Report from CSUN

[Victor Tsaran]

Wow! That sounds really great!
Vic

----- Original Message -----
From: "Janina Sajka" <janina at afb.net>
To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2002 4:29 PM
Subject: Report from CSUN


> 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
>
>
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>