GNOME Accessibility Team

Report for the Third Quarter 2011

Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias and Joanmarie Diggs

The Accessibility Team actively worked on a number of fronts during the third quarter:

We are happy to announce that:

AT-SPI2 has been significantly stablized with several crashes, memory leaks, and other bugs having been solved. In addition, the libatspi documentation has been improved thanks to the work of Aline Bessa.
Gail, GNOME's Accessibility Implementation Library, has been completely merged into Gtk+.
Accerciser's and Orca's migrations to introspection have been completed.
GNOME Shell Magnifier is getting closer to having support for inverse lightness, as well as the ability to change brightness and contrast.

And we are looking forward to an even more accessible GNOME 3.4.

Thanks to improvements to AT-SPI2, applications now have a cross-desktop way to determine if accessibility support is enabled and to enable it if need be. As other desktop environments implement this support, GNOME users will have access to even more applications.
Through the generous support of the F123 Project, a new libatspi-based plugin was created for Compiz, and focus and caret tracking has been developed for eZoom. This work will make it possible for users with low vision to work more efficiently, and also serves as an example to developers interested in a C++ implementation of libatspi. Thanks to Fernando Bothelo and the GNOME Foundation for their support.

The Accessibility Team participated at the Desktop Summit:

Alejandro Piñeiro gave two presentations about the status of GNOME Accessibility, one at the Summit and at the Annual General Meeting.
Developers from both GNOME and KDE, including Frederick Gladhorn (qt-at-spi2 maintainer) and Peter Grasch (Simon maintainer) took advantage of the co-hosted event to discuss issues and plans to improve accessibility for the free desktop.
A productive cross-desktop Accessibility Bof occurred at the end of the week.