[Kde-accessibility] Maintainer
Bill Haneman
Bill Haneman <Bill.Haneman@Sun.COM>
Tue, 19 Nov 2002 12:34:46 +0000 (GMT)
: Tue, 19 Nov 2002 16:07:05 +0800
>
>Hi
>No need to take off list unless people do not want to hear about apple
>stuff. The we is my school, with me as project leader. We were awarded
>a grant to examine porting emacspeak and or speakup to OSX. Looking
>more closely at OSX it has become apparent that the task of JAWS like
>access (speech) is not as large a problem as first thought, so we will
>head that way. Being BSD (sort of) it tends to to fall in with the
>linux accesability in some ways. Anything we do will be released under
>GPL so it will be open source!
Hi Iain:
I am not sure I understand you correctly with respect to "JAWS"; I assume
you are talking about screenreader capabilities in general, since JAWS
cannot be made to work with non MS platforms (probably unfeasible to port
even for Freedom Scientific). So are you proposing to write a new
screenreader? That is a very complex task, the only tractable way is
with
an accessibility-API-based approach. We already have an open
source/free-software
(LGPL) screenreader in development, 'gnopernicus', available in GNOME
cvs.
Gnopernicus intends to provide a full-featured, integrated screenreader
and
magnifier for the GNOME 2 desktop, that will also work with Java2
applications,
OpenOffice, and Mozilla, and is compatible with any GUI applications and
toolkits that implement one of the following accessibility APIs:
Java Accessibility API
ATK (Accessibility Toolkit API, based on glib-2)
AT-SPI (Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface).
AT-SPI is the interface which gnopernicus uses directly, it is
implemented for ATK and JA-API applications by bridging code.
The only Linux accessibility infrastructure for GUIs which is powerful
enough for screenreaders is the above GNOME Accessibility Project work,
as far as I or anyone in the fdawg group is aware. Building this stack
on OSX is quite possible (though perhaps nontrivial), it seems the Fink
project is already providing packages for most of GNOME 2:
http://fink.sourceforge.net/pdb/list.php
So a better integration of the GNOME-2 accessibility work on OSX (for
instance, providing ATK or AT-SPI support for Quartz) would be an obvious
win, and probably something that could be accomplished by a modest-sized
team. At the moment accessibility support would be available for Java-2
and GNOME-2 applications on OSX by the GNOME Accessibility Project
software stack, additional work would be required to include native
Quartz application support.
Best regards,
Bill Haneman
Architect, GNOME Accessibility
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap
>In fact I am typing this on my brand new apple powerbook that they gave
>us, just arrived today, and for sighted users it is very nice. (fast).
>If you would like any more info on the grant, the application is on the
>Apple University Consortium site.
>http://auc.uow.edu.au/index2.html
>
>On Tuesday, November 19, 2002, at 12:37 PM, JP Schnapper-Casteras wrote:
>
>> Hi Iain, all
>> Ok, I hope you can make it - we'll save logs and I'll take notes
as
>> well.
>>
>> When you talk about the overlap with Apple, who is the "we" and "work
>> we are
>> doing..."? Are you or is your group working on the usability of OS X?
>> On
>> the accessibility of OS X? Just curious and wanted to clarify. You
>> can
>> take it offlist if you'd like.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> --JP
>>
>> Cell: 206-849-9032
>> Web: http://www.stanford.edu/~jpsc
>> LARS: http://trace.wisc.edu/linux
>> FDAWG: http://www.speechinfo.org/fdawg
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: kde-accessibility-admin@mail.kde.org
>> [mailto:kde-accessibility-admin@mail.kde.org]On Behalf Of
>> i.murray@ece.curtin.edu.au
>> Sent: Monday, November 18, 2002 12:11 AM
>> To: JP Schnapper-Casteras
>> Cc: Olaf Jan Schmidt; kde-accessibility@mail.kde.org
>> Subject: RE: [Kde-accessibility] Maintainer
>>
>> Hi all
>> I think I may be the the most difficult re timezones, +8GMT, so I will
>> fit
>> in
>> with you guys if I can. Re the newbie howto, I actually got the idea
>> from
>> reading the Gnome stuff, so I will probably use that as a base, why
>> re-invent
>> the wheel? ;-) From that I believe there is quite a deal of overlap
>> and also
>> with some work we are doing with Apple and getting OSX to talk in a
>> usable
>> manner. Apples pdf docs are actually pretty good in describing user
>> interfaces
>> and accessibility issues, even if they do not design accessability
into
>> their
>> OS.
>>
>> --
>> School of Electrical & Computer Engineering
>> Curtin University of Technology
>> GPO Box U1987
>> Perth 6845 Western Australia
>> Ph +61 8 92664540
>> Fax +61 9 92662584
>>
>>
>> Quoting JP Schnapper-Casteras <jpsc@stanford.edu>:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>> Sure, that sounds great. I'll be the "team leader" and all of
you
>> will
>>> be "Co-Maintainers" (or feel free to suggest another title).
>>>
>>> Regarding IRC, how about sometime on this Friday, Nov. 15th on
>>> irc.openproject.net #kde-access or something like that?
>>>
>>> I realize we're all probably in different time zones, but which times
>>> (or
>>> days, if Friday is bad) work well for you (in GMT/UTCor with
specified
>> time
>>> zone please :-))?
>>>
>>> Best,
>>>
>>> --JP
>>>
>>> P.S. Iain: Doing a newbie tutorial sounds great - you might also want
>>> to
>>> see
>>> if / where there is overlap with the "GNOME Accessibility for
>>> Developers"
>>> document (
>>> http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/guide/gad/index.html).
>>>
>>> Cell: 206-849-9032
>>> Web: http://www.stanford.edu/~jpsc
>>> LARS: http://trace.wisc.edu/linux
>>> FDAWG: http://www.speechinfo.org/fdawg
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
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>
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------
Bill Haneman x19279
Gnome Accessibility / Batik SVG Toolkit
Sun Microsystems Ireland