Re: [orca-list] quality

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hey Jason:

You are mostly accurate here.  :-)  The only thing I'd change is that 
UltraSonix was originally the Mercator project, which was a joint 
collaboration between Sun, Georgia Tech, and DEC.  The public work 
really began around 1992 when we formed DACX, the Disability Action 
Committee for X.

The influence of RAP (the service-based API that Mercator used) on 
today's designs is for real.  When I was hired by Earl Johnson to work 
on the Java Accessibility API in January 1997, I applied the concepts of 
RAP to the work.  :-)  The Java Accessibility API ideas then fed into 
other areas, such as AT-SPI.

If I have one MAJOR regret for this whole thing, it's that we didn't 
provide a good specification for the event model in RAP.  This not only 
includes specifying the event types, but also the ordering of them.  In 
addition, I wish we had devised a way to specify a grouping of events 
based upon a single user action (e.g., a keypress).  With a tighter 
specification, I think a fair amount of complexity in the screen reader 
might go away.

Will

Jason White wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 11:11:31AM -0500, Albert E. Sten-Clanton wrote:
> > Will, this seems as good a time as any to express my appreeciation of the
> > unerringly constructive way you respond on this list to problems and
> > criticisms.  
>
> I fully agree. Also, I think we are fortunate to have the benefit of the
> knowledge, expertise and dedication that Will brings to the development of
> Orca.
>
> I first became aware of his involvement in about 1995 or 96, when I read
> papers published by the UltraSonix project, the first screen reader developed
> for the X Window System. As I understand it, this was the project in which the
> idea of an accessibility API was first proposed and implemented. Researchers
> at Sun and IBM extended this work in developing an accessibility API for Java,
> all of which laid the foundations for Gnome accessibility and eventually,
> Orca.
>
> As a matter of historical detail, I don't know where Microsoft obtained the
> idea of an accessibility API, but I wouldn't be surprised if it came from the
> UltraSonix work also. In those days, discussion of accessibility to graphical
> user interfaces, outside the UltraSonix project, was concerned with off-screen
> models and how unreliable the techniques were that attempted to extract
> information from the operating system about the user interface so as to
> construct and update these models. OS/2 Screen Reader had a reputation for
> doing this particularly well.
>
> What the UltraSonix researchers found, and documented in their papers, was
> that under the X Window System, it wasn't possible to extract the necessary
> details regarding the objects in the user interface in a reliable way, without
> modifying the user interface components to provide the required details, hence
> the move to an accessibility API.
>
> I hope I'm not rewriting history too much here; unless I'm terribly mistaken,
> this is roughly correct, even if some of the details aren't.
>
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