[Fwd: Re: GNOME Roadmap - Information Request for orca]

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

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• From: Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>
• To: Lucas Rocha <lucasr gnome org>
• Cc: Rich Burridge Sun COM, Michael Pedersen Sun COM, Lynn Monsanto Sun COM
• Subject: Re: GNOME Roadmap - Information Request for orca
• Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 13:30:42 -0400

Hi Lucas:

> > - What are your plans for GNOME 2.20 (next 4 months, before feature and
> >  UI freezes)?

Here's what we posted in the e-mail we sent for the GNOME 2.18 branch
announcement:

* Continued work with the Firefox and Thunderbird teams to provide
  more compelling access to the Web and E-mail.

* Address the i18n/l10n picture.  We will make it a high priority goal
  to work with the i18n/l10n teams to address these for GNOME
  2.19/2.20.  Bug 412200 will be used to track this.  Please be nice.
  We really want to do a good job here.

* Continued work on features/requirements which are in the
  specification but not implemented yet.  We track all of these
  at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?query=product%3Aorca.

* "Rear view mirror" refactoring to clean up some of the cruftier
  portions of the code.  This may also include the ability to
  better support multilingual text.

* Continued development of the test harness, code coverage analysis,
  and regression tests for Orca.  

> - What are your plans for GNOME 2.22 (next year)?

I'm going to be a little vague here, but we will continue to work with
the Orca community on the things it finds to be the highest priority
stuff to do.  :-)  This will most likely include additional work with
Firefox and focusing on compelling access to the overall suite of
applications in the GNOME desktop. 

To be more specific, we try to keep all of our bugs and RFEs up to date
at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?query=product%3Aorca, and we
try also to keep a prioritized form of the bug/RFE list at
http://svn.gnome.org/viewcvs/orca/trunk/docs/planning.ods.  These are
directly driven by the Orca community.

> - Do you have plans for a future release?

By all means.  Accessibility will never ever be "done".

> - Do you have any goals from 2.18 that were not achieved? Why?

Most of the things we were not able to achieve were due to problems in
other components (e.g., freeloader, Thunderbird, Firefox, etc.).  :-(

> - Is there something that is really missing in our infrastructure or
>  platform that would help you?

We really need to have a good regression testing across the board.  Bugs
are often found too late in the GNOME release cycle.  As a result, we
(the Orca team) often end up needing to find and fix the bugs in other
modules because the other module maintainers are too busy freaking out
about getting their planned work done.  :-)

To help with regression testing, we've been working with IBM to develop
the pyatspi support for unified Python bindings for the AT-SPI.  From
there, I hope the Dogtail and LDTP folks will roll in pyatspi.  Then,
I'd like to see more regression testing built in to build systems such
as jhbuild.  

> - Do you have plans to work on other modules not maintained by you?
>  What are they?

In the event we run into accessibility problems that live in other
modules, we try to work with the module maintainers to resolve these
problems.  We've done this a lot in the past, and I don't expect it to
stop.  :-)

> - Do you have any GNOME-wide goals suggestions for the next releases?

Regression testing.  Let's do it!

Hope this helps!

Will

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