Overview
GNOME Accessibility Project Enhancements and Fixes
The goal of the GNOME Accessibility effort is to ensure that people with disabilities can use the standard GNOME desktop user environment. There are three sub-pieces to delivering such a desktop:
- Defining what it means to be accessible.
- Ensuring that all applications that comprise the GNOME desktop conform to that definition of accessibility.
- Building the assistive technologies that people with disabilities use in order to interact with the GNOME user environment.
IBM participated in the GNOME Accessibility project by contributing code, documentation, testing, bug fixes and enhancements related to the accessibility APIs (ATK and AT-SPI), GNOME speech, magnification, developer guidelines, the Accerciser inspect tool, the Linux® Screen Reader, accessibility preferences, and other accessibility bug fixes. This work is being continued by Sun Microsystems and through other open source community efforts.
Accerciser Inspect Tool for Linux ATK/AT-SPI
Accerciser is an interactive Python accessibility explorer. It uses AT-SPI to inspect and control widgets, allowing you to check if an application is providing correct information to assistive technologies and automated test frameworks. Accerciser has a simple plug-in framework you can use to create custom views of accessibility information.
IBM created the original prototype of Accerciser and donated it to the GNOME open source community, where it is being enhanced and maintained through Mozilla Foundation grants and other open source community efforts.
The Linux® Screen Reader (LSR) project is an open source effort to develop an extensible assistive technology for the GNOME desktop environment. The goal of the project is to create a reusable development platform for building alternative and supplemental user interfaces in support of people with diverse disabilities. The primary use of the LSR platform is to give people with visual impairments access to the GNOME desktop and productivity applications (e.g., Firefox, Eclipse) using speech, Braille, and screen magnification. The extensions packaged with the LSR core are intended to address these needs (or these features).
IBM created LSR as a robust platform for developing extensions and donated it to the GNOME open source community. Some components of LSR are being used in Accerciser and other GNOME open source assistive technologies.
Note: IBM is no longer actively developing the Linux Screen Reader. While LSR is still available through the GAP open source community, the current Linux GNOME platform screen reader is Orca, which is being developed by Sun Microsystems.
Last updated, July 27, 2007