The goal of Igalia's Accessibility Group is to ensure that all users, regardless of age and ability, have a compelling and complete range of Free Software solutions which address their unique needs and wants. Achieving this goal, of course, is not something we can do alone; the ongoing involvement and collaboration of the entire community are essential. For this reason, we are quite pleased to once again have developers from the GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, and WebKitGtk communities in our A Coruña office for Igalia's second accessibility hackfest.

This unconference-style event is a continuation of the hackfest we hosted in 2011 to improve the libraries used to make free desktop environments accessible. During that event we identified and began work on the changes which are essential for consistent cross-toolkit accessibility. But much work remains in order to bring about an accessibility API which both makes sense to toolkit developers and which makes it possible for assistive technologies to provide access to those toolkits; one which is performant but also is complete; and one which is well documented so that implementors and consumers have no doubts about what to expect.

Pulling all of these things off is not a small task by any means, nor will it happen overnight. But fortunately, we are not starting from scratch: We have the benefit of an existing accessibility API which has been used in GNOME for the past 10 years, developers who know what has worked well and what is in need of improvement, and above all the motivation to achieve results. And once we achieve what we have set out to achieve, it will make a huge difference to our users in the form of a more reliable, more consistent, more performant user experience along with more accessible tools from which to choose.