Most projects don't actually want help. Go and try it: report a few bugs or point out usabilty issues. See what happens.
And on the other side as a maintainer, any bug report that demonstrates a clear issue (crash, hang, etc) with a reproducible setup is appreciated.
What can be really frustrating are bug reports that aren't bugs and a better understanding of the software would allow them to solve the problem. For example, there was one issue on Slic3r that was asking for a PDF output of config files. There is really no reason to do that.
Every project has accepted everything whenever I've actually tried to help with the actual work they're doing, i.e. solving a bug or submitting a pull request fixing some documentation, something that reduces their todo-list instead of adding to it.