Friday August 05, 2005

Accessible PDF documents on Solaris!

I'm starting to feel a bit like fellow Sun blogger MaryMary - in my case unabashedly tooting the accessibility horn lately. But when you get a lot of good news, it can be hard to resist talking about it. On a lark last night I went over to the Adobe web site, and discovered that Adobe Reader 7 is now available for download for Solaris SPARC.

I've been playing with versions of Adobe Reader 7 for Linux for a while now (it works nicely with the Gnopernicus screen reader/magnifier on Linux - in Braille and speech and everything), and have been looking forward to Adobe releasing this for Solaris. Last night I downloaded it onto my Solaris 10 SPARC box, fired up Gnopernicus, loaded my PDF test pages, and found it worked like a charm! When I used the arrow keys to move tthrough the text, Gnopernicus spoke the letters and lines to me. Ctrl-arrowing through the text and the words were read aloud. Magnification smoothly tracked the caret movement. And all of the text appeared faithfully on my refreshible Braille display. Then I went over to a sample form, and had no trouble filling it out using the screen reader. How delightful! A company releases a major piece of software, and it is immediately accessible, out of the box - just as it should be! And hopefully we'll see an Adobe Reader 7 release for Solaris x86 soon... (2005-08-05 10:08:12.0) Permalink Comments [3]

Thursday August 04, 2005

2 million accessible desktops!

As has been noted elsewhere, there are now over 2 million registered Solaris 10 desktops out there in the field. Cool news for Sun. And I trust for our customers who are enjoying the many great features of Solaris 10. But this is also especially cool news for people with disabilities!

In the United States the unemployment rate for people with disabilities is frightingly high. We are rightly alarmed the the unemployment rate of black Americans is of over 10% (compared to the general unemployment rate of a touch over 4% - see THE EMPLOYMENT SITUATION: JUNE 2005). But if that figure is alarming, what about the 75-80% unemployment rate of blind Americans? That figure is overwhelming! And it highlights a tremendous waste of potential and contribution to our workplaces, communities, and planet.

Which is why I'm especially thrilled that there are now 2 million deployed, registered, accessible Solaris desktops out there since the release of Solaris 10 earlier this year. Because that means there are now 2 million desks out there at which someone who is blind can work - without the need for expensive, additional accessibility software. And the same goes for people with a severe physical disabilities, who also have an outrageously high unemployment rate (and of course peole with less severe physical disabilities can likewise take advantage of the numerous other accessibility features of the Solaris 10 desktop).

But returning for a moment to the blind and low vision community - as California Speaker pro Tempore Leland Yee has noted, among the 25-30% of the functionally blind who are employed, virtually all of them (93%) use Braille. In fact, the importance of Braille literacy has been stressed over and over again as critical for empowering the blind in work and education. Which is why I'm very proud that the 2 million registered Solaris 10 graphical desktops all support refreshible Braille displays. With Solaris 10 and a supported Braille display, blind programmers (using NetBeans or Oracle JDeveloper 10g) can be more efficient - easily reading the difference between a comma and a colon, rather than trying to hear it. Blind authors can easily verify that the text they've written is in boldface or italics in StarOffice and OpenOffice.org. And blind folks taking part in on-line chats and reading e-mail and browsing the web can more easily read the smilies and abbreviations that everyone uses! And the set of applications people with disabilities on Solaris 10 can use is growing daily, as the set of applications using the GNOME/GTK+ libraries and the Java/Swing libraries grows.

P.S. to the anonymous commenter who fairly points out that many Solaris 10 installations are in headless servers and not in desktops. This is a good point and absolutely true. Nontheless, administration of these systems is an important and often well-paying job, and with very few exceptions system administration is likewise accessible - which is really the key issue. The large and growing set of Solaris 10 systems is opening up new opportunities for people with disabilities to get jobs and gain and education and ... And that is pretty cool. (2005-08-04 20:10:41.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Tuesday August 02, 2005

GNOME 2.12 is coming - lots of new features, and accessibility keeps working

The open source GNOME project, to which Sun and others have been contributing a ton of accessibility work, is nearing its release of version 2.12. Since GNOME 2.2, the GNOME project has done an amazing job of sticking very close to a 6 month schedule, with GNOME 2.4, 2.6, 2.8, and 2.10 coming out like clockwork every 6 months.

In his prerelease tour of GNOME 2.12 Davyd Madeley highlights many of the new features and applications in GNOME 2.12. Of particular note for me is the inclusion of GTK+ 2.8, Cairo and glitz; and their use in rendering throughout the GNOME desktop. Among other features, this trio will render the GNOME desktop user interface in vector graphics, accellerated directly via OpenGL to the video card. When you think about accessibility they way it used to be done [err... still is done on all versions of Windows through Windows XP], such a huge change in the rendering system of the graphics and buttons and what-not of the desktop would break a ton of stuff for accessibility. Screen readers' ability to label bitmap images would break. Screen magnifiers would break. And any anti-aliased text rendered this way would be completely opaque to screen readers.

But none of this is a problem in GNOME. The same Gnopernicus screen reader & screen magnifier that is shipped with Solaris 10 (identical except for a few bug fixes in the last 6 months - having nothing to do with this new rendering system) works with GNOME 2.12 and all the new and nifty graphics features. Pretty cool! All thanks to Access by Contract - the approach of accessibility exclusively through supported programming interfaces instead of back-door hacks. (2005-08-02 11:48:00.0) Permalink