KaveinthranI am pasting here the first President’s Report from the annual report by @NVAccess, annual report 2007-2008 that's fortunately available in html format on the #webarchive Let's hope that NVAccess will restart their tradition of providing annual reports.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100113011245/http://www.nvaccess.org/docs/Annual_report_2007-2008.html
source: https://web.archive.org/web/20100113011245/http://www.nvaccess.org/docs/Annual_report_2007-2008.html
NV Access
Annual Report
2007-2008
President’s Report
2007-2008 has been a very exciting and successful first year for NV Access. As a young organisation we have had to learn a lot from the word go, but I believe we have achieved many goals, and have been able to succeed in our most important function which is sustaining and improving the NVDA screen reader project.
In March 2007, NV Access Inc was created as a non-profit organisation, for the purpose of supporting and promoting free and open source software that can enhance the lives of blind and vision impaired people around the world. Specifically, the software we focus on is NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access), which is a screen reader for the Microsoft Windows Operating System [http://www.nvda-project.org/].
As NV Access is an incorporated association, it is run by a committee of about five individuals. The initial members of the committee were:
· Myself (Michael Curran) - President
· Amy Curran - Secretary, treasurer
· James Teh - vice president
· Mathew Mirabella - vice president
· Tenny Feng - general committee member.
During the year two more general committee members joined, these were Michael Sheppard and Geoff Shang. We also said goodbye to Tenny Feng, and we thank her for her participation.
Although NV Access is based in the state of Victoria Australia, our committee members also come from other states, and even other countries. We hold committee meetings by phone once a month, Thanks to Capital Accessibility who provide us with the conferencing facilities.
Although the committee meetings are a time for decision making and other tasks, we have been pleased to have invited two guests to speak to us over the year about projects they are involved with. We would like to thank Luke Yellevitch who spoke to us about the state of Linux accessibility, and Roger Wilson-Hinds who spoke to us about the Thunder screen reader.
July 2007 saw NV Access receive its first grant from the Mozilla Foundation. This grant allowed NV Access to greatly improve NVDA's support for content in Mozilla products such as Firefox and Thunderbird. The code written also allowed for future improvements for support of other web browsers. As a core developer of NVDA, I was commissioned for this project.
As a part of our work in searching for funding, NV Access applied for a Volunteers Small Equipment grant from the Australian Government. It happened that we were successful in receiving the grant, and this has allowed us to by a printing/copying/faxing machine, which means that we are able to efficiently produce informational materials and perform other administration tasks.
As NV Access was created to support and promote NVDA, it is important that we are able to sustain the project, and allow it to grow, so that more blind and vision impaired people can make use of this free screen reader. Because of this, NV Access wants to make sure that there are paid full-time developers for the project. NV Access approached the Mozilla Foundation with a proposal of a grant that would allow the employment of one full-time developer. At the close of 2007, NV Access was successful in receiving a grant of AU$92,000 from the Mozilla Foundation, which has allowed us to employ James Teh for a minimum of one year, to work on core development of NVDA, but at the same time work very closely with the Mozilla accessibility community and ensuring that Mozilla products continue to be well supported by NVDA. A part from employing James, the grant also provided NV Access with funding that could cover administrative overheads and contribute to sustaining NV Access into the future.
A part from two grants, the Mozilla Foundation has also provided funding for travel and accommodation for various events. In March 2007 I was able to attend the 23rd Annual Technology and Persons With Disabilities conference in California. Not only did I get to promote NVDA, but I was also able to network with a range of amazing people in the industry.
In October 2007 I attended the Mozilla Accessibility Summit in Boston where I was able to meet up with many of the other faces in the Mozilla Accessibility community, and participate in important discussions on the projects we are all a part of and where they should head in the future etc.
Finally in March 2008, both James Teh and I attended the 24th Annual Technology and Persons with Disabilities conference, where we helped in promoting Mozilla Accessibility and of course NVDA, and also participated in panel discussions and even met with a few organisations who took a special interest in NVDA.
The NV Access committee and I would like to thank the Mozilla Foundation for all they have provided.
On a more local level, NV Access has had a presence at a couple of blindness related technology expos. Specifically an expo held at the October 2007 Blind Citizens Australia National Convention, and an expo for the adaptive technology staff of Vision Australia.
