Can the community work with Gnome to improve GTK+ a11y?

[Bill Cox <waywardgeek gmail com>]

I would like to reset my relationship with the GTK+ team and see if it
is possible to help improve a11y in a cooperative manner.  I have not
followed a11y issues in GTK+ for a while, so I'm not sure what
progress has been made lately.  Here's just a quick dump off the top
of my head of issues that seem to be GTK+ bugs that have been
outstanding for a number of years.  Has there been any progress?  What
could people like me do to help?

- Calling draw routines from another thread than the main thread while
at-spi is running locks up the desktop.  Gnome applications like gksu
do this.  While applications like gksu really should not draw from
other threads, GTK+ should not lock up the desktop, either.  This
causes programs like the Ubiquity installer to crash.

- Icons in tables and trees generally have no way to attach an
accessible description, leading to non-talking indicators on the
default Gnome panel, for example.

- Menus that are greyed out seem to not exist for screen reader users.

- Navigation of combo boxes is difficult for screen reader users, who
expect to be able to type the first letters of an entry and move to it
directly, but instead have to use down arrow and let the screen reader
read each entry until they find the one they want.

- The calendar widget is not accessible

If I could wish for one thing to be fixed, it would be having at-spi
running by default on every Gnome desktop.  Having it run only when
blind users turn it on leaves it in a low-priority land where it's
considered acceptable to have gksu lock up the desktop.

As a volunteer developer interested in improving a11y, is there
anything I can do to help move issues like these towards resolution?

Thanks,
Bill