Making Accessibility Work in 2.8

Bill Haneman

&

Marc Mulcahy

Sun Microsystems /

The GNOME Accessibility Project

Intro

Accessibility + i18n = Universal Access

A11y lowers barriers to GNOME, and GNOME lowers barriers to computing

Accessibility is a key aspect of GNOME 2

See the Roadmap documents on gnome.org

... but what does that mean?

(I hope you attended Janina's talk)

Where we are today:

http://gnome.org/~calum/access-bugs.html

8 critical bugs, ~50 serious bugs

Assessment:

2.6 : Can be made to work, with some effort

Need some HEAD components for better results

2.8 : Reasonable level of functionality “out of the box” : (still at risk)

GOAL: disabled users can do all key tasks

Depends on regression control and attention by packagers, community

New in 2.6 / 2.8 :

Dasher

Accessible Login

Gdmlogin dialog accessible

'gestures' defined in gdm config can launch assistive technologies

New LoginHelper API in AT-SPI

Support for new X extensions:

Xfixes, Damage, Xevie

GOK i18n, other new features

Small stuff (accessx status, warning dialog)

In the Pipeline:

Gnome-braille (braille i18n, shared services)

CVS module gnome-braille

GOK ICCCM support (Openi18n.org)

Improved support from Mozilla and “*”Office

Some Challenges

TTS voices:

Lack of free non-English voices

Quality and flexibility issues with festival

Multimedia support

Captioning, etc.

DAISY reader project using GTK+

Really New Stuff

COMPOSITE X extension

Sphinx 4 speech recognition/command and control

Free license, but Java

KDE adoption of ATK (in time for 4.0 ?)

Python and orca

(CVS modules gnome-python and orca)

Learning from 2.6

Regression control...

Gtk+ issues with late integration of new widgets

How do we detect and handle behavior changes?

Accessibility testing of new apps?

Configuration problems... what to do?

We need your help!

Tell us what went well, what went wrong...

Making it Work

DOCS!

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/guide

Tell what you need, help us create them

Testing

Test articles from Wipro

Sanity test suites for accessibility

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/testing/a11y_sanity_suite.html

http://developer.../gap/testing/a11y_sanity_gnome_details.html

Tools

At-poke, brlmonitor, event-listener-test, test-speech

Getting it Out There

Distros

Self-install

Help!

And Beyond...

Test and automation harnesses

Kiosks

Cool stuff

GNOME to go

Q:

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/

gnome-accessibility-devel@gnome.org

gnome-accessibility-list@gnome.org

Gnome-access-bugs at basso dot sfbay dot sun dot com

2004-02-17T16:22:24