All these events we have attended have been able to show us the popularity of NVDA. It is always wonderful to hear stories from someone about how NVDA has helped them, or even more wonderful when you are able to show someone, or even provide them with, NVDA, and know that this product has the potential to change their life in some way. For example at a conference in March 2008 James and I were visited by a teacher and students from a blind school in the U.S. Although these students had access to assistive technologies at school, at home they were not able to afford anything like that. However we were able to point them to NVDA, so that they would be able to access their own family computer at home for absolutely no cost.
To sustain itself and NVDA, NV Access must continue to seek funding. A part from approaching the Mozilla Foundation, NV Access has approached a few other large organisations, who may take an interest in NVDA, though success has not been that easy. Out of the organisations approached, only one organisation has worked with us on a possible funding agreement, and as arrangements are still being agreed upon, we can not disclose any further information at this time.
Another important financial resource to NV Access is donations. To date, NV Access has received over AU$13,000.00, which has helped the organisation in many ways. Some of the ways include paying for facilities to host the NV Access website, along with the websites and online services of the NVDA project. It has also allowed James and myself to hold two face-to-face NVDA developer meetings in Melbourne, where we have been able to discuss the design and future of NVDA, and even to work on some of the coding as a team.
A part from monetary donations, NV Access was kindly donated a server machine from an individual living in Queensland, which has been invaluable to both NV Access and the NVDA project. NV Access is able to use it as a file server to allow storage and retrieval of administrative data, and the NVDA project has been able to use it as a snapshot building and testing server, which compiles versions of NVDA for testing by the community.
On behalf of the NV Access committee, I want to extend a big thank you to all who have donated.
Since NV Access has started supporting the NVDA project, through promotion, providing resources and developer time, NVDA has massively improved in many areas. Notable ones are:
· Many core improvements greatly increasing its performance and accuracy.
· Greatly improved support for the Mozilla Firefox web browser, including the access of today’s rich and dynamic web content.
· Support for the IAccessible2 accessibility standard, which allows NVDA to support applications such as the Lotus Symphony office suite and Mozilla Gecko applications.
· Improved logging and debugging support which also allows for much more efficient bug fixing.
· The addition of an issue tracking system which enables the tracking of bugs and features as they get implemented in NVDA.
· A much improved version release process, plus one major and two minor releases of NVDA have been made.
· Better handling of internationalization, including rapid growth in the amount of languages supported.
· Added support for Java applications via the Java Access Bridge
· Improvements to NVDA's user interface and documentation.
In conclusion, I think that this year has been very successful for NV Access. However, there is much work that still must be done, and we must work even harder in the years to come. Goals for the following year include:
· Drawing up a business plan which clearly defines where the organisation is going and how it will get there.
· Forging relationships with governments and other organisations to make them aware of NVDA and to put forth funding proposals which would allow us to continue work on the project and to sustain NV Access.
· Securing further funding for James Teh as a full-time developer, and seeking funding to allow for a second full-time employee.
· Investigating becoming an organisation with DGR (gift recipient) status, which means that people could make tax-deductable donations.
In closing I would like to thank the entire NV Access committee for all its hard work this year.
Michael Curran
President NV Access Inc
Finance Report
Treasurer’s Report
NV Access has been operating since March 2007 and I am very pleased to present our first finance report. You may notice that the reports below range from April 2007 to June 2008, this is because there was virtually no spending in the first few months of operation. Therefore, I have incorporated the details as part of the report for the 07-08 financial year.
Over this period we have been very conservative with our spending and use of income from both grants and donations. This is mainly due to the age of the organisation as well as not yet having an established or stable source of funding. However, thanks to the Mozilla Foundation, James Teh has been able to come onboard as a full time developer for NVDA. With his contributions NVDA has attracted a lot of attention from large international organisations and opening up discussions for potential funding opportunities.
· Total income=$123,133.07
· Total expenses=$41,749.90
Our expenses are fairly low as everything is run from home. Most of the major conferences we attend (such as CSUN) is usually covered by organisations like the Mozilla Foundation. We are currently looking into the potential of selling small, low overhead, products such as speech synthesis engines. The income from these sales should enable us to cover costs associated with local conferences and exhibitions.
The next couple of years are looking very promising for NV Access as we have a very healthy surplus as well as a major grant in the pipeline which will allow us to employ Michael Curran full time for at least 12-18 months. We will also be looking into funding that will enable us to employ someone to both manage and seek funding on a full time basis.
Amy Curran
NV Access Treasurer
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