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From: | Peter Korn |
Subject: | [Access-activists] Re: Next Set of Tasks for GAI |
Date: | Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:44:51 -0700 |
User-agent: | Thunderbird 2.0.0.24 (Windows/20100228) |
Chris, Good start on topics. A few comments in-line below. Peter and Janina: if you haven't yet joined the access-activists mailing list, please do so as it is the home of our "insiders" whose advice we value highly so I needn't keep CC'ing you guys on emails to the list. It is low traffic and I expect it to stay that way for a while. I'm now subscribed.
We can point to a11y bug databases for these perhaps? Not all bugs necessarily, but... manually maintaining this might be a pain. A challenge also requires no prerequisites but is a much more substantial effort that probably requires a team as it will probably not be easy for a singleton. Yup. We might also include on this list things that have already received funding (e.g. making Evince parse accessibility information in the PDF and expose it properly to Orca). Also we have several AEGIS funded activities to put here (e.g. generating DAISY books, Braille embossing, and support for people with language-cognitive impairments creating & reading text documents - all FLOSS LGPL add-ons to OpenOffice.org, funded by AEGIS). A grand challenge is a really big project that requires a ton of effort and takes AT in a direction we may have not seen before. A key one here is speech dictation & control of the desktop. The obvious thing to build on here is Sphinx 4, a FLOSS speech recognition engine. VEDICS is a new project out of India to building on Sphinx 4 and the GNOME a11y API/framework to do this. Another is what I broadly call "3rd generation assistive technologies" - utilizing the accessibility API info on the GNOME desktop to go beyond what current GUI-based (and reverse-engineering-based [or 2nd generation] AT does today. AEGIS is helping start this in the magnification space, but there is a lot more to do there. WYNN-style AT for the entire desktop is another significant effort. Not sure if it is a "grand challenge" or just a "challenge". Depends in part on how far it goes.
Why not have this as part of the task list?
A number of the folks (e.g. me) who participate in GNU accessibility will not want to be part of any sort of public shaming. I appreciate the idea, and also the need for it. But we should be careful about what is done in various folks names. At a minimum, I would like some distance from whoever does this. Another thing to keep in mind: what is the charter of GNU? GNU regularly addresses abuse of FLOSS, regularly speaks out against DRM, etc. But where should GNU come down on a website which may or may not be using FLOSS tools (e.g. Apache), which may or may not support FLOSS user agents (e.g. Firefox), but has a bad accessibility story/support. Should GNU accessibility only speak to accessibility, separate from where an organization stands on FLOSS/freedom support? Should it only criticize our "friends" (in the "freedom" sense) who are blowing it around accessibility? Only criticize those who blow it in all areas?
Yup. See AEGIS Concept Coding Framework add-in to OpenOffice.org, to be announced soon. It is an entry in this broad space; others are needed (e.g. TextHelp-style apps). And also I think with AT-SPI we can do some desktop-wide things that would be very powerful.
Yes indeed. I'd add to that list - perhaps as a "second tier" - IM, audio & video chat, and calendar (e.g. Lightning add into Thunderbird). Music software is also always popular, particularly among the blind. We then also have constellations of apps that are popular/important for particular disability groups. E.g. scanning software for the blind, dictionary/thesaurus software for folks with writing impairments, environmental control for folks with physical disabilities.
Regards, Peter --
Peter Korn | Accessibility Principal Phone: +1 650 5069522 500 Oracle Parkway | Redwood City, CA 94065 Oracle is committed to developing practices and products that help protect the environment |
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