GNOME Accessibility Update

[Janina Sajka]

I thought folks on this list would appreciate the following
progress report on GNOME accessibility:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bill Haneman <bill.haneman at Sun.COM>

As Marc indicated things are pretty busy here.  The GNOME architecture
and initial implementations of the APIs are nearly complete, we are
working in several areas.

GNOME 2 is nearing community 2.0(.0) release.  We are hoping to get the
kinks ironed out with regard to keyboard navigation and theme support. 
We are working on some GTK+ themes for low vision including
high-contrast and large-size icons (which have been done tigert and
jimmac in the GNOME community).

ATK support for the base GTK+ library is substantially complete and we
expect to have reasonable support for the core GNOME 2 desktop.  Apps
like gedit, gcalc, gnome-terminal, etc and the GNOME 2 panel are
substantially accessible, though many bugs remain.

Currently I am integrating the Java Accessibility API into the at-spi
services, so that Java applications using the Java Foundation Classes
will be accessible in the GNOME environment.

Work is well underway in the open assistive technology projects as well,
'gok' the virtual keyboard suite, and the 'gnopernicus' screen reader. 
Our test tools for at-spi are also continuing to develop.

We have a wish list; in addition to getting close to being able to
integrate contributions of speech and braille drivers, we need:

* a "virtual DDX" for XFree86 (that is, a way to create a virtual
display framebuffer within a regular X Server instance), for
magnification;

* assistance in improving the performance of our basic screen
magnification service;

* a volunteer to port an upcoming new X extension for keysnooping to
XFree86;

* someone willing to tackle the issues of accessibility for an open PDF
viewer;

* people to port applications, test accessibility, and log bugs.

best regards,

Bill

> Best,
> 
> --JP
> 
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