[dot] KDE Accessibility Cooperation

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1127425930/

From: Olaf Jan Schmidt <ojschmidt at kde.org>
Dept: together-we-are-strong
Date: Thursday 22/Sep/2005, @16:52

KDE Accessibility Cooperation
=============================

   Recent weeks have seen a lot of cooperative activity between the KDE
Accessibility Team [http://accessibility.kde.org] and various other Free
Software accessibility teams. The Free Standards Group Accessibility
Workgroup [http://accessibility.freestandards.org/], KDE Accessibility
and GNOME Accessibility [http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/] teams
have now released a joint statement
[http://accessibility.freestandards.org/a11yweb/forms/soi.php]
describing some of this cooperation.  "We believe users who are persons
with disabilities should be empowered to choose technologies from any
and all environments which provide accessibility just as other desktop
users today routinely use a mix of technologies from different desktop
environments. Our goal is seamless interoperability."

     In addition to participation in the accessibility workgroup of the
Free Standards Group, KDE Accessibility also closely cooperates with a
number of other accessibility teams. During the KDE Conference, for
example, we worked together with the Brailcom [http://www.brailcom.org/]
to make KDE Accessibility interoperate well with applications for the
console.

     Other areas of activity and cooperation include:

    * Participation in the Google Summer of Code to support Leo
      Spalteholz in developing a new application for eye trackers
      (project NoKey)
    * Development of a new X.Org based screen magnifier
    * Foundation of the Freedesktop.org Accessibility Initiative
    * Foundation of the Unix Accessibility Forum during last years KDE
      Conference, and cooperation with the German accessibility user
      group Linaccess to organise it again during LinuxTag this year
    * Cooperation with OpenUsability.org [http://www.openusability.org]
      to develop accessibility guidelines for KDE developers

     All of this will contribute to making Unix in general and KDE in
particular the software of choice for disabled users.