Category: a11y

I’m GNOME 3 as well!

Big and greats days for many of us. GNOME 3 is finnaly out!

Try it!

I’m proud of being part of a great community of people who is able to accomplish such a big amount of work and have this great libre desktop ready to go.

I am GNOME

I’m just a user, fan, I used to do some translations and I do collaborate now with some bugs and patches to a few projects, nothing like a lot of good friends here who, for me, are real heros. It’s amazing the work some people is able to do. Hat off to them!

As a proof of that work you can see the weekly commit digest and see how more than 200 hackers make more than 2000 commits (sometimes even more than 3000) per week to get ready this awesome project.

I know there are some fears from people using GNOME 2, but a lot of those fears are just myths, so people like me that work at downstream distributions for specific set of users and big deployment can be relaxed.

GNOME a11y

I just want to save some words of this humble post to some people I’ve been working with sometimes. People I know that have been working really, really hard to make this new GNOME 3 world more accessible to everyone, the GNOME a11y Team. They had too much things against them, but they are really hard workers.

Special kudos for two big friends and a11y hackers: Joanmarie and Ale

Colaborar en español con la accesibilidad en el escritorio

Sorry to the non-spanish speakers this is an anounce for the people who feel more confortable speaking Spanish than English and all the people who may know people that feel like that.

Muy buenas 🙂

Para quienes no lo sepan, Orca es el proyecto libre principal en torno a las tecnologías de accesibilidad en el escritorio. Últimamente se está haciendo un gran esfuerzo por mejorar este aspecto y se quiere obtener todo el feedback posible.
Como la comunidad hispana es una de las más implicadas en este y otros aspectos del escritorio se acaba de abrir una lista en español para que puedan participar más activamente dando experiencias de usuario. A continuación les copio el anuncio oficial para que tengan la información y la difundan en los círculos que crean conveniente.

Muchísimas gracias 🙂

Nueva lista de correo de Orca en español

Estamos encantados de anunciar la creación de la lista orca-es-list, una lista de correo oficial de GNOME para los usuarios hispanohablantes del revisor de pantalla Orca.

Facilitar la participación a usuarios no-angloparlantes con la comunidad de Orca ha sido durante mucho tiempo uno de los objetivos, no conseguidos hasta la fecha, del equipo de desarrollo de Orca.
Ahora, gracias al apoyo del Consorcio Fernando de los Ríos, la participación continuada de los desarrolladores de Emergya, y la voluntad de usuarios hispanohablantes de Orca de contribuir con su tiempo y conocimiento, el equipo de desarrollo de Orca está en posición de mantener dicha lista de correo.

Para suscribirse basta con rellenar el siguiente formulario:
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-es-list

Estamos muy agradecidos a todos los que han hecho posible esta nueva lista de correo, incluyendo a GNOME por facilitar la infraestructura de hosting. ¡Esperamos verte por la orca-es-list!

El anuncio en inglés en
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2011-February/msg00012.html

–El equipo de desarrollo de Orca

NOTA: El anuncio original de esta lista, aparte de en la lista en inglés de Orca ha sido en este post de uno Alejandro Leiva, uno de los mantenedores del proyecto.

GNOME events

This is being a very GNOME year for me. After some time of the events I’ve attended to an GNOME Hispano meeting, an GNOME Marketing Hackfest, the GUADEC Hispana, the GUADEC and the next week I’m going to attend the GNOME Accesibility Hackfest.

I’ve been a bit lazy with the blog but I’ve been spending my time helping the awesome GNOME a11y team with is making big progress and a huge effort to keep the project alive and healthy.

I’m looking forward to meet all the enthusiastic a11y developer than are going to come to Seville the next week 🙂

Well, and of course, to Joanmarie that comes before and is being so patient (sometimes :-P) with me  😉

Orca settings

We keep working on a11y improvements for the GNOME desktop. We’re focused on some Orca and OCRFeeder bugs the Consorcio Fernando de los Ríos has ask us to fix.

But when we started with the Orca’s ones we realized that Orca needed a better configuration system and Joanmarie (Orca’s maintainer) invited us to solve this before going on fixing the other bugs.

At this point we had to decide what configuration system we should migrate Orca to. At the first shot, GSettings seemed to be the better choice, but after a second thought it didn’t seem so obvious.

Let’s see some issues we found about it:

  • GSettings is not fully implemented right now
  • Orca is written in Python and the GSettings support for GSettings (via PyGI) is not ready
  • We need those changes available for Guadalinex v7 and Guadalinfo v6 distributions which ship a GNOME version with no GSettings support at all. Backporting Glib for getting that support doesn’t seem to be a good and healthy choice…
  • Some people like to have plain text based files for the settings

That’s why, after some discussions we all agreed to create a settings manager that could be plugged by different config backends (plain texts, old Python based config, GConf, GSettings, KDE settings?, etc). It is not much more work and it would make happier everyone 🙂

The settings manager itself is almost ready and now it is working properly with the old Python based config files. The next step is to get the GConf backend ready to go. Later, when the GSettings support in Python is ready, we’ll create that backend based on the GConf one (it should be easy).

For the GConf backend we are focusing first on defining the schema, because there are a lot of different keys and values to care about and they need to be checked and confirmed. My friend Javi is working on that and he has asked for help to check for missing keys, values or deprecated ones. Any help here will be very useful.

Once he has the GConf schema, he’ll be able to create the backend which will get and set the different keys and values into GConf system.

I know that all this settings manager sounds a bit overcomplicated but the implementation won’t be and we need it, at least for the transition. Hopefully we’ll skip this manager and we’ll let just the GSettings connection at the next cycle.

The discussions were very interesting and explained better than me the needs that made us to take this approach so, I recommend reading them if you’re interesting on this topic.

And, of course, any ideas are welcome 🙂

Warming up with the a11y stuff

We still are far from have the Guadalinfo a11y project ready, but we start to warming up 🙂

Our friends from Yaco has already some good improvements on Evince (still waiting for the final patch) and they looks nice 🙂

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FqVp7GYQR0[/youtube]
ORCA reading the text of a PDF document at Evince


Meanwhile we are working on a “import from the scanner” feature for OCRFeeder, which is quite functional and is also waiting to be finished the patch. But also we are working on Orca. We have a few Orca’s bugs we are looking at, but we don’t have time for all of them, so we need to select the ones our client believe are more important.

Anyway, we are working now on a possibility of having keybinding profiles at Orca. There is something working but still need some fixes and some love… probably the lovely Orca’s community will help us with it. I’m very surprised about how active and friendly is the people there 🙂

Well, I think I have no more news by now, stay tuned because (if everything goes well…) there will be some interesting a11y improvements soon 😉

UPDATED: The people from Yaco has posted about their progres here:

http://hoygan.yaco.es/first-results-in-the-evince-a11y-improvements

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 España
This work by Juanje Ojeda is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 España.