Re: [orca-list] Possibly Forking Gnome 2

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com> wrote:
 
> What you suggest like helping out with individual projects such as
> LibreOffice accessibility, Firefox access, or helping out with KDE 4
> accessibility does seem like a more realistic goal than maintaining a
> Gnome 2 fork. Plus by hitching myself to an existing desktop or app I
> can insure my work actually makes it into the major distributions, and
> isn't just some optional desktop that may or may not get packaged for
> distribution x. There are certain apps like LibreOffice and Firefox
> that will be in someone's package repo no matter what. So I think you
> convinced me that lending my help elsewhere is the right thing to do.

It is. Now here's what I think needs to happen for the accessibility of X
desktop environments and applications to improve significantly:

There needs to be a group of people who are familiar with the ATK/AT-SPI
technology, and whose job it is to work with various projects (desktop
environments and applications) to maintain and improve their accessibility
support, and to improve the release processes to avoid regressions.

Without such an effort, I don't think we'll see consistent support over the
long term.

My own interest is in other approaches to accessibility that don't involve
significant modifications to the source code of applications. For example,
Emacspeak works by using the extension language of Emacs (in which much of
Emacs itself is written) to provide a spoken interface; ChromeVox takes a
similar approach, with only minor modifications to the browser that can be
subjected to automated testing. For Web accessibility and Aria, there are
interesting approaches, for example AxsJax, which modifies the HTML content on
the client side to insert missing Aria attributes - much easier than the
patch/compile/install process required of desktop applications, and all that
is needed is some Javascript to improve the accessibility.