On Fri, 2010-12-17 at 10:15 +0100, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: > SugarLabs hasn't been successful at all with raising so far, but I > think they would be happy to assist (I'm not that active there these > days). > > Regards, > > Tomeu
I tend to agree that diverting resources by making Orca cross-platform is not the best use of our resrouces (be it funding or human). However, the question of raising funds is a separate issue and should be tackled for the broader accessibility benefits of GNOME and other FOSS projects. I support Orca and know that someday, probably sooner than later, I'll actually need to use it. But GNOME's accessibility is more than about catering to people with vision impairments. And we need to keep that in mind if GNOME is to remain a viable option to paid-software solutions. Where there's a will, there's a way. There's funding opportunities abound to help us further development, raise awareness, and reach out to users. We just have to put our heads together. For the last couple of weeks, I've been sitting down and looking at what we need, terms of funds, to go around and promote/market GNOME Accessibility beyond our normal HFOSS circles. And while the list of "where to go" grows, the question of "How do we pay for this?" remains constant. Take a look at http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/2011_Events which probably could be even longer, but needs a way to actually pay for it. :-) And for every dollar I want to ask for funding promotional opportunities, that's a dollar taken away from development opportunities. And I *don't* want to do that if I can avoid it. CSUN alone, for a booth, costs us $2,000 and to give a presentation at the conference costs us $375 per speaker. CSUN is a very important event for raising awareness outside of HFOSS and we certainly woke up some people to our existence. We're fortunate that we were able to negotiate a waiver of the speaker fees this year, but we're told we won't get that next year. With more awareness and reaching out to more people in the accessibility community/industry, as well as other organizations that have an indirect stake in accessibility, the greater our chances of finding even more funds to cover our initiatives of a truly open source accessibility alternative. This is one of the initiatives that GNOME-A11y outreach wants to pursue for 2011. So, why don't we expand this to bring together more heads and create some sort of task force to address how we can find opportunities, and fine tune our message of appeal. And we shouldn't be thinking just about going to accessibility organizations to ask for funding. They're looking for funding as well. We need to think beyond this because as I say many times, a11y is about all of us, not just people with special needs. Bryen M Yunashko GNOME A11y Outreach "Where Freedom and Accessibility Meet!" _______________________________________________ gnome-accessibility-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
