[Techtalk] Want to add accessibility to open-source project

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Mon, Jan 19, 2004 at 10:32:20AM +0100 or thereabouts, Dan Richter wrote:
> As part of my master's degree, I have to do a project involving 
> computers and accessibility, in particular for blind people. Rather than 
> writing a report that will go into some file cabinet and never see the 
> light of day again, I would like to contribute to the accessibility of 
> an open-source project.
> 
> I'm looking for suggestions as to which open-source project I should 
> choose. I know what Freshmeat is, but I have some criteria that are 
> difficult to search for using a computer:
> 1) The program must have a web interface.
> 2) The program must have a French-language interface available.

Obvious thought: one of the wikis with a French language 
translation available :) There's a zillion wikis, so one
of them must have French. 

Erm..

Mailman has a web interface. The linuxchix lists run on
Mailman. I know we have had the occasional blind user, but
I don't know how navigable the archives are, how easy it
is to set options, and so on. 

Erm...

> 3) I'm not interested in projects where the designers are already 
> accessibility fanatics, because there would be nothing for me to do.

Aww, so GNOME and KDE are out, then? :) 

GNOME accessibility project: http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/ 
KDE accessibility project: http://accessibility.kde.org/

I can't speak for KDE, but the way it works in GNOME is this:
stuff which is shipped as part of GNOME (the "desktop and 
developer platform") has to conform with a whole load of 
guidelines: it must be accessible, internationalised, localisable,
documented, in the format the Human Interface Guidelines like,
and so on. But there are far more applications which use GNOME
or which want to be part of GNOME which haven't covered all of
those yet. So there are all these other GNOMEy apps which may
not be accessible, or documented, or.. (and so on). Sometimes
this is because the designer doesn't know how to do it. And 
they might welcome some help.

And there is http://leb.net/blinux/ too, but I assume you know
about that. Actually, looking at it, question 7.2 in the FAQ is
"How can I contribute to improve support for the Linux user who
is blind?" and there are several suggestions, although many are
not coding-related. 

Telsa