FoG Accessibility Campaign 2012

GNOME has held accessibility amongst its core values from the project's inception. With the advent of GNOME 3, we have started down an exciting new path in terms of usability, which includes users of all ages and abilities. This drive is not only necessary for those with disabilities but is also increasingly needed for our devices to work for any user.

The GNOME accessibility team is working hard, but its resources are more limited than in the past. For this reason, the GNOME Foundation started a Friend of GNOME campaign to get funds for supporting development in this important area.

A Friends of GNOME campaign is a fundraising campaign for a particular cause through the GNOME donation page. Money collected from this page when the campaign is running is targeted to the specified cause.

The goal for the campaign was set to US $20,000 when the campaign was launched on the December 16. With the help of many Friends of GNOME, the goal was reached on June 7. The campaign was helped by two GNOME users who generously shared their experiences about how the accessibility features of GNOME 3 impacted them:

"For me, GNU/Linux and GNOME equal freedom, and without all of the hard work which has been put into all of this wonderful software, I would truly be at a loss. This is why further development and maintenance of accessible software is so important to me."

-- Robert Cole

"I'm happy because I can now use the computer in my classroom without any assistance. I could not imagine that I would only use a computer on my own."

-- Diego Sánchez

Following our fund raising campaign through Friends of GNOME, the always supportive Mozilla Corporation joined the cause to improve accessibility and assigned US $10,000 extra to this endeavor. So finally the money available for the project is US $30,000.

The GNOME Board of Directors, with the advice of the GNOME Accessibility Team, decided to spend the money in several tasks to enhance the accessibility of documents, with focus in the PDF format. The GNOME Foundation Board, after a Call for Bids procedure, selected Igalia to perform the work.

Igalia presented a good bid with a detailed analysis of the current status of accessibility of documents within GNOME and a comprehensive plan to achieve the expected results. It was reviewed by a committee of volunteers who are active in GNOME's accessibility work but who were not affiliated with any submitted proposal. The committee, composed of David Bolter, Mike Gorse, Juanjo Marín, Joseph Scheuhammer and John Walicki, made their recommendation to the Foundation's Board of Directors which then voted to accept the bid. The full bid has been published on the GNOME wiki.

Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias, Carlos García Campos and Joanmarie Diggs will be the main developers working on the project. They are experienced developers in all the technologies and components involved, like Poppler, Evince, ATK, AT-SPI2 and Orca, which guarantees that GNOME Documents and Evince will get the accessibility support that many GNOME users are waiting for.