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IBM Beats Microsoft Over the Head With Their Own Code

Posted by Zonk on from the ow-that-if-statement-hurts dept.

bednarz writes "IBM has added a twist to its new commitment to help OpenOffice.org battle Microsoft Office by donating code that was originally derived in part from a Microsoft-developed technology. IBM's iAccessible2, code-named Project Missouri, is a specification for technology used to help the visually impaired interact with Open Document Format (ODF)-compliant applications and was developed in part using Microsoft Active Accessibility (MAA). 'When the specification was donated to the Linux Foundation, Oracle, Sun, and SAP committed to help with future development. Mozilla is committed to incorporating it into its Firefox browser, and vendors GW Micro and Freedom Scientific will also use it in their own screen reader products. In addition, Project Missouri has won accolades from the American Association of People with Disabilities, the American Foundation for the Blind, and the National Federation of the Blind in Computer Science.'"

12 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Microsoft says... Thanks! by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't know where "beats Microsoft over the head" comes in. IBM is donating Microsoft-developed code that empowers the blind to use software better.

    Gee, I'm sure MS doesn't want that kind of bad PR...

    Next up: Bill Gates donates large sums to the UN to help with immunizations! Oh, MS! BURRRNN!

    1. Re:Microsoft says... Thanks! by PJ1216 · · Score: 4, Informative

      It's just saying that in the war to bring down MS Office being the unofficial standard as office documents (though, is trying real hard to become a standard), MS code will play a role against MS.

      Microsoft code will be used to help out a product in direct competition with Microsoft. That's where the article headline comes from.

    2. Re:Microsoft says... Thanks! by Stalus · · Score: 4, Informative

      I work at IBM with some of the folks that designed IA2, so let me fill in what you're missing. There is NO Microsoft-developed code here at all, AFAIK.

      Microsoft has an event system (MSAA) in Windows that is designed to pass COM objects from applications to screen readers. They also designed an interface that provides information like an object's role and label (e.g. a button labeled submit). Unfortunately, this interface (IAccessible) has been entirely inadequate, but what do you expect from something designed for Windows 95? Instead of extending the interface, Microsoft has decided to pursue UI Automation, which screen readers don't/can't support yet.

      IBM used their experience to design a more complete interface, named IAccessible2. They then showed how you can use the Windows MSAA event system to pass around COM objects that can expose the IAccessible2 interface. Then, they worked with screen reader manufacturers and other companies (Microsoft didn't participate AFAIK) to make sure there was a complete solution - an interface is useless if no one uses it.

      Now, for the part Open Office cares about - The real code for OO.org is that you have to implement these interfaces for all of your widgets. For Lotus Note 8, IBM used editors similar to Open Office and implemented and tested this interface for all of these widgets (menus, rich text, yadda yadda). Now IBM is donating some of that code, which has the potential to make Open Office more accessible and more robust with screen readers than Word.

  2. sensational headlines by pembo13 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    These sensational headlines are kinda getting boring.

    --
    "Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
    1. Re:sensational headlines by Poromenos1 · · Score: 4, Funny

      I don't know what this "backslashdot" you speak of is, but it sounds bad.

      --
      Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
    2. Re:sensational headlines by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 5, Funny

      It's the bizarro-slashdot. Interesting stories. Expertly-edited summaries. Insightful and intelligent discussion.

    3. Re:sensational headlines by somersault · · Score: 3, Funny

      Unfortunately it is filled with Microsoft zealots and Linux shills >_>

      With regards to TFA, would you really WANT Microsoft code in anything? Ack.

      --
      which is totally what she said
  3. Wow! by Otter · · Score: 5, Funny

    This is now even more promising: a Microsoft spec, Lotus Notes code and a Brooksian army of offshored developers! It's hard to imagine how this couldn't work!

    --
    What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
  4. There are a bunch of accessibility features... by bmajik · · Score: 4, Interesting

    in the Microsoft platform that many people never see or think about. We end up making extensive use of them for automated testing, actually.

    It turns out that the same sort of API that makes it easier to build accessible products, whereby you can ask any UI element about its current visibility, text, or whatever, is also good for writing test automation. When you couple that with the ability to send windows events or messages to an arbitrary control, now you've got something foundational for doing automated UI testing in a pretty robust way.

    Internally we work pretty hard on accessibility features because they're great for enabling users with different adaptive needs, they're required to sell to many government offices, and because they're excellent for our internal testing efforts.

    --
    My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
  5. The article it wrong; IBM work is not from MS IP by peterkorn · · Score: 5, Informative
    IAccessible2 is an extension to IAccessible, the core accessible object in Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA). It supplements the MS-defined information with a ton of stuff that is missing and is needed to provide real support for assistive technologies (vs. the very limited job Microsoft did). IAccessible2 is actually a port of the GNOME Accessibility API that Sun developed and brought to the GNOME community (see ATK and AT-SPI from the GNOME SVN repository). That was in turn derived from the Java Accessibility API, of which I am a co-author.

    More specifically, the IAccessible2 header files are copied almost directly from the OpenOffice.org UNO Accessibility API - the IAccessible2 headers contain a Sun copyright! See http://blogs.sun.com/korn/date/20070910 and http://blogs.sun.com/korn/date/20061214 for more on this.

  6. Re:Reading incorrectly by jimicus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Bear in mind that it's probably fairly old code.

    I daresay IBM were granted sublicensing rights at a time when Microsoft hadn't even considered that such a license as the GPL could exist, let alone be in any sort of common use. I bet you anything you like they wouldn't license code in such a way today.

  7. Re:The article it wrong; IBM work is not from MS I by peterkorn · · Score: 4, Informative
    Bill,

    This is precisely why the license for OOo changed to LGPL (which happened just prior to OOo 2.0). Under the previous license, code did not need to be contributed back (and the OOo derived functionality in IBM's Lotus Notes 8 came from OOo 1.9.x). The big news in the IBM announcement is that IBM is returning to the community from whence it forked OOo, and contributing back (many? most? all) of their changes. One thing that is being highlighted (and discussed in this thread and erroneously attributed to a Microsoft original source) is that among their first contributions back is the newly created by them Windows edition of the accessibility work that they derived from OOo.