Re: [orca-list] Proposal of investment in free software accessibility

[Peter Vágner <pvdeejay gmail com>]

Hey guys,

I am sure hypra and f123 have great intentions, however I would say we might do better when we manage to to do this even on a slightly higher scale.

We need to raise a bit more awareness, we need more expertise and what we need the most are contacts with other main stream developers where we can try to motivate more accessibility developments.

Yesterday I had no suggestions because it seems there is no stable company with accessibility experts and interests in leading open-source development.

After reading this Planet Igalia recap http://frederic-wang.fr/review-of-igalia-s-web-platform-activities-H1-2017.html I would say we need to try showing more funding opportunities to Igalia also working together where possible trying to stimulate their accessibility development with contribution from other organizations like Hypra or F123 or even volunteers. Igalia is awesome company, is known for a while and I hope when it can recognize additional flow of funding the accessibility might again be seen as a bit higher priority than it is being tackled right now.

Have you checked how much Hypra vision overlaps with theirs?

I would say this might really get interesting.

You can see they do still have some accessibility top stars on their board.

Greetings

Peter

2017-11-20 19:14 GMT+01:00 Fernando Botelho <Fernando Botelho f123 org>:

I understand. Sorry for overlooking the obvious philosophical issues.

I will be in touch. F123 might be able to help sometime in 2018.

Fernando

On 11/20/2017 03:18 PM, Jean-Philippe MENGUAL wrote:

Hi Fernando,

Thanks for your support:


Le 20/11/2017 à 17:56, Fernando Botelho a écrit :

This would be a perfect match for FSF and friends. Have you tried
knocking on that door?

I do not have any contact, but if you have, I would be glad doing it. I
just do not know if they can invest anywhere. However if they just can
donate, accelibreinfo can get funds and become investor through this
donation. I also am afraid they do not want to support a not full-free
software project due to OCR and tts and Debian, they do not consider as
a free software distro. And I cannot fight for political reasons in such
propposal.

I also support this wider and very public effort, it is just that these
are big numbers if we look at what has been raised in the past.

Right, hence our will to do differently. We want to focus on
non-regression tests before everything, then only work on bugs
themselves, in order to ensure that this investment is the last as
massive, but will be secure thanks our tests, lobbying in communities,
etc. Hence also the amount which could seem low in front have all the
work which needs to be done actually. For your info, many people invest
about 10 000 euros so far, or 5000.

Best regards,

Good luck,


Fernando



On 11/20/2017 02:29 PM, Jean-Philippe MENGUAL wrote:

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Hi,


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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Orca documentation: https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/
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Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org