Thursday September 08, 2005 
The collected occasional commentary by Peter Korn, Accessibility Architect at Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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Peter Korn's Weblog The collected occasional commentary by Peter Korn, Accessibility Architect at Sun Microsystems, Inc. |
Thursday September 08, 2005 GNOME 2.12 is outRight on schedule, GNOME 2.12 was released yesterday. One of the ongoing accessibility success stories from the open source desktop communities - led by the GNOME community - is the extent to which they not only embrace accessibility, but actually are defining themselves by it. Here is an excerpt from the start page for GNOME 2.12 (emphasis added):
GNOME's focus is ease of use, stability, and first class internationalization and accessibility support, so that GNOME and its applications are usable by anyone, anywhere. GNOME runs on a variety of platforms, including GNU/Linux (commonly called Linux), Solaris, HP-UX, BSD and Apple's Darwin. Work has been done in this release to make it easier to port GNOME tools to Windows as well.
As I noted last month GNOME 2.12 includes lots of new features, with accessibility support remaining as strong as ever. It contains updated versions of the GNOME On-screen Keyboard (GOK), the Gnopernicus screen reader & magnifier, and the keyboard input alternative Dasher. Another cool thing about GNOME 2.12: you can download a Live CD of it. That means if you have an x86 box (perhaps one running that other operating system) you can easily take GNOME 2.12 for a spin with this self-booting CD that'll otherwise leave your existing OS intact and unharmed. Using the Live CD is quite easy. After getting and burning it, put it into the CD-ROM drive of an x86 box and reboot. Based on the Ubuntu distro (the self-proclaimed "Linux for Human Beings"), after a pair of presses of the ENTER key to tell it "yes I want to boot", and "yes, I'm using a US keyboard", I was shown a login screen briefly, which then after a timeout brought me to the desktop (and played a lovely sound for me in the process). Unfortunately, it looks like a few compromises were made in order to fit Linux and GNOME onto a single self-booting demo CD. Among the things missing is the libatk-bridge library, which is necessary for making accessibility work. Another thing that didn't make the cut are the beautiful high contrast and large print themes. Hmmm... we'll have to see about fixing that... By the way, similar to the way the GNOME community has embraced accessibility, UNIX and GNU/Linux distributions are doing the same. Beyond our own Solaris 10 which features accessibility, Ubuntu makes an explicit statement about accessibility as well (again, emphasis added), taken from their home page:
The team behind Ubuntu makes the following public commitment to its users: ... Ubuntu includes the very best in translations and accessibility infrastructure that the Free Software community has to offer, to make Ubuntu usable by as many people as possible. Is this perhaps a sign that, at least in UNIX systems, we are reaching the air-bag stage of development in computing? Of course, we clearly still have a bit of work to do on the Live CD configuration... (2005-09-08 20:09:42.0) Permalink |
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