[Accessibility] Accessibility Status: Swamped

[Christian Hofstader]

Hi Everyone,

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.

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.

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.

Quite obviously, anyone who knows of anyone or group of people who want 
to volunteer in accessibility roles should please forward them to me.

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.

We are starting off on the path to making a free speech recognition tool 
with a variety of different user experiences with different grammars for 
different applications. A couple of people have already signed up for 
our speech recognition mailing list (address@hidden, put 
subscribe in the subject field). We need many more to really get this 
going. One of the biggest early tasks is to do research on what may 
already be out there in the free software world and help build a 
collection of links to various tools which may prove helpful. For now, 
I've nicknamed this project "Greco" for GNU Recognition but I'm not the 
marketing guy so a better name will be accepted.

Related to the speech recognition project, we are about to kick off an 
initiative to get as many people to help improve the VoxForge corpus by 
sending recordings of themselves reading a particular bit of text. 
Recently, Nuance, the proprietary vendor of Naturally Speaking, told the 
world that it was able to improve its recognition by 15% by using 
millions of samples from people who used their no-cost iPhone 
application. I doubt that we can get millions of volunteer readers but 
we can use as many as possible. Virtually everyone can do this as 
virtually every computer sold in the past decade or so has some sort of 
audio recording software and many have microphones built in.

The GNU Accessibility Initiative has no formal web presence. I've been 
wanting to get to this for months but find that I never seem to have the 
time for it. I would really appreciate a volunteer who can work with rms 
and I on the text for an accessibility home page, some starter wiki 
items and a blog entry to say we are here.

4. Some of My Immediate Needs

I have been using Thunderbird as my mail client as I want to get a feel 
for all major office type applications with orca. Thunderbird is usable 
but has so many problems that  I find that I will either send an email 
where the text got messed up if I'm in a hurry and do not stop to reread 
or that I need to do a lot of editing as odd problems with my text show 
up all over the place. I am told that the open office mail client, 
evolution, works very well but I cannot figure out how to configure it 
to receive mail from my GNU account, I can send mail but I cannot figure 
out the settings for receiving. Anyone who can help me, please write 
privately or call me as I'd like to start experimenting with evolution 
so I can report on how accessibile it is. For expediency sake, I may 
start using emacspeak for email as it just plain works and I haven't a 
lot of spare time to fiddle around with Mozilla's accessibility bugs.

As I mention above in a couple of places, I really need help from 
someone who is good at researching and finding things online. The speech 
recognition project alone has a ton of effort needed in this area but we 
have lots of other tasks that could be helped a lot if we could gather 
some information.

Thanks everyone!

--
Happy Hacking,
cdh

Christian Hofstader
Director of Access Technology
FSF/Project GNU
http://www.gnu.org, http://www.fsf.org
GNU's Not Unix!