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This year brought great improvements to #accessibility in GNOME, including:
• Accessibility from the start on the login screen
• Full accessibility of GNOME Web
• Tons of improvements to Calendar
• Screen reader integration for Notifications
• Configure #Orca screen reader from Settings
• GTK apps integrated w/Windows & macOS accessibility
Help us reach 1,500 #FriendsOfGNOME so we can focus on accessibility even more in 2026!
@gnome I saw y’all introduced an end-of-year donation nag similar to @kde! (I say this endearingly and happily; FOSS needs to be okay with asking for user support!) Perhaps it was already there, but it seemed new. Do you know at this stage if it’s provided a significant boost in donations, similar to what KDE experienced last year?
@moshimotsu we introduced the desktop notification in the latest release (GNOME 49), so only folks running the very latest will see it. But yes, we started with zero #FriendsOfGNOME through the new https://donate.gnome.org and are now at 777 recurring donors!
We don’t currently track the source of donations (e.g. whether someone is coming from the notification versus social media or the GNOME.org site), so it’s hard to attribute it all to the desktop notification, but we consider it successful!
@moshimotsu it is also patched out or disabled in some popular Linux distributions, which can affect its success; we’re chatting with folks from those distros to see if we can work something out together.
@gnome That’s unfortunate, and feels a little counterproductive. As for the “source” of the donation, I’m not sure KDE tracks those either, but the perception of success was largely brought on from seeing an unprecedented spike in user donations right about the time of the nag. Yes, correlation is not causation, but Occam’s razor may apply!
This is a small personal instance of Bonfire in the Fediverse.
