Exciting news: funding coming our way!

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi All:

The larger community has seen our work with identifying and prioritizing 
the accessibility tasks we find really important.  As a result, they are 
now providing funding to get the work done.  This is FANTASTIC news!

More details will be coming out very soon (this week?), but the GNOME 
Board has requested that we let the GNOME accessibility community know 
first.  :-)

David Bolter from the University of Toronto, Luke Yelavich from 
Canonical, and I will be the judges for the program.  Between the three 
of us, we can represent industry, academia, infrastructure, assistive 
technology, standards, and end user considerations.  We of course will 
not operate in a vacuum but will instead continually consult with you, 
the community members, to make decisions.

Way cool stuff.  The nature of the funding will support shorter term 
individual projects (e.g., USD$6K with a 6 month deadline).  When I look 
at the tasks we identified as a community 
(http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/GetInvolved), I see a really good 
balance of achievable tasks that fit within the budget, and they are all 
on the top of the list.  In particular, the following seem to be very 
good matches:

1) Documentation.  There is a steep learning curve for users, 
developers, and operating system integrators.  Many people just need a 
place to start and concise hand-holding directions.  With good 
documentation in place, we can provide answers to common questions such 
as "how do I test my application for accessibility?", "how do I fix 
common accessibility problems?", "what assistive technologies are 
available for my disability and how do I use them?", etc.  We will get a 
lot of really good impact across the board with this task.

2) Evince accessibility.  Accessible free open source document viewing 
is dearly needed on our platform, and Evince is sooooooo close.  With a 
concentrated effort, this task will help bring accessible document 
viewing to GNOME.  Way cool and way needed.

3) Speech and magnification.  With Orca helping exercise speech and 
magnification, we have been able to identify the strengths and 
weaknesses of the existing support provided by gnome-speech and 
gnome-mag.  At the same time, the world has changed a bit around us, 
with considerations needed for a more global view.  These two separate 
tasks will help move us to state-of-the-art cross-platform solutions 
that can be used by GNOME, KDE, OLPC, OpenMoko, etc.  Again, way cool 
and way needed.

4) Testing.  It's hard for me to count the number of times we've seen 
components make changes late in the release cycle that adversely effect 
accessibility.  My only measurement is how much hair I have lost as a 
result.  GNOME needs a unified testing strategy, and we need to make 
accessibility a core part of that from the start.  This task will help 
get us there.  AWESOME.

5) Bug fixing.  We need bugs fixed and good hackers will now have money 
to inspire them.  'Nuf said.  :-)

So...we still have some work to do as a community.  In a separate 
e-mail, I will be sending out proposed times for an IRC meeting next 
week based upon the availability I've received from everyone so far.  In 
this meeting, we can discuss the program and the tasks further.

This is soooo exciting.  Many thanks to everyone who has helped -- we're 
going to make some great strides with this.

Will