Wednesday September 21, 2005

GNOME/KDE/FSG Statement On Desktop Accessibility Development

As noted throughout this blog, we at Sun have been focused on the accessibility of GNOME - the open source desktop that is part of Solaris 10. Nontheless, we've felt for a long time an accessibility architecture should be as open, free from license restrictions, and as broadly supported as possible. To that end we have been working for a long time with the KDE Accessibility community, who agree with the GNOME accessibility folks that having one accessibility API for UNIX and GNU/Linux is the right answer (as opposed to each of us having our own). In fact, from the outset - before we starting talking with the KDE folks - we took pains to limit the use of GNOME libraries in the GNOME accessibility infrastructure so as to make it as portable as possible.

And as I've mentioned previously, we've come together with the KDE accessibility folks and other interested parties under the umbrella of the Free Standards Group - specifically the Accessibility Group of the Free Standards Group - to standardize on desktop accessibility components, with a very large subset of the GNOME Accessibility API as one of the components we are standardizing upon.

It has always been clear to those of us working on UNIX (and Solaris and GNU/Linux) accessibility that the GNOME and KDE accessibility efforts are basically complimentary and are designed to work together. It has always been clear to us that the UNIX desktop is a fundamentally heterogeneous environment with interesting applications utilizing a variety of toolkits - sometimes GNOME or sometimes KDE (or sometime UNO or XUL or Java/Swing or ...). But that doesn't mean it has been clear to everyone else.

And so we together thought it would be a good idea to release a joint Statement on Desktop Accessibility Development. "UNIX accessibility" doesn't equal "GNOME Accessibility" (any more than it equals "KDE accessibility" or "Java accessibility" or...). UNIX accessibility is the product of a collaboration that includes GNOME folks (drawing from people within and outside of Sun), KDE folks, Java folks, StarOffice/OpenOffice.org folks, Mozilla folks, Evolution folks, X windows folks, GNU/Linux folks, commercial software vendors (e.g. Adobe's UNIX accessibility implementation work), and anyone else who would like to contribute [and I'm particularly delighted that the UNIX accessibility community includes a number of folks with disabilities, and a number of folks with long expertise developing assistive technologies for people with disabilities]. The way to make UNIX accessible isn't to make one toolkit accessible and then have everyone "just use the accessible one." To an American like me, that sounds a little too much like the doctrine of "Separate but Equal" that was applied African Americans throughout much of the last century in much of the United States. To say that "this toolkit or environment is the accessible one, so use that one" is to either assume that nothing of interest or value is happening anywhere else - which is patently false - or to relagate people with disabilities to an accessible ghetto. And we refuse to accept that. (2005-09-21 17:07:50.0) Permalink