Re: [g-a-devel] Status of IBM a11y

[Peter Korn <Peter Korn Sun COM>]

Hi Jason,

As someone working for one of those small number of companies working on 
GNOME, Mozilla, etc. accessibility, I couldn't agree with you more.  I 
am appreciative of the contributions IBM has made to our work - perhaps 
in the future we will see a resumption of their effort.

I also want to recognize some of the (now not so) new - and wonderfully 
steady - contributions from the Ubuntu accessibility effort.  They are 
bringing wonderful energy to our community, and also doing a lovely job 
of bringing Summer of Code funding, which in turn can help foster new 
engineering talent into the field.

We also have a growing body of individual contributors to specific 
pieces of the overall accessibility task.  In particular, the Orca 
project has gathered a growing collection of folks making significant 
contributions.  I fear I might miss some if I tried to name them (the 
Orca change logs tell this tale much more eloquently in any case).  I 
think one way we grow the community is around specific accessibility 
needs like vision impairments.

One place I continue hoping will become a real source of energy are the 
disability organizations - like various national organizations for the 
blind.  For so very long the primary - and perhaps sole - tool of 
disability organizations to improve technology access has been 
advocacy.  Disability organizations pushing industry through letters and 
laws and lawsuits to develop accessible products and technology.  But 
open source provides a new and powerful tool to disability organizations 
and the disability community overall.  I encourage everyone who is a 
member of a disability organization on this alias to consider ways of 
having those organizations formally get involved in improving open 
source accessibility solutions.  So many of these organizations have as 
a goal increasing the digital literacy of their constituents, and 
improving their access information, services, and the Internet.  Also 
improving the dismal rates of employment of people with disabilities.  
Open source accessibility is one of the best vehicles I can think of to 
move rapidly on those goals.


Separate from all that, as someone who has been part of the GNOME and 
OpenOffice.org accessibility efforts since their beginning (and part of 
the Mozilla accessibility effort since the start of the UNIX portion of 
it), I very much welcome any suggestions you have for what I and Sun can 
do to further help bring more developers from a wider spectrum of 
organizations into our community. 


Regards,

Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

> On Fri, Jun 01, 2007 at 03:01:50PM -0400, David Bolter wrote:
>   
> > That was painful to read.
> >     
>
> I've been concerned for some time that much of the work involved in creating accessibility support for Gnome, Mozilla, etc., has fallen to a small number of corporate-sponspored developers. That corporate support can change, or evaporate, at any time, as perceptions of business needs or other priorities alter.
>
> What worries me is not that these projects are supported and sponsored, in large part, by corporations - this is true of other free software projects as well - but, rather, that there appears to be a concentration of expertise in a small number of companies which end up doing a lot of the actual development work.
>
> I'm not sure how to change this, but for the future of accessibility in Linux, especially in Gnome, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc., I think it would be a healthier community if the responsibility were spread out more among developers working for a wider spectrum of organizations. That is, accessibility support needs to become more of a community effort than it now is.
>
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