New Free(b)Soft website & ITS

[Hynek Hanke]

Dear all,

we have created a new website for the Free(B)Soft
project:

     http://www.freebsoft.org

In the past, the website was very technical and targeted
mostly on developers and technically skilled people. The
new website has two sections: Live and Devel, so now it
has something for everyone.

     http://live.freebsoft.org
     http://devel.freebsoft.org

Live is now targeted at ordinary users who do not have
much technical skills and seek an advice on what is
available, how to install it, how to use it etc. I think it is
quite important for bringing the technologies we create
to the people themselves for whom they are intended.
We now plan to use it to do more promotion of our projects,
including Speech Dispatcher and related tools.

Devel is the improved platform for developers. It contains
a full list of our project, links to git repositories, online
documentation etc. Restructuring the website has created
more space for publishing such working documents as
project roadmaps, technical specification drafts and such.


Among others, I'd like to point out a few big improvements:

Issue Tracking System
------------------------------

Tracking of issues (problems, bugs and/or feature requests).
The system is easy to use and well accessible. It includes
issue categories, foldable tree menu for navigation, comments,
email notifications on issue changes, attachments and tags. It
is especially tailored for our model of development, including
the notion of solver and reviewer. On of the projects tracked
is of course Speech Dispatcher.

     http://its.freebsoft.org

I'll post a separate email about it tomorrow.

Accessibility Guide
-------------------------

Overview of accessibility for blind and visually handicapped
on three main platforms and a guide how to install and use it.
Especially on the GNU/Linux platform, such a guide was
completely missing. Some of the information comes
just from our experience and some of it, we had to dig
in hard to find technical specifications.

During writing of the guide, we have made a list of some
outstanding bugs and issues, linked them into entries in
the ITS and also filled them upstream. Now we follow
these issues and hope to eventually get them being fixed.

Communication tools
----------------------------

Discussion board including email notifications and
audio-video-chat Communicator. In the Live section, we
believe this will be invaluable for providing support
and consultations to end users. In the Devel section,
it might enable us to carry out live coordination meetings,
consult technical matters etc.


The website has also got a fancy graphical facelift,
including icons and illustrations, whose primary reason is
to make it more attractive for visitors.

If you want to try the communication tools or post issues
into the ITS, you will have to register. Althgough interconnected,
Live, Devel and ITS are technically three different websites, so you
will have to register separately. We plan to establish a common
registration eventually, but this is not ready yet and we
didn't want to delay the other good things because of it.

Best Regards,

The Brailcom Team