by: Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias and Joanmarie Diggs

Hackfest

In May, members from the GNOME Accessibility Team joined other accessibility developers for a five-day ATK/AT-SPI hackfest at Igalia in A Coruña. Unlike the more traditional hackfests, the primary work done was not coding; instead, the group conducted an intensive analysis on the current state of ATK and began the design of what will become ATK 3. Thanks to G.P.U.L, Xunta de Galicia, Mozilla, Igalia, and the GNOME Foundation for making this event possible!

Towards GNOME 3.2

The team continued to address accessibility issues in GNOME 3. In addition to ongoing bug fixing in all of the team's modules:

• Benjamin Otte and Matthias Clasen have been hard at work merging Gail into GTK+, finding and fixing accessibility bugs in the process. We are excited to see accessibility becoming even more tightly integrated in this toolkit and are grateful for all the time and energy Benjamin and Matthias are investing to pull this off.
• The ATK bridge now disables most of its signal listeners if no Assistive Technologies are listening for events. We believe that this improves desktop performance when accessibility support is enabled by default, and we hope to test this quantitatively in the near future.
• Further progress has been made in improving GNOME Shell Magnifier, including a preliminary investigation on how to implement caret and focus tracking so that it does not have to rely upon Orca for this functionality, along with continued work on integrating the magnifier's configuration into the Universal Access settings.

Outreach Program for Women

The team is quite pleased to have its first intern from the GNOME Outreach Program for Women, Aline Bessa from Brazil. Aline's background in computer science, her interest in accessibility, and her seemingly limitless enthusiasm have proven extremely valuable. She has already contributed a completely new, topic-based documentation for Accerciser and has since progressed to fixing bugs and working on enhancements for this tool. Aline is also making much-needed improvements and additions to the libatspi documentation. Thanks Aline for all your dedication and hard work, and thanks to the Outreach Program organizers and supporters for making it all possible!

Plans for the Third Quarter

In addition to continuing its work towards GNOME 3.2, the team plans to begin implementation of the agreed-upon improvements to ATK and work towards more performant desktop accessibility.