Following our fund raising campaign through Friends of GNOME, and with the help of Mozilla, the GNOME Foundation is looking for developers to enhance the accessibility of documents within GNOME.

Knowledge of the GNOME development process will be required to carry out the work.

The tasks should be set out in each of the bids, with the goal of enabling accessibility of documents such as PDFs, word processing documents, and HTML content.

The non-exhaustive list of modules and software projects that could be involved in enhancing accessibility for GNOME is as follows:

  • poppler (PDF rendering library)
  • libxps (XPS rendering library)
  • evince (PDF and XPS reader for GNOME)
  • WebKitGTK (HTML rendering library used in Web, Yelp, and Evolution amongst others)
  • GNOME Documents (document viewer for local and remote documents in GNOME)

The money available for the project is $30,000 ($10,000 from the Mozilla Corporation, $20,000 from our Friends of GNOME campaign). The bid selection will be made by a group including professional consultants with GNOME-related experience and GNOME Foundation Board members.

Bids should include:

  • a list of specific tasks to be achieved and the list of components impacted
  • details of your research into what level of accessibility the targeted end-user modules have.
  • a time line and schedule for the whole project
  • references to previous GNOME or accessibility related work.

Note that the goal of the GNOME Foundation for this project is upstream acceptance of the various modifications made during the project.

Please send your proposals to karen AT gnome DOT org with the subject line ”A11y of Documents Bid” by March 15, 2013.