Wow! That sounds really great! Vic ----- Original Message ----- From: "Janina Sajka" <janina@xxxxxxx> To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca> Sent: Friday, March 22, 2002 4:29 PM Subject: Report from CSUN > 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 > > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup > >
