Hi All: The larger community has seen our work with identifying and prioritizing the accessibility tasks we find really important. As a result, they are now providing funding to get the work done. This is FANTASTIC news!
More details will be coming out very soon (this week?), but the GNOME Board has requested that we let the GNOME accessibility community know first. :-) David Bolter from the University of Toronto, Luke Yelavich from Canonical, and I will be the judges for the program. Between the three of us, we can represent industry, academia, infrastructure, assistive technology, standards, and end user considerations. We of course will not operate in a vacuum but will instead continually consult with you, the community members, to make decisions. Way cool stuff. The nature of the funding will support shorter term individual projects (e.g., USD$6K with a 6 month deadline). When I look at the tasks we identified as a community (http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/GetInvolved), I see a really good balance of achievable tasks that fit within the budget, and they are all on the top of the list. In particular, the following seem to be very good matches: 1) Documentation. There is a steep learning curve for users, developers, and operating system integrators. Many people just need a place to start and concise hand-holding directions. With good documentation in place, we can provide answers to common questions such as "how do I test my application for accessibility?", "how do I fix common accessibility problems?", "what assistive technologies are available for my disability and how do I use them?", etc. We will get a lot of really good impact across the board with this task. 2) Evince accessibility. Accessible free open source document viewing is dearly needed on our platform, and Evince is sooooooo close. With a concentrated effort, this task will help bring accessible document viewing to GNOME. Way cool and way needed. 3) Speech and magnification. With Orca helping exercise speech and magnification, we have been able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the existing support provided by gnome-speech and gnome-mag. At the same time, the world has changed a bit around us, with considerations needed for a more global view. These two separate tasks will help move us to state-of-the-art cross-platform solutions that can be used by GNOME, KDE, OLPC, OpenMoko, etc. Again, way cool and way needed. 4) Testing. It's hard for me to count the number of times we've seen components make changes late in the release cycle that adversely effect accessibility. My only measurement is how much hair I have lost as a result. GNOME needs a unified testing strategy, and we need to make accessibility a core part of that from the start. This task will help get us there. AWESOME. 5) Bug fixing. We need bugs fixed and good hackers will now have money to inspire them. 'Nuf said. :-) So...we still have some work to do as a community. In a separate e-mail, I will be sending out proposed times for an IRC meeting next week based upon the availability I've received from everyone so far. In this meeting, we can discuss the program and the tasks further. This is soooo exciting. Many thanks to everyone who has helped -- we're going to make some great strides with this. Will _______________________________________________ gnome-accessibility-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
