Friend of GNOME Accessibility Campaign

These are some of the tasks from the GNOME accessibilty roadmap you could help us to accomplish:

Many users and developers complain frequently about performance with respect to GNOME accessibility, both the tools themselves (e.g. Orca) and the performance degradation seen in applications when accessibility support is enabled for the session -- even when no assistive technologies are being used. This latter issue is frequently cited as the cause for developers not enabling this support as well as for the community and distros being unwilling to enable this support by default.

GNOME Shell Magnifier does not track focus or the caret. As a result, GNOME Shell Magnifier users who need to use preferentially the keyboard must either regularly move the mouse to see the active area, or use Orca to cause the area of interest to be displayed by the magnifier.

Evince, the GNOME document reader, and Poppler, its PDF engine, should reflect the structure of the document (headings, paragraphs, etc.) and its formatted attributes rather than the single text object.

WebKitGTK+, the new GTK+ port of the WebKit, the successful free and open-source web content engine, used in the GNOME web browser, Epiphany, and the help viewer Yelp, needs some work to make ARIA and HTML5 accessible. Also we would like to provide support for porting Evolution to WebKitGTK+ and removing the old code and custom widgets to make it accessible.

We spend a non-trivial amount of its time triaging and filing bugs introduced by changes in the applications and toolkits GNOME ATs provide access to. It would be much better if these regressions could be automatically detected when they are made so that the problematic changes are identified and not committed. This will enable accessibility developers to be more productive.

Despite the best efforts of the teams working on GNOME 3, there will undoubtedly be bugs which are not caught in time. We will not fully know what exactly is broken until a significant number of GNOME users have worked with GNOME 3 on a regular basis. In addition, there are already a non-trivial number of accessibility bugs logged in GNOME’s bugzilla. If we want to provide a truly compelling desktop environment, we need to fix these bugs.