I’ve been away from the GNU/Linux world for quite some time. I’m beginning to migrate my systems completely over for various reasons.
I came back here to see if the GNOME accessibility mailing list were still available and originally didn’t see it until I saw this email address.
I tried to tag GNOME on Twitter but receive dno responses (it may be that that account is not very active). Honestly, my heart sank.
I don’t have a lot of money, but if accessibility of GNOME/Orca/accessibility is still under active development, I would like to start making monthly donations because — just like back when I was a part of the old accessibility mailing lists— I think that it is very important for accessibility to continue improving.
Is this the right place to receive updates and such regarding GNOME and accessibility?
The GNOME project retired mailing lists at the end of 2022, and replaced them with Discourse after a migration of nearly 3 years.
If you wish to donate to the GNOME project, you can set up a recurring donation on: Donate – GNOME — Donations go towards infrastructure and events, like the GTK 2020 hackfest, which was heavily geared towards the improvement of the accessibility API in GTK4.
In general, more than donations, the accessibility stack needs contributors: people who understand the technology and can work on the implementation inside GNOME, both in terms of toolkit and applications, and in terms of assistive technologies. There aren’t many people left, and most of them are working on something else, contributing to the accessibility stack on their spare time.
There is a new orca mailing list here. I see it’s pretty active.
I don’t think we have a way to target contributions specifically towards accessibility. Most money donated to GNOME will be used for other purposes. The good news is most of the developers working on accessibility are professionals paid by companies, and I doubt they’re looking for donations. They probably are interested in new contributors, though; you don’t have to be a developer to help with user questions, issue triage, etc.
My name is Bob. I participated in the Orca list and the GNOME Accessibility list many years ago. I couldn’t find my distro home, life went crazy, and I left GNU/Linux as my daily driver for several years.
I couldn’t stay away and finally came back into using GNU/Linux full-time outside of my MacBook. I have attempted to reach out to GNOME on Teitter (I’m guessing the Twitter account might not be as active?) because I wanted to learn about what the state of of Orca and GNOME might be.
I don’t have a lot of money, but I owuld like to start donating if accessibility is still going forward. I have always felt that Orca has a great deal of potential and that accessibility should be a “big matter” for GNU/Linux, but I didn’t have anything that I could contribute back then.
So–in brief–what is the state of accessibility these days? What can I do to help? Are tehre any pages available with current information? I have Googled but have mainly found outdated information (that could be my fault). My programming experience is lmited, but I am slowly learning (Python, currently).