Report from CSUN

[Janina Sajka]

Dear Friends:

The news here is very good. Exciting technologies will be in our hands by 
autumn. Let me elaborate just a little.

Sun Micro sponsored an entire day of sessions on the work in progress to 
make the GNOME desktop accessible. These sessions, held yesterday, where 
very well attended. Upwards of 150 people attended the opening overview 
session and the closing open discussion. Here's a quick rundown of what we 
learned:

GNOME 2.0, which is a major rewrite of GNOME in all respects, not just 
accessibility, is slated to ship late summer. 
Sun will ship their version shortly after. They're saying September. It 
will contain the accessibility api, Gnopernicus with speech, braille, and 
magnification support, an and an onscreen keyboard which had some of the 
folks with motor disabilities very excited. The gnopernicus demo used 
ViaVoice, though Sun's FreeTTS will be shipped with GNOME. Thomas 
Friehoff, Baum Retec AG
explained that gnopernicus work has only been ongoing since November. 
Baum took it on because they did not feel they could do anything on 
Windows any longer because the Windows market was saturated and dominated 
by just a few companies. Baum's first problem, therefore, was coming up 
to speed with linux/solaris programming. They also had to think hard 
about the GPL  because this was novel thinking to them. They're now fully 
behind it;

Anyone who wants to play with this technology now is welcome to do so. 
Be advised, though, that it's not stable, and you will need to build and 
install GNOME 2.0 by hand from the CVS tree;

Messaging between the various libraries involved is being achieved through 
XML. Among other advantages, this will enable gnopernicus to support 
speech and braille in many languages almost immediately;

Sun announced two development teams now at work on applications. Nine 
people have been tasked to add accessibility into Mozilla, but no 
availability date was offered. Likewise, a team is at work adding 
accessibility to StarOffice/OpenOffice, again with no ship date yet;

Among other things, I asked about support for smooth interaction among 
this new technology and those existing, console based technologies that 
many of us will certainly continue to use in many ways. I learned that one 
of the chief programmers working at Sun on the accessibility API uses 
speakup to write the api, and expects he will continue to use speakup for 
programming even after gnopernicus is available. Marc Mulcahy committed to 
write necessary drivers to support speakup under GNOME.


-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

Email: janina at afb.net		Phone: (202) 408-8175

Chair, Accessibility SIG
Open Electronic Book Forum (OEBF)
http://www.openebook.org