With the departure of Luke, and before him Mario Lang, from GUI accessibility development, I think we are few now to develop for free software accessibility via classical GUI. I know much groups work on other components (BRLTTY, Fenrir, Vinux, etc). Rare persons work on it now: Joanmarie (thanks Igalia), Dave, Samuel, but except Joanmarie, it is not fulltime and they are busy due to the massive work. And apps devs are not yet aware of the problem related to accessibility.
Hypra tries to support this effort: to get a universally accessible OS, we patch Compiz, we fixed some problems in MATE, Thunderbird, Firefox, we report bugs (Libreoffice, Firefox), we try helping Debian accessibility team. To do this, we have funded technicians such as Samuel (not fulltime), and other devs, as well as a project manager in low-vision matter.
We needed to use not-only free software for OCR and tts because, to pay all this, we needed to sell some products, and basi users just adopted GNU/Linux in such conditions: a quite excellent OCR and tts. Thanks to this, we served about 100 persons to use free software now. For them, sometimes we re-affected Orca bindings to make them closer than Jaws. And of course, all our efforts are in free software area (public repos).
We now would like to enforce our investment in improving free software techno and increase the number of users of it. We will be supported by French State up to 330 000 euros, provided that we find 200 000 euros ourselves. Via crowd equity through our own platform, we have already about 100 000 euros. If you want to get involved in this development effort, you can invest in Hypra and contribute to free software dynamic dev, speeding up it. With such funds, we will: - pay for an additional dev; - improve our communication about what we do to increase the number of new free software users, supported by our service activities in their daily usage.
Technically, the new dev, as well as Samuel, will: - fix bugs in Firefox and Libreoffice (see Debian BTS for list of identified bugs today); - setting non-regression tests, to secure such fixes, in MATE, Libreoffice and Firefox, and Thunderbird; - improve the braille implementation, to enable using free software at school in braille, in mathematics, musics, etc.
If this first effort is a success (eg we get investors, we dev successfully what we said, and we increase our users number), the future of accessibility free software dev will be nice I think: - less workarounds or hacking in Orca, hence more time to dev new features - we will help PureOS, to get a free (libre) and accessible mobile phone; - we will experience low-cost machines, to use other things as PCs and, thus, be able to sell performant machines at less than 700 euros (today, we dont have money to explore the most performant configuration and how to set it to be confortable with a keyboard, a screen for low-vision persons, etc).
Well, a lot of prospectives. Provided that we speed up our increasing, via more users, and this fund raising. If we fail, we will not stop, just we will be slower. Just afraid that if we are too slow, maybe it will be so late, and given the impact of Google and Apple on accessibility and privacy, I am worry for free software and user respect. Because free software need to renew its staff, and it probably is possible through the success of an economic ecosystem.
Don't hesitate contact me in private if the prospective interests you.
Best regards,
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