Re: draft for Friends of GNOME campaign

[Brian Cameron <brian cameron oracle com>]

Karen:

> GNOME has held accessibility amongst its core values from the project's
> inception. Because of this commitment, along with the efforts of many
> dedicated developers, GNOME 2 became one of the most accessible free
> desktop environments

Perhaps more importantly, GNOME was the first free desktop to seriously
tackle meeting U.S. Disability Act Section 508 requirements.  The GNOME
a11y community won several awards for doing this.  I think Peter Korn
summed up some of the early achievements well in this blog post:

http://blogs.oracle.com/korn/entry/gnome_accessibility_turns_4_today

Also, we should perhaps touch base with HFOSS to see if they might want
to participate again or perhaps sponsor in some way:

http://blog.hfoss.org/?p=90

> With the advent of GNOME 3, we have started down an exciting new road in
> terms of usability, a road we want to extend to everyone, including users
> of all ages and abilities. The GNOME Accessibility team is working hard to
> accomplish this; however, we have fewer resources than in the past and
> many goals yet to achieve in order to make GNOME 3 compellingly
> accessible.

GNOME has done some exciting things in the past to develop accessibility
like the "GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility" project.

  http://projects.gnome.org/outreach/a11y/

Perhaps we could highlight better some of the significant things that
The GNOME Foundation has managed to accomplish already in the field of
accessibility.

> With your help we can start tackling those goals. Let's kickstart 2012 as
> the Year of Accessibility at GNOME and make the most usable desktop
> environment the most accessible desktop environment!

I think the campaign could more clearly highlight that The GNOME
Foundation's mission is to make free desktop software available to
everyone.  Accessibility features increasingly include features that
are necessary to use some devices.  Touch screen gestures, on-screen
keyboards, and magnifiers are increasingly standard features,
especially in mobile devices.  So, features that make devices more
accessible are increasingly needed to make some types of device work
for any user.  Now is a real opportunity for the GNOME community to
show the world how a free software community can provide competitive
features that are differentiated by the GNOME Foundation mission.
This campaign, I think, should be described as yet another step we
are taking to meet such goals.

Brian