Howdy Community,

as frederik (my formal mentor and previous QT Company developer) sadly seems not be around anymore ( I hope he is doing well, he did maaaany work for a11y) , I was left as the last member of the official KDE accessibility "team".

But KDE's accessibility efforts never stopped. In fact KDE made huge progress in the last year in this area.

Motivated by this efforts of some individuals, special thanks here to Carl Swan, Vlad Zahorodnii or  notmart and others (if i miss you in this list, let me know, this needs to been fixed ;) !) i decide take some efforts to revive the accessibility team. Some of those guys are currently working to improve the world also if its country is currently sadly in a war with an evil aggressor. Respect for those guys!

I wired up an message to plasma matrix channel about the progress and the ask for revive the accessibility team. And.... HERE WE ARE :).

We are active forming a new accessibility !team! :).

The Team

• Carl Schwan (aka ognarb)
• Felipe Kinoshita (aka fhek)
• Christian Hempfling (aka chrys -> me)
• Anna Vyalkova (aka cybertailor)
• You? =)

I update this list for a while as the progress is very active currently.

I did the call on June 22 2022 at 00:09 (UTC+2).

The Plan

Take the accessibility issues and fix them. Sure...! I plan to bring irc.linux-a11y.org community to KDE for feedback and tests. Most of them are technical more skilled than the "normal" user with special needs. So we need a good and easy way for them to test most current fixes and features. This is something we need to talk about.

I plan to use the official KDE's accessibility matrix room for communication:

https://matrix.to/#/#kde-accessibility:kde.org 

And use KDE's official accessibility phabricator page to plan the future:

https://phabricator.kde.org/project/profile/249/ 

all the work should be transparent. 

I plan to meet periodical. Not sure yet about the frequency :). And we definitive should have hack fests or sprints :), because I like drinking a coffee or beer with awesome people! But this is future talk.

The Road

• We need a way for bring the latest fixes to users with special needs for testing. (VM? docker?)
• We need to check the current situation and issues. For this, a detailed review about the current accessibility state is following :). Might come up the end of this or next week.
• We need to write down all the issues. i started this process some years ago in KDE Phabricator. I already updated some of the Tasks to match the current situation. More to come after the detailed review.
• Carl Schwan started a draft purposal to define accessibility as KDE Goal. This is a voting progress. I tried this back in 2019 as well. But i have a good feeling with this in 2022 :).

A new first step is done. KDE is an awesome platform with awesome people.

Thank you KDE + Community!

Cheers chrys