Invitation to accessibility workgroup

[Hynek Hanke]

Hello everyone,

computer accessibility (for physically or mentally disabled people, as well as
for children and even ordinary users) is very closely related to multimedia.
For example most of the blind users rely on their sound output during all the
time they are working with computers and it's essential for them that it's fast
and reliable.

During our work on making computers accessible for the blind, we found out
there is currently not any good solution for the multimedia framework that we
could use. Maybe our requirements are unusual in some aspects, although I
believe all of them are important also for other fields of use of multimedia.

This issue was discussed on a recent meeting by the Free Standards Group
in the end of January and the conclusion was made that we would try to put
down our basic requirements and then try to see how can we have them fulfilled
in the Free Software world in near future. We are seeking help of the
multimedia community but we are also ready to help with the development of these
missing features ourselves.

I'd like to invite the multimedia developers who would like to seriously
participate in these discussions to the mailing list:

        accessibility at lists.freedesktop.org
        http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/accessibility

This mailing list currently includes many of the Free Software accessibility
and accessibility-related developers around the world including developers from
projects/companies such as GNOME, KDE, FSG Accessibility Workgroup, IBM, Sun
Microsystems, SuSE/Novell, Trolltech and Free(b)Soft. It's a general topic
accessibility group targeted at cooperation among the projects and
at the standardization process.

In the first round of the discussion, I would like to create and agree on
a list of all the core requirements of accessibility. I'm going
to post a start document with the conclusions we have reached so far
to the mailing list early next week.

I hope we will finally be able to work towards the solution of this problem
which is currently a great pain for the accessibility developers.

With regards & Thanks for your participation,
Hynek Hanke
http://www.freebsoft.org/