Module Proposal: Caribou

[Eitan Isaacson <eitan monotonous org>]

I'm late, and sorry.

Purpose:
Caribou is a text entry and UI navigation application being developed
as an alternative to the Gnome On-screen Keyboard. The overarching
goal for Caribou is to create a usable solution for people whose
primary way of accessing a computer is a switch or pointer device.

Target: Desktop

Dependencies: None that are outside the usual. We might be using
clutter in the future for more interesting keyboards and features.

Resource Usage: Gnome Git, Bugzilla and FTP.

GNOMEyness, community:
>From the start Caribou has been seen as The next generation GNOME
onscreen keyboard. The early design process included the community,
specifically the bigger a11y community. Caribou draws from GOK as it's
predecessor and seeks to fill the gap that is left now that GOK is not
following us into GNOME 3.0. On the technology front Caribou uses the
usual suspects PyGTK+, AT-SPI, etc.

Other Notes:
As mentioned above, GOK (GNOME Onscreen Keyboard) is being
discontinued along with it's deprecated dependencies in GNOME 2.x.
This leaves a need for an alternative input assistive technology. I
believe the a11y community supports Caribou and the goals it sets out
to achieve. In the last several months there has been a lot of
interest around Caribou from student groups like Project:Possibility
and HFOSS. There is also funding from Consorcio Fernando de los Rios
for warp.es adding switch access features.

Status and future:
Caribou is definitely still in early development stages. Hopefully
with the help of the different interested parties we could have a
limited, yet solid feature set for GNOME 3.0. We will continue
expanding on features in the following releases.

My personal investment is to see that this module is managed in a way
that is conducive to the larger GNOME project, conforms to the release
schedule, and eventually gets into users hands!