Re: GNOME Launches Campaign for Accessibility

[Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs igalia com>]

Hey Bill.

On 12/16/2011 09:56 PM, Bill Cox wrote:
> I'd feel a lot better pushing gnome accessibility if GTK+ wasn't such
> a complete lost cause in terms of accessibility improvement.

I don't think this is a fair assessment. There has been a lot of 
investment in improving Gtk+ Accessibility, including the recent merging 
of Gail into Gtk+, and the subsequent work being done to find and 
eliminate any remaining regressions. Benjamin Otte has also been working 
hard in recent days to make GtkTreeViews much more performant.

>  Pixmaps should have accessible descriptions.  The calendar should talk.

Bugs should be filed. Developers should be pinged.

> Someone somewhere in GTK+ land should care, and I just don't see it.

http://git.gnome.org/browse/gtk+/log/

> I recommend channeling the few dollars we can influence towards
> projects that have actually made a big difference in the last two
> years: Orca, NVDA, emacspeak, speakup, Ubuntu, Vinux, Debian, and many
> others.  I am listening to this e-mail with NVDA, though if I happened
> to be in Linux, I'd be Orca.  People like Joan Marie and James Teh
> make this possible, at great personal sacrifice.  Other than the
> complete lack of cooperation from the GTK+ team over the last two
> years, what should I be feeling about Gnome that would make me want to
> organize contributors to support Gnome accessibility?  Where are the
> contributors like Joan Marie or Luke?

* I'm still here in GNOME.
* Luke is still active both upstream and downstream.
* Mike Gorse is still working on AT-SPI2.
* Alejandro Piñeiro is still working on ATK (and working on improving
  the Collection interface, and working on GNOME Shell Accessibility).
* Mario Sanchez Prada is still working on WebKitGtk Accessibility.
* Joseph Scheuhammer is still working on gnome-shell magnification.
* Benjamin Otte is still working on Gtk+ Accessibility.

And I fear I am forgetting others who are working hard each and every 
day on their contributions which support GNOME accessibility.

> I believe they are there,

Phew! :)

> the Gnome organization keeps them from making any positive difference.

That strikes me as a bit harsh. But I think we can agree that systems 
change at a number of different levels is called for. This FoG campaign 
was started in that very spirit and has been spearheaded by the new 
Executive Director of GNOME (Karen Sandler) and the new GNOME 
Accessibility Marketing Lead (Juanjo Marín).

>  Let's put our dollars elsewhere.

Let's try to improve the current situation so that we have an awesomely 
accessible free desktop.

Take care.
--joanie