hello and introduction

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Jonathan,

On Fri, 2013-02-22 at 22:00 -0500, Jonathan Nadeau wrote:
> My name is Jonathan Nadeau and I'm the executive director of the
> Accessible Computing Foundation located here

	Great to meet you.

> I'm looking to fund some developers to fix some accessibility bugs with
> Libreoffice and the Orca screen reader. I was hoping either someone on
> the list would be interested in fixing some bugs or that the list might
> know of some people that would like to earn some money to fix some bugs.

	So this list is really for discussing concrete code, patches, code
improvements and so on - so please follow up with the individuals I've
CC'd off the list.

	Having said that ( and having initially written much of the LibreOffice
atk bridge [ as well as chunks of older Linux a11y the
infrastructure ;-] ), I'd love to be included in that discussion. I've
CC'd:

	Tim Janik - of Lanedo, a consultancy working with LibreOffice
	Joanmarie Diggs - of Igalia - a consultancy working with Linux a11y
and	Matus Kukan - a chap starting to do consulting around LibreOffice

	I'd recommend any/all of them - and I've prolly forgotten others. We
try to encourage recommending certified LibreOffice developers for these
sorts of roles; but for this generic Linux / a11y  skill & experience is
at least as useful I think.

	In better news, we've un-frozen our internal a11y UNO infrastructure
interfaces in LibreOffice 4.0 with precisely the aim of improving a11y -
and (as Caolan prolly mentioned) our new toolkit/layout technology
allows some significant a11y wins via glade annotation of relations -
hopefully incrementally making our dialogs much more useful as we deploy
that new layout code across the suite.

	I've also a number of pet peeves with the a11y backend ;-) there are
several things that need fixing to make it more reliable, and there are
some great benchmarks / tests that we can run that (currently) are very
much less reliable when a11y is enabled - so there is plenty of fruitful
work here.

	Looking forward to talking this through off-list,

	All the best,

		Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks at suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot