Lending a Helping Hand

Hello everyone,

I would like to introduce myself and offer my assistance to those of
you who are working towards a fully accessible KDE desktop
environment.

My name is Thomas Ward, and I have been a c/C++ software developer for
about 10 years. I am totally blind, but have been a strong Linux user
and supporter for many years. I am currently using the Orca screen
reader for Gnome, and would like to lend my help wherever possible to
your efforts to making KDE fully accessible to blind and other
disabled computer users. Although, I myself am not very experienced
with QT or the KDE desktop I am certainly willing to learn and study
any API documentation, technical guides, etc you think would help me
get up to speed with what I need to know as a developer to lend a
helping hand with the work that needs to be done with KDE
accessibility.

In the mean time Joanie, from the Orca team, has mentioned you are
currently working on KDE 4.8 beta. If you need on the ground blind
testers to test things I'd be willing to compile and test whatever
needs to be tested, file bug reports,  suggestions, etc so we can jump
start KDE 4.8 accessibility. Right now I'm using Ubuntu 11.04, and
will probably use that as my testing/development platform unless their
is any real reason to switch to a different distribution. Thanks, and
let me know how I can help.

Sincerely,
Thomas Ward