Hi Simon,
thanks for all your considerations regarding accessibility.
On 10/02/2022 23.25, Simon Phipps wrote:
The challenges are often attached to systemic issues and need extended
time of LibreOffice experts to unpick the root cause before implementing
the fix - even specifying them to tender takes research and pre-work as
I expect you know. We've tendered these sorts of issues, and we could
consider employing someone to deal with them full time, yes. However,
there are also specialist elements - having accessibility devices for
testing, for example. My sense is we would be better off paying an
existing expert team (there are a few companies who specialise, not
necessarily "the usual suspects") to take on the whole backlog for us
for maybe 18 months, doing both engineering management and
implementation and joining the ESC while they do. After that I'd return
to the topic and reconsider the best approach in the light of that
experience.
I can see pros and cons for both approaches (internal developer, tender).
In case of tendering, I think some cooperation of a11y experts and LO
experts (like a company specializing on a11y + "one of the usual
suspects") might even be more ideal than just an a11y-specialized
company by itself, since from what I've seen so far, I suspect that some
of the issues are somewhere deep down in the Writer/Calc/... stack that
might take people without any previous experience with LibreOffice
development quite a while to get into.
In any case, I think it would be important to also make sure that there
will be a possibility to get a11y issues fixed in the future as well.
In case of a TDF developer, that should be relatively straight-forward
because the developer can "just work on it".
In case of tendering, I would see a need for some kind of arrangement
that will allow to hand out follow-up tasks without having to go via the
usual tendering process, which would otherwise allow an issue that is
identified today to be considered only in a proposal for next year's
tendering budget, so there would be quite a delay.
(I don't know whether that's possible, but maybe, some longer-running
contract to be able to hand out additional smaller work items flexibly
as needed might be a solution, once the initial work has been finished.)
Best regards,
Michael
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