Re: Meeting Minutes Published - November 11, 2010

[Steve Lee <steve fullmeasure co uk>]

On 18 December 2010 06:46, Peter Korn <peter korn oracle com> wrote:

Cesar,

However, IMHO, I think that this approach could be taken into account for some new
AT projects, especially those less dependant on specific api's (for instance, I'm thinking
of AAC software). Beyond probably increasing funding opportunities (according to previous
comments in this thread), a larger user base could be reached. Is just my opinion.

This is already being done.  Dasher is already cross-platform.  The plug-ins to Open Office to generate DAISY books or print to braille are cross-platform (well, the braille part will be on other platforms soon).  Etc. 

Having been involved in an attempt at making a cross-platform screen reader (we wanted to make the new outSPOKEN both for Windows and Mac - and I had an experimental port to SunOS going back in the day), I'm of the opinion that the overhead cost in abstracting the different approaches & hooks & such for the different platforms is likely not worth the cost - vs. just developing separate efforts which share ideas.


Peter

I kinda agree with both of you. Have platform agnostic AT will [potentially] increase the diversity of the community and so [potentially] improve sustainability. However it also adds considerable development complexity and support burden, especially when you consider we now need to include mobile/tablet platforms now such as Android and iOS. There is also project management complexity as each platform may pull in different directions due to variations in platform conventions and usages.

With Maavis [1] I was careful to consider portability with GNOME in mind, even though the original requirement was Win32 only. Accordingly I used Mozilla XUL (actually Firefox) and llimited the contacts points with the platform by using VLC for media playing, XPCOM components for process launch/control and TTS (SAPI), plus an Outfox Python server is used for (video calling (Skype for win32) and switch (joystick) input. I'm fully aware that even with this care in architecture that supporting several platforms will be plenty of work.

1: maavis.fullmeasure.co.uk

-- 
Steve Lee

Full Measure - open source accessibility - http://fullmeasure.co.uk