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the Orca screen reader, I would still be stuck running outdated commercial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
