[orca-list] PDF accessibity works

[Juanjo Marín <juanjomarin96 yahoo es>]

Hi there !

Last month, the GNOME Foundation Board annouced the winning bid to enhance the accessibility of documents 
within GNOME [1]. The announcement was made public in the GNOME web pages and in several social networks like 
Facebook, identi.ca and twitter. However, I miss to send an email to this list the, sorry for that !.


As many of you already know, the GNOME Foundation run a specific Friend of GNOME campaign in 2012 to get 
funds for working in GNOME accessibility. Thanks to all your generous donations, we raised 20,000 US dollars 
and Mozilla helped us with 10,000 US dollars more. Remember that the GNOME Foundation supports accessibility 
hackfests every year and considers accessibility as an important topic to care of. So you can still can help 
accessibility by supporting the GNOME Foundation [2].

The winner bid was from Igalia, a Spanish consultancy company specialized in the development of free and open 
source software. Maybe you would like to that Alejandro Piñeiro and Joanmarie Diggs work in this company, so 
they really know about the GNOME accessibility stuff and how Orca works. Also, Carlos Garcia Campos, 
maintainer of the GNOME document reader, Evince, and co-maintainer of poppler (the PDF engine that Evince 
uses) is in Igalia. 


The main focus of this work will be to add Tagged PDF (ISO 32000-1:2008 section 14 ) support to poppler. This 
means that Evince will be able to expose the content of tagged PDF documents as discrete accessible objects 
with a significant amount of structural and semantic information. This, in turn, will make it possible for 
Orca and other assistive technologies to provide truly compelling access to PDF document content. As a result 
of this work, the support of non-tagged PDF documents will be also improved o the greatest extent possible.

I look forward for trying all this stuff !!!!

Cheers,

   -- Juanjo Marin


[1]http://www.gnome.org/news/2013/06/gnome-accessibility-bid-selected/
[2] http://www.gnome.org/friends/