Wednesday September 07, 2005

Accessibility hilights from aKademy 2005

Last month was the yearly KDE Developers and Users Conference. As they have in years past, the good folks from the KDE Accessibility Project hosted several talks on accessibility. This year there were two talks in the accessibility "track" on Tuesday September 30th.

Gary Cramblitt, Hynek Hanke, and Jan Buchal gave a presentation on Text-to-Speech Solutions for KDE for accessibility. Hynke and Jan are with the Czech company Brailcom, who developed Speech Dispatcher, an open source software layer for communicating with software text-to-speech engines. Much of the talk discussed improvements to kttsd - the KDE text-to-speech daemon - in order to support Speech Dispatcher. Audio and video of their presentation is available in (of course) the open source Ogg format (you may need an Ogg player for your platform). Note to those following the recordings: skip past the first 20 minutes or so, while they were ironing out technical problems... Read more about KTTS by Gary Cramblitt, and a PDF presentation on Speech Dispatcher with KTTS by Hynek Hanke

The second accessibility presentation at aKademy 2005 was given by Olaf Schmidt, Hynek Hanke, and Jan Buchal - titled "Changes needed in KDE4 to increase accessibility". Alas I wasn't able to locate slides for it, but audio and video are available for download (again in Ogg format). It was a good presentation, covering the basic support in KDE already, as well as what is coming in KDE4 - support for the AT-SPI open source accessibility architecture developed by the GNOME Accessibility Project.

It is really great to see how warmly and deeply the UNIX desktop communities are embracing accessibility. And further, it is great to see that "Not Invented Here Syndrome", which so often affects commercial companies, is not preventing these disparate desktops (KDE and GNOME) from agreeing on a common set of goals and approaches to UNIX accessibility. (2005-09-07 22:38:15.0) Permalink