Re: [g-a-devel] Status of IBM a11y

[Jason White <jasonw ariel its unimelb edu au>]

On Fri, Jun 01, 2007 at 03:01:50PM -0400, David Bolter wrote:
> That was painful to read.

I've been concerned for some time that much of the work involved in creating
accessibility support for Gnome, Mozilla, etc., has fallen to a small number
of corporate-sponspored developers. That corporate support can change, or
evaporate, at any time, as perceptions of business needs or other priorities
alter.

What worries me is not that these projects are supported and sponsored, in
large part, by corporations - this is true of other free software projects as
well - but, rather, that there appears to be a concentration of expertise in a
small number of companies which end up doing a lot of the actual development
work.

I'm not sure how to change this, but for the future of accessibility in Linux,
especially in Gnome, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc., I think it would be a
healthier community if the responsibility were spread out more among
developers working for a wider spectrum of organizations. That is,
accessibility support needs to become more of a community effort than it now
is.