[Kde-accessibility] KDE/Qt at the 2nd Linux Accessibility Conference

[Peter Korn]

Greetings all and Bill,

> > ... [discussion about the conclusion from LAC2 to focus on a vertical
> >      stack as first priority, KDE/Qt at a much lower priority] ...
> 
> Bill Haneman from the Sun and GNOME projects here;
> 
> Though the notes attribute the original statement of the consensus to
> Peter Korn (of the Sun Accessibility Program Office), I'd like to
> reassure everyone that we don't seek to discourage work in KDE
> interoperability, and AFAIR the initial conclusion wasn't really
> from me or Peter... my initial expectation for the "interoperability"
> session at LAC2 was that we'd be spending some time discussing how
> to best move forward with KDE interoperability.  

Thanks Bill for defending my honor!  

I'd like to reinforce/amplify some points Bill and others are making.  Making a
whole desktop stack accessible, with a platform architecture, UI toolkits
supporting it, hundreds and thousands of applications taking part, and
assistive technologies for the various different accessibility needs, is a
*huge* project.  

Bringing KDE/Qt, as well as other UNIX UI toolkits (Mac OS X anyone?) into this
architecture remain goals, and important ones.  However, the consensus from
LAC2 was that we should focus our immediate efforts on proving that the whole
stack works with what we have on the GNOME 2.0 desktop - providing high quality
access to users with a wide variety of disability needs to a complete set of
apps on GNOME.  

That said, I don't think *anyone* is unwelcoming of efforts from the KDE/Qt
community (or any other UI toolkit) who want to work on accessibility support
and interpoerability.  After all, the GNOME Accessibility hackers went to some
considerable length to make the architecture have as few dependencies on GNOME
libraries as possible explicitly to make it possible to port to other
environments.  And I'm certain I speak for all of the Sun Accessibility folks
when I say that we very much want to see that support happen!  We just aren't
going to put much of our own effort on that, especially when we're not done
with a complete vertical stack.


Regards,

Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team