Accessibility – GNOME Foundation

Evince hackfest taking place in Strasbourg ahead of GUADEC

GUADEC is only a few days away, but some GNOME contributors are already gathering in Strasbourg to improve the GNOME document reader, Evince.

Their goals include: making further improvements to accessibility support, implementing tiling support to allow infinite zoom, improving the support for PDF annotations, revamping the comics back-end and reviewing and integrating pending patches.

The hackfest brings together members of the GNOME Accessibility team, and Evince developers. It also involves a number of Google Summer of Code students.

The event could not have taken place without the support of the GNOME Foundation.

You can learn more about the Evince Hackfest on the event wiki page.

Evince logo

GNOME Accessibility bid selected

The GNOME Foundation Board is happy to announce that following the Call for Bids for GNOME Accessibility Work, Igalia, a Spanish company, was selected to perform the work.

We received a great bid from Igalia with a detailed analysis of the current state of document accessibility within GNOME and a comprehensive plan to achieve the expected results. It was reviewed by a committee of volunteers who are active in GNOME’s accessibility work but who were not affiliated with any submitted proposal. The committee, composed of David Bolter, Mike Gorse, Juanjo Marín, Joseph Scheuhammer and John Walicki, made their recommendation to the Foundation’s Board of Directors which then voted to accept the bid (with the interested director recusing herself from all relevant discussion). The full bid has been published on the GNOME wiki.

“It was an honor to participate in the volunteer committee and collaborate with this group of top-notch accessibility professionals. We all agree that Igalia presented an excellent bid and we are confident that they have the knowledge and experience to successfully address accessibility support for pdfs,” said Juanjo Marín, a member of the GNOME accessibility team and Branch IT Manager for the Junta de Andalucía in the Culture and Sports Department in Cadiz, Spain.

Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias, Carlos García Campos and Joanmarie Diggs will be the main developers working on the project. They are experienced developers in all the technologies and components involved, like Poppler, Evince, ATK, AT-SPI2 and Orca, which guarantees that GNOME Documents and Evince will get the accessibility support that many GNOME users are waiting for.

The GNOME Foundation Board would like to thank all the Friends of GNOME accessibility campaign donors and the Mozilla Corporation for funding this work.

Call for Bids for GNOME Accessibility Work!

Following our fund raising campaign through Friends of GNOME, and with the help of Mozilla, the GNOME Foundation is looking for developers to enhance the accessibility of documents within GNOME.

Knowledge of the GNOME development process will be required to carry out the work.

The tasks should be set out in each of the bids, with the goal of enabling accessibility of documents such as PDFs, word processing documents, and HTML content.

The non-exhaustive list of modules and software projects that could be involved in enhancing accessibility for GNOME is as follows:

poppler (PDF rendering library)
libxps (XPS rendering library)
evince (PDF and XPS reader for GNOME)
WebKitGTK (HTML rendering library used in Web, Yelp, and Evolution amongst others)
GNOME Documents (document viewer for local and remote documents in GNOME)

The money available for the project is $30,000 ($10,000 from the Mozilla Corporation, $20,000 from our Friends of GNOME campaign). The bid selection will be made by a group including professional consultants with GNOME-related experience and GNOME Foundation Board members.

Bids should include:

a list of specific tasks to be achieved and the list of components impacted
details of your research into what level of accessibility the targeted end-user modules have.
a time line and schedule for the whole project
references to previous GNOME or accessibility related work.

Note that the goal of the GNOME Foundation for this project is upstream acceptance of the various modifications made during the project.

Please send your proposals to karen AT gnome DOT org with the subject line ”A11y of Documents Bid” by March 15, 2013.

Help GNOME reach its accessibility fundraising goal!

We’re closing in on our goal of $20,000 for our accessibility campaign. If you haven’t already, take a look at the testimonial by Diego Sánchez that we’ve been lucky to include. As Diego says, GNOME 3 has really helped him: “I’m happy because I can now use the computer in my classroom without any assistance.” Our accessibility team‘s work has made a big difference in many people’s lives, but we still have a long way to go. Help us make our goal and donate now via our Friends of GNOME program!

Excellent Progress Made at GNOME Accessibility Hackfest

The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce the successful conclusion of the ATK/AT-SPI Hackfest which was held from January 18th to 22th at Igalia’s offices in A Coruña, Spain. There were attendees from several companies and organizations including Red Hat, SUSE, Igalia, Mozilla and Nokia with different backgrounds and expertise in areas like GTK, ATK, AT-SPI2, Qt, WebKitGtk+ and Gecko.

Picture of the attenders to the hackfest

Some rights reserved by mariosp

The hackfest was very productive, some of the highlights included:

It was agreed to remove key events emission from GTK+ as soon as an alternative implementation is provided. Several approaches for this implementation where discussed.
Accessibility support for WebKitGtk+ has been further improved with a big refactoring of the code, as well as exposing WebKit2Gtk+ accessibility hierarchies to ATK/AT-SPI.
Ideas for a more efficient and effective AT-SPI2 cache policy were discussed, with the goal of keeping DBus messages traffic to a minimum.
There was an important discussion about global vs per-object events. The aim here is to make sure that only the relevant events are sent to accessibility clients. In the short term, the current goblal-events hook-based implementation will be maintained, but we will be exploring alternatives.
It was concluded that in order to enable accessibility support by default, we shouldn’t use ATK-bridge as a module, but integrate it in the core platform. Several possible approaches were discussed, and we set the aim of having a concrete plan decided by the time GNOME 3.4 is released.
These and other accessibility underpinnings were worked on, which will effectively improve the experience of GNOME users who need accessibility features.

There are many challenges in the near future of accessibility and GNOME is currently campaigning to raise funds to support its ongoing efforts. Help us to make 2012 the Year of Accessibility for GNOME!.

The GNOME Foundation and community are very grateful to the sponsors of this event:

Hackfest Plans to Improve GNOME Accessibility

GNOME accessibility contributors will be gathering for a four day hackfest in A Coruña, Spain, next week. Together, they will be working to enhance GNOME’s assistive technologies, which allow people with disabilities such as visual, movement, hearing, cognitive and language impairments to use GNOME software.

The hackfest will be focusing on two key GNOME accessibility technologies – ATK and AT-SPI. These facilities allow GNOME applications to be used through accessibilty technologies, such as screen readers.

The hackfest is being hosted by Igalia who, alongside the GNOME Foundation, are sponsoring the hackfest. See the hackfest wiki page for more details.

GNOME is currently campaigning to raise funds to support its ongoing accessibility efforts. Help us to make 2012 the Year of Accessibility for GNOME!

GNOME Launches Campaign for Accessibility

Today the GNOME Foundation announces a fundraising campaign to kick off 2012 as the Year of Accessibility for GNOME.

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.

“For me, GNU/Linux and GNOME equal freedom, and without all of the hard work which has been put into all of this wonderful software, I would truly be at a loss. This is why further development and maintenance of accessible software is so important to me.” —Read the rest of Robert Cole’s story.

With the advent of GNOME 3, GNOME has started down an exciting new path in terms of usability, which will include users of all ages and abilities. This drive is not only necessary for those with disabilities but is also increasingly needed for our devices work for any user. The GNOME accessibility team is working hard, but its resources are more limited than in the past.

With your help we can tackle the accessibility team’s many goals, making GNOME the best and most accessible desktop available today. Please help us make 2012 the Year of Accessibility at GNOME! Donate $25 or more today and ask your friends to donate too.