Re: Accessibility and the recent GNOME announcement

[Peter Korn <peter korn sun com>]

Hi JP,

> ...[URL to an announcement from Sun, Wipro, and Ximian]...
>
>      My question for the list and more specifically for
> the actual hackers at Sun is "With your added manpower
> and fulltime hackers, do you forsee any changes in how
> the community is involved?"  A follow  that is less
> GNOME specific is "Do you think you're goals would be
> attainable without all the full-time hackers you have
> and have recently acquired?"  I ask because I'm also
> involved in KDE Accessibility, a project / issue for
> which there is no similar corporate support.

Making a desktop accessible is a very large undertaking.  You need the
following big things (and a number of other smaller things too):

 1. an Accessibility architecture for the desktop
 2. assistive technologies for the desktop
 3. building blocks for assistive technologies (text-to-speech, etc.)
 4. *all* of the applications (well, at least one of each kind) to
    implement the accessibility architecture for the desktop

Of these, #1, #2, and #3 are fairly bounded tasks, if complex, challenging,
and requiring a number of dedicated engineers.  Whether or not these tasks
can be done without corporate funding is, I think, and open question.  Sun
has provided some of the funding for some of these for the GNOME desktop, and
that funding has been critical to the speed with which everything is
happening.

But #4 is a potentially unbounded task - it depends upon how you define the
"applications of the desktop", and of course how many common re-usable user
interface pieces those applications share.  In a different market climate, or
with fewer applications, or with a less urgent schedule, it may have been
possible to get #4 without additional corporate support.  But given the
present market conditions and our aggressive schedule, we felt that it was
appropriate to specifically support the efforts needed for #4.


Can this happen without corporate support?  That's a big, contentious, and
somewhat religious question.  It hasn't happened (for accessibility) in the
past that I'm aware of.  Certainly one explicit aspect of the open source
model is to harness individual corporate needs (and funding), along with
individual desires (and self-funding) towards the common good for all.  And
Sun's priorities and funding for accessibility are an obvious addition to the
common good.


On the specifics of KDE, my suggestions to you and the KDE accessibility
community are:  

 1. Re-use as much of the GNOME Accessibility architecture as you can.
    We've gone to considerable lengths to make that as possible as we
    could.  You can re-use the AT, the AT-SPI, and potentially even the
    ATK libraries.  

 2. Find companies who are relying on KDE for their desktop offerings,
    and evangelize accessibility to them.  If they want it, they may be
    willing to help make it a reality.  Money rarely hurts...

We (the engineers working on GNOME Accessibility here at Sun, if I may take
the liberty to speak on their behalf) would very much like to see KDE be
accessible, and specifically accessible in a way that is compatible with the
GNOME Accessibility architecture. In fact, that name is more and more
inappropriate - it's really more of the GNU Accessibility architecture, as so
much of it is not tied to GNOME (and certainly not to GTK+).  Java
applications will work with it, as will StarOffice and Netscape (none of
which are really "GNOME" applications in the traditional sense).


Regards,

Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team