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GNOME GUI

Sun Announce GNOME Accessibility Lab 28

Posted by timothy from the stolen-lawn-ornaments,-look-ma-no-hands dept.
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.
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Sun Announce GNOME Accessibility Lab More

Sun Announce GNOME Accessibility Lab

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  • Sun has never been altruistic. THey are trying to take over Gnome or something. You can't trust them... Look how Java leads to Java Enterprise and how expensive it gets... Look at how much it costs to get a fully functional system when you download the 'free' Solaris. Sun only lies... They must not be trusted.
  • I know [X is] just a glorified, networkable display driver.

    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.

  • If you use an NES emulator such as NESten (Win32) or TuxNES (Linux), you might want to try out GNOME vs. KDE: Battle of the Desktops [8m.com], a hack of a port of Panel Action Bingo to NES. And it's free software!
    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]

  • Yes, but the ADA and marketing are just 1 motivation. You're too cynical.

    Don't forget about ethical motivations.

    People wanting to do the right thing

    Sun & IBM hire disabled employees that are very skilled, who need to be accomodated.

    Making software accessible makes it easier to design for small devices. Voice browsing with no screen is similar to use by a blind person. Having limited screen real-estate on a small device is similar to use by those with low vision on a large screen. Data entry with a keypad brings up similararites to use by the physically handicapped.

    Accessibility is often just good design, and makes the the user interface better for everyone. For example, keyboard support really sucks in most Linux GUI's.

  • >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.

    I thought that Windows was actually the platform with the best accessiblity? It had the most avalable software etc.. And the one person I know who used it because she was blind could use any software she wanted, including AOL.
  • 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.
  • accessibility has to be built in from the ground up -- not tacked on as some separate project.

    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

  • Its nice to see a company give back like this, with not much hope of huge returns. I cant imagine that the disabled market is a huge one, especially with an OS like linux/unix where fast typing and the command line rule...

    I mean, if you didnt set up these drivers and utilities, who would come after you? Reminds me of the Futurama eposide with Stephen Hawking in it...

    (ducks!)


    Simon
  • I have to commit I am GNU/Linux Fan since a long time and I am impressed what new software announcements and innovations are made nearly every day. In comparison with announcements from Microsoft as seen today "New Screenshots of Whistler" with some bigger icons and features like "A new shutdown" Button, I don't understand this world any more. I ever thougt most people reading slashdot understood the meaning of GNU/Linux and how it will change our world. But when I look at 200 Comments being made about Windows Screenshots, and 30 Comments being made about a Gnome Accessibility Lab, then I start to doubt. Can't we just move on and forget Windows?
  • 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.
  • I cant imagine that the disabled market is a huge one, especially with an OS like linux/unix where fast typing and the command line rule...

    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.

  • 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.
  • Sun Announce GNOME Accessibility Lab
    timothy post story.
    Me read headline.
    Me not understand why no "S".
    OOG hack timothy account?

  • 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.. :-)

  • Definately needed! (Score:3)

    by brokeninside ( 34168 ) on Friday September 22, 2000 @03:23AM (#762630)

    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

  • The timing could not be better. On page A16 of the New York Times and articles in many other Newspapers there is an article, "Clinton Focuses on Access Of Disabled to Computers." These efforts are in part geared towards those are unable to type. With $16 million in grant money it would be cool to see at least part of this money going toward Linux based solutions for people with disabilities.

    Check it out online at: http://www.nytimes.com/200 0/09/22/technology/22CLIN.html [nytimes.com] (Free registration required)
  • Here's a soft (virtual) keyboard that uses GTK:
    http://www.gnu.org/software/gtkeyboard/gtkeyboard. html [gnu.org]
    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.

  • Re:Good stuff! (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Actually, I suspect that SUN will get back far more than they invest, on designing for accessibility. Accessible design has the interesting side effect of making things more usefull/easier for the non-disabled to use.

    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

  • Fully Modular Software Disaster (Score:3)

    by 1010011010 ( 53039 ) on Friday September 22, 2000 @02:10AM (#762634) Homepage
    ... 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!

    ---- ----

  • morse code shell for one-button control (Score:3)

    by pehr ( 1992 ) on Friday September 22, 2000 @02:47AM (#762635) Homepage
    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.

  • it's about time (Score:3)

    by bcboy ( 4794 ) on Thursday September 21, 2000 @08:47PM (#762636) Homepage
    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?

  • I've found that trying to imagine how a blind user would find your software (or webpages) is a great way of abstracting the code. I do it as a matter of principle now.
  • > To do voice control you need fairly low level hooks in the gui

    Interesting you should mention that. I saw a talk by Jim Gettys earlier this year (he was one of the developers of X). He showed a videotape of adding speech control to X - 7 or 8 years ago!

    The reason it can be done is because X was designed under the assumption that they didn't know everything, so they made it easily extensible. They also kicked policy upstairs, so you can layer whatever policy you want on it.

    The wonders of knowing what you don't know - you end up with good design because you HAVE to layer / modularize.

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