Accessibility is a [core value](https://www.ubuntu.com/project/about-ubuntu/our-philosophy) for Ubuntu and we have a wonderful [Ubuntu Accessibility Team](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility) who are passionate about making Ubuntu a truly accessible platform for everyone.

Recently the team have been putting the finishing touches on their plans for the 12.04 cycle and I just wanted to highlight some these plans and encourage those of you who are interested to get involved.

Many thanks to Penelope Stowe for providing much of the content for this blog entry and to Alan Bell for reviewing it to ensure it is comprehensive and reflects the team well.

## 12.04 Plans

The accessibility plans for *12.04* cycle can be broken into four main areas:

1. Testing
2. Development
3. General Community Work
4. Kubuntu

Since this is a LTS release the team is focusing on polishing and resolving issues that have caused problems for users with accessibility needs in the last few releases.

### Testing

The primary goals with testing this cycle are to make it easier for users without accessibility needs to test accessibility features. Since there are no major feature changes planned for 12.04, this cycle should be slightly easier than it’s been in the past where test cases have had to change monthly, if not weekly, as features changed, were added, and things broke. Penelope is also working with Charline on the Design Team to try to get some usability testing of the accessibility features of Ubuntu.

**See the [blueprint](https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/desktop-p-accessibility-team-testing)**.

### Development

Most of the development work being done for 12.04 is around polish and fit and finish, however there is one important feature that needs to be added: *screen magnification*. At the very least there are plans in place to get screen magnification into Unity 2D, but the team is hoping to be able to work with the Desktop Experience team to get it into Unity 3D as well.

**See the [blueprint](https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/desktop-p-accessibility-polish)**.

### Community

The community focus in this cycle will be in cleaning up documentation, trying to gain more community involvement, and researching how Ubuntu accessibility can better serve people with learning disabilities/differences including ADHD, autism, dyslexia (just to name a few). Inspired by the other development summaries, the Accessibility Team will be aiming to write monthly blogs summarizing bite-sized bugs to try to attract more developer support, as well as blogging more about the current activities (both development and community) throughout the cycle.

**See the [blueprint](https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-p-accessibility-team-community-goals)**.

### Kubuntu

The Kubuntu team is going to work to integrate more accessibility into their desktop. This will include improving the *qt-at-spi* integration with *at-spi2*, reviewing applications to see which are accessible, and packaging [Simon Listens](https://www.simon-listens.org/index.php?id=122&L=1). They also plan on working with the upstream [KDE Accessibility](https://accessibility.kde.org/) team to try to update documentation of what’s available.

**See the [blueprint](https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/desktop-p-kubuntu-accessibility)**.

## Getting Involved

The *Accessibility Team* are always looking for help and support from developers, testers, documentation writers, wiki gardeners and more.

You can get in touch with them in a few different ways:

* **On IRC**: `#ubuntu-accessibility` on [freenode IRC](https://www.freenode.net)
* **On the Mailing List**: [ubuntu-acessibility](https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/Ubuntu-accessibility) (see the [archive](https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-accessibility/))

Also see their:

* **Blog**: [https://ubuntuaccessibility.wordpress.com](https://ubuntuaccessibility.wordpress.com)
* **Wiki**: [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility)

You can also keep up to date with the progress on these projects with their [burndown chart](https://status.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-precise/group/topic-precise-desktop-accessibility.html).

Many thanks to *Penelope Stowe, Alan Bell, Charlie Kravetz, Mackenzie Morgan, Luke Yelavich, Frederick Gladhorn* and the other members of the team for their wonderful contributions to making Ubuntu more accessible.