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Sun Announce GNOME Accessibility Lab
CC writes "LinuxWorld Australia is reporting that Sun are establishing an accessibility technologies lab to build utilities and device drivers so that GNOME can be brought to those who cannot access a computer via the keyboard. Interesting moves from Sun this week." So far, this is all future tense -- "will begin working" and so on -- but any moves which increase the accessability of systems running Free software to the keyboard-impaired are good for everyone, at the very least for the way they force a re-evaluation of The Best Way To Do X.
People such as yourself have launched on huge "let's throw away X" projects before. All such projects inevitably stumble and fall after the core developers realise there's far more to a windowing system than just "networkable display drivers".
Rather than attack X you should identify the faults in X and fix them. If you have definite proof that the X architecture is so flawed that it can't be saved, you should publish a paper and educate all those idiots working on XFree86 so they don't waste any further time.
Or perhaps it's possible that the people who work on XFree86 know more about this topic than you do.
With the AOL/Sun iPlanet deal Sun has a lot of influence over Netscape. They are also directly paying for both the Java support and the SSL implementation.
Is there a place to find information on the problems with the X architecture that are setting it back? It's hard for me to believe that the win32 gui or the mac gui architectures are so well-designed.
I for one use the remote networking features of X almost daily, and would miss them greatly on other platforms. I guess you are saying X was designed poorly compared to the other options, and I would like to see some technical information on it's problems.
Thanks.
I can't understand why anyone would want KDE to dissapear, what purpose would it serve? This article wasn't even concerning KDE, why bring it up.. it's good to be happy about GNOME's success, but there is no need to flame KDE over it.
This is quite true. That is one of the benefits of Bonobo. Low level GUI hooks are there to be hooked onto by whatever you want.
--BEn
Let's compare two bits of rhetoric.
(1) "Sun Microsystems has always promoted the tenets of Universal Design, which hold that products, solutions, and services should be developed to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without adaptation or specialised design," said Marco Boerries, vice president and general manager of webtop and application software at Sun Microsystems. (from the article)
(2) Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT") is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software - any time, any place and on any device. (from every Microsoft press-release)
In its rush to foist NT dominance on the rest of the IT world, Microsoft has done more, perhaps, than anyone to undermine the accessibility of computers to people with visual disabilities. It takes true vision and compassion for Sun to learn from Microsoft's failures and perform a truly noble deed. That is enlightened self interest at its very best.
Actually, the "openness", scriptability & stuff that un*x apps tend to have are good things for accessibility. Basically, the only thing a disabled person would need is a fully speech-controlled emacs (w/ a package manager), and a web browser (Mozilla 1.0-pre-2?).
Who among the disabled would care about the gnome? Virtual desktops are the only necessary WM component, and MS will never be able to implement a functional virtual desktop. They have their motto, worst is better, after all.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
It seems that Sun is willing to put a lot of resources into helping Linux become a success on the desktop. With the GPL'ing of StarOffice and Mozilla, the developers they are putting onto the GNOME project they are linning up to be the biggest backer of desktop Linux projects. Thanks Sun.
You realize that if you hadn't replied to that post, there wouldn't have been any mention of the issue on Score:1 or higher which is where most of us read :)
Well at the time Cardinal's post hadn't been marked as flamebait.. :-)
My wife is disabled and has only partial use of one arm. Her biggest challenge to using Linux is the lack of stable, intuitive, feature rich sticky keys. On Windows, she runs sticky keys and selects which keys she wants to be sticky (typically, shift, alt and cntl). She hits the key once to make only the next letter she types affected by the sticky key or twice to make all characters affected until she hits the sticky key again.
The best Xfree86 program I've found will do one or the other of the above but not both (you can configure the program to react one way or the other but not both ways depending on how you hit the sticky key).
Sticky keys, keyboard free input, speech recognition and voice synthesis are IMHO the most important areas that need to be improved under Linux (and the BSDs).
What good is a revolution if we leave people out by design?
regards,
-l
Here's a soft (virtual) keyboard that uses GTK:. html
http://www.gnu.org/software/gtkeyboard/gtkeyboard
It can do QWERTY and some international layouts, and even the OPTI layout (similar to FITALY but faster). You can run X, Emacs, etc. with just the mouse. It has word completion too (similar to what Stephen Hawking uses, but GPLed), which speeds up text entry.
Speech controlled PC's come to mind as one very usefull thing. [ No more trying to find the mouse cursor, because the person who wrote the os didn't conceive that one might not be able to see a mouse cursor.]
Screen reading programs work, but only when the screen they are reading is well designed. Something that is true for very little software.
If SUN gets software using the GNOME interface to be consistently well designed, that would be a major step towards increasing the accessability of that software by everybody. A lesson that could be learned by that company on the other side of Lake Washington.
xan
... and it's not even fully modular.
The Best Way To Do X is, of course, to chuck it out and replace it with something better. Mark this as flamebait if you must, but the X architecture is too complicated, creaky, and old to support the new features everyone wants in an efficient way. The only advantage of X is remote display, and 95% of the time no one uses it. And, surely that can be provided in another, better, graphics system. A new system can take into account the improvements in hardware and user interface design made in the last 20 years. And, X Defenders, don't jump on me to point out that X isn't a user interface. I know it's just a glorified, networkable display driver. But its limitations are imposed on any toolkits that use it. GTK cannot do anything that X cannot -- unless it ignores X (see the Gnome Canvas). And please don't jump on me pointing to the installed base of applications. So what? Rewrite. IT happens all the time. And any new system can provide an X interface for backwards compatibility.
Do we want to continue to emulate the limited systems of the past, or truly create something new and good? Or will the world have to continue to use the Macintosh if they want a good user interface? Mac OS X does look pretty schweet!
---- ----
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I've been working for the last year
to build a morse-code shell that
has voice and speach synthesized feedback.
http://morseall.org
I don't have many users yet, but I'd
love to hear comments and feedback.
Please try it and let me know how
it works for you. Sound can be
turned off from the config file.
Combined with autologin, it feels like
it is at the point of being reliably
useful for quadrapalegics in need of
a reliable terminal.
gnome/gtk developers have been ignoring this for quite some time, in spite of it coming up several times. To do voice control you need fairly low level hooks in the gui (so, for example, you can add menu options to the current vocabulary, or read them to blind users). accessibility has to be built in from the ground up -- not tacked on as some separate project.
From the article:
Later in the year, Sun is planning on sponsoring a summit meeting that will bring together experts, partners, and contributors to kick off the GNOME open source accessibility.
We definitely need a representative from the KDE project at this meeting! Here's why:
Everyone agrees on the necessity for accessibility standards on the Linux desktop. Sun has great expertise in this area with their accessibility team - folks who brought us Java Accessibility - often considered to be better designed than MSAA (Microsoft Active Accessibility). This is partly because they were able to learn from the mistakes in MSAA. Likewise, open source accessibility should be that much better.
Sun will likely be doing something like Java Accessibility for Gnome/StarOffice. However, KDE must and should have input into this process from the absolute beginning, since everyone will benefit from the work. Is there a person at KDE who is knowledgeable regarding the architecture and clued into accessibility? We really must find some way of getting them to this meeting. Something as important to everyone as accessibility should not be about politics. If KDE has a different standard for accessibility on the desktop, it will be a mess for print-disabled users such as the blind and visually impaired. Having standards would also allow speech recognition software and input-assisting technology for the physically disabled input to more easily work seamlessly with a mixture of Gnome and KDE software.
Comments please?
Smoke a swan, smoke a fish, smoke a Swanson's fish dinner.