by: Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias and Joanmarie Diggs

Preparation for GNOME 3.0

Several significant improvements were made in the area of GNOME Shell accessibility: GNOME Shell is mostly keyboard navigable, and is recognized as an application by the accessibility framework. The work required to make GNOME Shell fully accessible to screen readers is ongoing. However, because Assistive Technologies now have more of the information they need to provide access to this environment, it was possible to begin implementing support for GNOME Shell within Orca.

GNOME Shell Magnifier's functionality was expanded to include support for brightness, contrast, and inverse video. The incorporation of these proposed features into GNOME Shell, along with some corresponding additions to the Universal Access control panel, should make GNOME 3 much more accessible to users with low vision.

Many new improvements were made to WebKitGtk accessibility, which in turn made it possible for the Orca team to greatly enhance its support for both Yelp 3 and Epiphany. We are quite pleased with the progress thus far towards making content viewed in GNOME's web browser compellingly accessible, and are looking forward to making it even better in the months to come. Thanks to the Consorcio Fernando de los Ríos for their support in this area!

AT-SPI2 was greatly stabilized after the refactor done in the previous quarter. Various memory leaks, crashes, non-working functions, and other miscellaneous problems have since been fixed. While there are additional issues to resolve, AT-SPI2 is now generally usable and performs comparable to AT-SPI1. Furthermore, AT-SPI2 makes it possible to implement accessibility support in Qt. The work being done by Frederik Gladhorn in this area will lead to GNOME users having even more accessible applications available to them. Thanks to Nokia for supporting Frederik in this effort!

Community Outreach

The orca-es-list, an official GNOME list for Spanish-speaking users of the Orca screen reader, was created in January. Providing ways for non-English speakers to get more involved in the Orca community has been a long-time goal of the Orca team -- and up until recently, an unachievable one. Now, thanks to the continued involvement of developers from Emergya, the willingness of existing Spanish-speaking community members to contribute their time and knowledge, and the GNOME infrastructure through which to host it, the team is able to support such as list. For more information, please see: https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-es-list.

In February, several team members participated in the first Accessibility Devroom at FOSDEM. In addition to giving and attending sessions, we had the opportunity to connect with several XFCE developers who stopped by. As a result, our team has since begun collaborating with theirs so that they can achieve the accessibility goals they have on their roadmap for their 4.10 release.

GNOME Accessibility was proudly represented by five members from our team at CSUN - The 26th Annual International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference in San Diego, California this March. Along with developers from Mozilla, we were the FOSS ambassadors in a mostly proprietary technology market. Our booth and presentations gave us the opportunity to demonstrate unique alternatives to a variety of mainstream and assistive technologies, including providing demonstrations of GNOME 3.

Plans for the Second Quarter

The team plans to focus on refining GNOME 3 Accessibility support, fixing what they can for 3.0.2 and aiming towards much-improved access for the 3.2 release. In addition, developers working on accessibility for the free desktop will be coming together for the ATK/AT-SPI Hackfest which will take place at Igalia in A Coruña, Spain in May.