[orca-list] some programmers want to contribute to orca.

["krishnakant Mane" <researchbase gmail com>]

hello,
this email is mainly targetted towards jonie and willi and scot.
others also please put in your valued responses.
let me start by giving all a good news.
in the southern most state of india called Kerala, with the help of
state government, we have established 1600 computer centers for
visually impaired people exclusively using free software.
and the choice of screen reader is of course orca.
the state chief minister visited one of the major labs and was highly
impressed with the performance of orca.
actually it is his governments policy to only support free software.
the blind users are so dedicated that they want to use orca even
though they are aware that they will some times face problems.
infact they are ready to become testers.
one of them is already on this mailing list and his name is balaram.
any ways now for my questions.
after this success a few of my programmers who are sighted, want to
help make orca better and they want to particularly contribute to web
accessibility with firefox, and openoffice for word processing etc.

they are really good at python and also very good at the gnome desktop.
further more they had been my students so they know the accessibility
related issues pritty well.
now what should I advice them to do initially to get started?
I am telling them to read the orca documentation but one question
comes to my mind time and time again.
how important it will be for them to absolutely know every thing about at-spi?
and if yes then what should I advice them initially to do?
the main point here is that they are all sited people and unlike us
wont understand some things directly.
one of the programmers for example did a very interesting thing yesterday.
she tried to do a complete ubiquity based install by closing her eyes
and actually got success!
I had herd a couple of people doing the same thing when I was in the
state of Kerala for last 5 days.
after a couple of failed attempts they all got success in blindly
installing ubuntu by just depending on orca.
so that is how it is going but now I need to give them proper
directions as to how they can get started on the web accessibility and
office.
regards,
Krishnakant.