[orca-list] The future of Orca

[Joanmarie Diggs <joanmarie diggs gmail com>]

Hey guys.

Last week I attended the GNOME a11y hackfest which took place at CSUN.
Oracle sent two engineers from Sun Beijing, Li Yuan (who is the
maintainer of AT-SPI and Atk) and Ke Wang (who is the maintainer of the
Java Atk Wrapper). It is my understanding that they will be able to
spend some of their time working on Orca. Yay!

In addition to Li and Ke's contributions, Alejandro PiÃeiro Iglesias
(aka API) of Igalia is looking at getting Orca and the new gnome-shell
working together. Phew!

The government of Spain has also put out a grant which includes working
on Orca. Personally, I'm really hoping that the grant gets awarded to
Igalia as we have an established, good working relationship between
their developers (who are already familiar with Orca) and the Orca team.
But regardless of who gets it, that should mean one or two additional
developers contributing to Orca.

My DayJob hours got reduced a while back, so I now work three (really
long) days a week. That frees up the rest of the week for Orca stuff --
including WebKitGtk. Once I've gotten past all the WebKitGtk bugs which
are making Yelp 3.0 inaccessible to us, I should be able to devote the
bulk of my non-DayJob days to working directly on Orca.

And some of you are helping out by doing increased bug triage and
contributing patches (for which I am *extremely* grateful). The more of
you who can take on these sorts of roles, the further we will get and
the more solid Orca's future will become.

So things are definitely looking up. Times may be tough, but I think
we'll pull through this recent snag. We all just have to pitch in and do
what we can.

Take care.
--joanie