hey everyone, I went through all of the feedback emails, and here is a revised draft that I hope responds to all of them. I wanted to keep the text really short and focused, so kept other materials (the list of our goals and the full testimonial) accessible by links instead. I also think that our slogan for the campaign can be: Help to make 2012 the Year of Accessibility at GNOME!
We'd like to go live on Friday, so please take a moment to send me your additional comments as soon as you can. Hopefully, we'll also get a second testimonial, and we can do a follow-up push with that. (Thanks, jjmarin, for all your hard work on this!!) karen ---- GNOME has held accessibility amongst its core values from the project's inception. Because of this commitment, along with the efforts of many dedicated developers, GNOME 2 became an award winning accessible free desktop environment. "I can testify that I could not have come along as far as I have without the work which has been done in GNOME as related to accessibility. Without all of the work which was put into things such s screen magnification and the Orca screen reader, I would still be stuck running outdated commercial assistive technology software on an up-to-date operating system." --Read the rest of Robert Cole's story.<link to full testimonial> With the advent of GNOME 3, we have started down an exciting new road in terms of usability, a road we want to extend to everyone, including users of all ages and abilities. In addition, features that make devices more accessible are increasingly needed to make some types of device work for any user. The GNOME Accessibility team is working hard to accomplish all of this; however, we have fewer resources than in the past and many goals yet to achieve in order to make GNOME 3 compellingly accessible. With your help we can start tackling our goals in this area <link to jjmarin's list>. Help to make 2012 the Year of Accessibility at GNOME and let's make the most usable desktop environment the most accessible desktop environment! Donate $25 or more right now and help us reach another person. ---- <jjmarin's list:> These are the main tasks you could help us to accomplish : 1. Performance Improvements Many users and developers complain frequently about performance with respect to GNOME accessibility, both the tools themselves (e.g. Orca) and the performance degradation seen in applications when accessibility support is enabled for the session -- even when no assistive technologies are being used. This latter issue is frequently cited as the cause for developers not enabling this support as well as for the community and distros being unwilling to enable this support by default. 2. GNOME Shell Magnifier track focus and caret GNOME Shell Magnifier does not track focus or the caret. As a result, GNOME Shell Magnifier users who need to use preferentially the keyboard must either regularly move the mouse to see the active area, or use Orca to cause the area of interest to be displayed by the magnifier. 3. Improved and Increased Access to Application and Toolkits The Accessibility team would like to provide more compelling access to currently-supported modules and implement support for modules which are currently not supported due to problems with their accessibility implementation. This requires collaboration between our team and the teams whose applications and toolkits we would like to provide access to. The most remarkable cases are: * Evince, the GNOME document reader, and Poppler, its PDF engine, should reflect the structure of the document (headings, paragraphs, etc.) and its formatted attributes rather than be a single text object. * WebKitGTK+, the new GTK+ port of the WebKit, the successful free and open-source web content engine, used in the GNOME web browser, epiphany, and the help viewer Yelp, needs some work to make ARIA and HTML5 accessible. Also, we would like to provide support for porting Evolution to WebKitGTK+ and removing the old code and custom widgets to make it accesible. 4. Alternative Input Devices Research GNOME has very few options for users who require alternative input device(s), including users with physical disabilities and users with learning disabilities. Because we lack compelling solutions in these areas, we do not have an extensive user population providing us with feedback and requests. In order to ensure that the GNOME Desktop is an environment which is truly universally accessible, we need to provide solutions based on a detailed and accurate understanding of user needs in this area. 5. Improved Regression Testing Tools for Applications and Toolkits We spend a non-trivial amount of time triaging and filing bugs introduced by changes in the applications and toolkits GNOME ATs provide access to. It would be much better if these regressions could be automatically detected when they are made so that the problematic changes are identified and not committed. This will enable accessibility developers more productive. 6. Bug Fixing Despite the best efforts of the teams working on GNOME 3, there will undoubtedly be bugs which are not caught in time. We will not fully know what all is broken until a significant number of GNOME users have worked with GNOME 3 on a regular basis. In addition, there are already a non-trivial number of accessibility bugs logged in GNOME's bugzilla. If we want to provide a truly compelling desktop environment, we need to fix these bugs. You can get extended information about these and another goals in the GNOME accessibilty roadmap <https://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/Roadmap> -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list