The GNOME Foundation launches an accessibility outreach program [LWN.net]

By Forrest Cook
March 4, 2008

The GNOME Foundation has announced a new outreach program for the GNOME accessibility project:

The GNOME Foundation is running an accessibility outreach program, offering US$50,000 to be split among individuals. This program will promote software accessibility awareness among the GNOME and broader Free Software communities, as well as harden and improve the overall quality of the GNOME accessibility offering. The program is sponsored by GNOME Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Google's Open Source Program Office, Canonical, and Novell.

Applications were opened for review starting on March 1, the project closes on December 31. Acceptance of long-term tasks closes on October 1, short-term task acceptance closes on December 15. The goal of the program is to work on improving shortcomings in the existing GNOME accessibility system. There is an aim to increase awareness of accessibility-related issues, encourage developers to work on accessibility issues and generally improve accessibility in free software.

From the project announcement: "There will be two tracks to the program: In the first track accepted individuals will work towards accomplishing one of the major projects nominated for the program, earning US$6,000 and can take up to six months to complete the task. The second track will reward contributors US$1,000 for fixing five bugs out of a pool of accessibility bugs nominated by the program judges."

The program rules explain the contract that the developers will work under, the process of claiming tasks, the judging process and more. A list of tasks has been announced: "Are you a developer who wants to become more familiar with accessibility? Are you an artist that can draw? Maybe you might also be interested in becoming a module maintainer some day. A great way to get started is by fixing bugs, and we're offering you a way to get paid to do it. :-)"

The list of long-term tasks includes:

Writing and updating accessibility documentation.
Improving accessibility support in the Evince document viewer.
Adding and improving GNOME magnification support.
Building an accessibility testing framework.
Adding new participant-defined accessibility projects.

Developers who need some income and are willing to improve availability of GNOME to all should consider taking on a task.

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