Re: [Accessibility] Accessibility Status: Swamped

[Piñeiro]

From: Christian Hofstader <address@hidden>

> I was off line for more than a week due to some peculiar issues on
> this computer and I'm just now digging out of the pile of things on
> which I had fallen behind. For all intents and purposes, I am swamped
> with little tasks and could use help in many ways so if someone wants
> to volunteer to help out with some administrative stuff, please write
> to or call me directly and we can talk about ways you can help.
> 
> Update:
> 
> 1. Development Priorities
> 
> Right now, regarding programming, projects, I am prioritizing orca and
> other highly visible accessibility bug fixes above all else. Our
> friends Joanie and Bill Cox will likely do the specific assignments
> (correct me if I am wrong folks) to try to get as many high priority
> bugs, performance problems and features that aren't quite right
> remediated.

Just to comment that most of the visible problems of Orca related to
performance are a consecuence of the current at-spi2 performance
issues (this is not new, when the DBUS migration was being analyzed,
it was detected a worse DBUS performance compared with CORBA).

AFAIK, Mike Gorse is working on this when he has a free slot, but if
accessibility-gnu is thinking in any kind of active plan related to
orca performance, I think that it is worth to work directly on at-spi2
performance (or DBUS performance, if we keep digging to lower fields).

> 2. Volunteer Hackers
> 
> Krishnakant has four students in Mumbai who are apparently ready to
> start hacking soon. I will coordinate with him on how and to whom
> these young hackers should be assigned. I haven't met any of these
> people via email, phone or in any other way so we'll see how they work
> out in the near term future.
> 
> A Brazilian professor whom I met while working on a project for the
> U. Florida RERC on Technology and Successful Aging, and I will be
> talking on the phone this morning. He has what he describes as a "lot
> of students" and substantial funding to work on FLOSS access
> technology. Sometime next week, we will have a better idea of how many
> resources we have in Brazil next week and I'll send an update when I
> have a better feel for who they are and what they will be doing.

This two examples are the kind of "active plan" I was thinking in my
previous comment.

> I have some emails from people telling me that they also have students
> and/or other hackers who they want to assign to our projects and work
> in partnership. They are all dedicated to free software and my level
> of contact with each is somewhere along the introductorypart of the
> curve so I can't say with any probability what we will have in the
> near term future. Based upon conversations with the various people
> offering to help us find hackers, though, I would estimate that we
> might have as many as 10 people by the end of the month and no fewer
> than six or seven.

Other example.

> 3. Major New Initiatives
> 
> I say above that we currently want to focus on fixing the
> accessibility problems that already exist but we are also pursuing
> some new initiatives.
> 
> Our new friend, Speedy Don Marang has agreed to turn his pretty cool
> "Speedy OCR" program over to us as an official GNU package. I
> discussed this over email with rms and we all seem to be happy with
> this idea.

Just to comment that right now, OCRFeeder [1], OCR GNOME application,
is doing extra work to improve their accessibility support. Part as a
local government on Andalucia, reviewed and integrated by his
maintainer and main developer (ie: [2]).

One of the reasons I explain that is that some months ago, Willie
Walker asked to the gnome community to test the application and get
some feedback [3]. Now that some a11y improvements were made (without
any feedback from the users btw), it would be good if some people try
to test it and start to report bugs if neccesary.

(Not sure if this fits better on gnome-accessibility. Sorry for the
noise if this is the case)

BR

[1] http://live.gnome.org/OCRFeeder
[2] 
http://www.joaquimrocha.com/2010/07/30/one-more-step-in-ocr-with-ocrfeeder-0-7/
[3] 
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-accessibility-list/2009-October/msg00024.html

===
API (address@hidden)