together.
My embroidered art will go to the top donor SFC’s fundraiser, from the time you receive this email until end of day (AOE) on January 8th. If the top donor doesn’t want it, the art will go to a random donor, including anyone who donated from the start of Conservancy’s fundraiser through January 8th.
This means even if you can only give a smaller amount to support Conservancy, there is still a chance you may receive this SFC art. Every donation to SFC helps us sustain software freedom!
I hope you will take heart in my recovery journey. If it inspires you, please use that energy to support software freedom, especially the right to repair and accessibility.
I encourage you to donate to Software Freedom Conservancy to build the resilient future free software needs.
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Sage Sharp
Senior Director of Diversity and Inclusion at Software Freedom Conservancy
Cultural Change Agent at Outreachy
Please email any comments on this entry to info@sfconservancy.org.
