Dear Friends: The news here is very good. Exciting technologies will be in our hands by autumn. Let me elaborate just a little. Sun Micro sponsored an entire day of sessions on the work in progress to make the GNOME desktop accessible. These sessions, held yesterday, where very well attended. Upwards of 150 people attended the opening overview session and the closing open discussion. Here's a quick rundown of what we learned: GNOME 2.0, which is a major rewrite of GNOME in all respects, not just accessibility, is slated to ship late summer. Sun will ship their version shortly after. They're saying September. It will contain the accessibility api, Gnopernicus with speech, braille, and magnification support, an and an onscreen keyboard which had some of the folks with motor disabilities very excited. The gnopernicus demo used ViaVoice, though Sun's FreeTTS will be shipped with GNOME. Thomas Friehoff, Baum Retec AG explained that gnopernicus work has only been ongoing since November. Baum took it on because they did not feel they could do anything on Windows any longer because the Windows market was saturated and dominated by just a few companies. Baum's first problem, therefore, was coming up to speed with linux/solaris programming. They also had to think hard about the GPL because this was novel thinking to them. They're now fully behind it; Anyone who wants to play with this technology now is welcome to do so. Be advised, though, that it's not stable, and you will need to build and install GNOME 2.0 by hand from the CVS tree; Messaging between the various libraries involved is being achieved through XML. Among other advantages, this will enable gnopernicus to support speech and braille in many languages almost immediately; Sun announced two development teams now at work on applications. Nine people have been tasked to add accessibility into Mozilla, but no availability date was offered. Likewise, a team is at work adding accessibility to StarOffice/OpenOffice, again with no ship date yet; Among other things, I asked about support for smooth interaction among this new technology and those existing, console based technologies that many of us will certainly continue to use in many ways. I learned that one of the chief programmers working at Sun on the accessibility API uses speakup to write the api, and expects he will continue to use speakup for programming even after gnopernicus is available. Marc Mulcahy committed to write necessary drivers to support speakup under GNOME. -- Janina Sajka, Director Technology Research and Development Governmental Relations Group American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) Email: janina at afb.net Phone: (202) 408-8175 Chair, Accessibility SIG Open Electronic Book Forum (OEBF) http://www.openebook.org
