Friday January 27, 2006

What can happen when chorus rehearsal is in a garage...

The fun folks at Honda UK put together an ad for the new Civic that, along with the Carlton Draught Big Ad, is in the running for most innovative use of chorus in advertising. See a cached copy here. (2006-01-27 13:04:33.0) Permalink

Wednesday January 18, 2006

StarOffice 8 Product Patch 1 available

Sun has just released Product Patch 1 for StarOffice 8 (this is also available as OpenOffice.org version 2.0.1). This release closes the following 8 accessibility bugs:

• Issue 45917: JAWS 6.0 freezes OOoCalc
• Issue 50188: Crash in table wizard in special case
• Issue 55411: Crash choosing symbols from Selection pallette with accessibility on
• Issue 42664: Initial Registration Dialog can't be spoken with Gnopernicus
• Issue 46400: task pane: cannot start tasks with keyboard
• Issue 46886: Gnopernicus feedback overly verbose going through Registration options radio buttons
• Issue 48643: Icons in the printadmin module are not HC compliant
• Issue 48644: The icons of the Launch Menu are not HC compliant

Accessibility work on StarOffice (and OpenOffice.org) is ongoing. Another 19 accessibility bugs are already closed in the forthcoming StarOffice 8 Product Patch 2 (also known as OpenOffice.org version 2.0.2).

Kudos to the gang in Sun Hamburg doing all this great work! (2006-01-18 15:10:30.0) Permalink

Veni Creator Spiritus!

Rehearsals have begun for the 2nd half of the 2005/2006 San Francisco Symphony Chorus program. Last night we began rehearsing Mahler's 8th symphony, which opens with the Latin text "Come Creator Spirit". Dedicated to "Meiner lieben Frau Alma Maria", the 8th symphony is one of the more challenging choral works. Like Mahler's 2nd symphony, he demands an incredible vocal range (the basses go from B below the bass clef to G above middle C - nearly three octaves!), and does so across a huge dynamic range (ppp through fff, and every step in between). Thankfully when we're down the gravelly parts of our range (the low B) its ppp - the most sound we could possibly make down there anyway, and likewise the high G is ff (since we couldn't do that quietly no matter how good our falsetto).

I've performed Mahler's 8th symphony with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus on two previous occasions, so last night felt like renewing an acquaintance with an old friend. Another old friend I'm looking forward to a renewed acquaintance with is the Verdi Requiem, which we perform in June.

If you are interested in attending any of these performances, now is a great time to get tickets! Today through Tuesday evening January 24th the Symphony Box Office is running a sale - all seats that cost less than $50 are available for $25, and everything else is available for $50 (including their very best, $107 seats). Details available here. (2006-01-18 14:48:51.0) Permalink

Friday January 13, 2006

Freedom Machines - now on DVD

I first heard about the Freedom Machines movie at a pre-release screening at the CSUN Conference in March 2004. I was blown away by the excellent job they did introducing the topics of accessibility and assistive technology, and putting them in context with the lives of the people who needed that technology.

After getting a lot of exposure on U.S. Public television and elsewhere, Freedom Machines is now available for purchase on DVD and VHS. I got and watched my copy yesterday. They've added a bunch of additional resource material on the DVD - background on the laws, where to get assistive technologies, etc. They've also gone to great lengths making the DVD itself accessible - all of the menus talk - in addition to the more usual things of close captioning & descriptive video. They've even made this acctssibility multi-lingual!

You can see a half minute trailer to get a taste of the material. (2006-01-13 15:06:16.0) Permalink

Thursday January 12, 2006

Thoughts on the "Joint Statement on OpenSource & OpenDocuments in Massachusetts"

The good folks at the Disability Policy Consortium and the Bay State Council of the blind have issued a Joint Statement on OpenSource & OpenDocuments in Massachusetts. This thoughtful document makes a number of important and concrete recommendations of actions to be taken prior to implementation of the Open Document Format implementation in Massachusetts so that people with disabilities won't "face the potential of once again being left out in the cold."

These recommendations are (slightly paraphrased):

• Conduct a thorough assessment of the assistive technology utilization of current state employees
• Roll out training prior to rolling out new technology
• Include funds for transition costs and training
• Commit to hiring new employees with disabilities by developing training programs in advance of implementing a new software platform
• Commit to maintaining training programs on Windows technology
• Make a public announcement of any requirements on vendors for compliance with OpenSource OpenDocuments

I completely agree with many of these recommendations - especially the first one. Without a good understanding of what assistive technologies are being used in the Executive Branch of Massachusetts, and more specifically how they are being used to create and review office documents, it isn't possible to commit to a specific date for when an alternative office application will offer the same accessibility, productivity, usability, and efficiency to people with disabilities as what they are using now. This is one of our first tasks, and I am glad to see that both the Disability Policy Consortium and the Bay State Council of the Blind feel strongly about that as well.

Another key task that came up at the start in discussion around the Massachusetts ODF decision is the development of training materials and a training program for the transition. As with any new product or process put into place in any organization, training is an important part of making it successful. Training is especially critical for many people with disabilities - most especially those with complex assistive technologies like screen readers and voice recognition tools. This would be case in Massachusetts with any new software application deployment - and even with an upgrade to their existing office software (such as a change to Microsoft Office 12 with its radically new user interface). You want the training materials ready, and training programs in place well in advance of switching people to the new program/process. And it should go without saying that training materials for people with disabilities are best developed by the experts in using assistive technologies.

I agree with the joint statement that Microsoft Windows will continue to be the dominant desktop for quite some time - just as DOS remained the dominant desktop for nearly a decade after Microsoft Windows 1.0 was introduced in 1985. So of course I would expect that users in the Executive Branch of the Massachusetts government will overwhelmingly remain on Windows - including users with disabilities. For reading/writing ODF files, I would again expect them to use something like the commercial StarOffice suite, or the commercial IBM Workplace suite, or the commercial WordPerfect application, (or the open source OpenOffice.org suite) - all running on the on Microsoft Windows desktop. It is telling that the Disability Policy Consortium and the Bay State Council of the Blind feel a major threat towards Windows, especially where none is intended.

But then, perhaps that is because of a continuing co-mingling of the two distinct concepts of Open Standard and Open Source. These ideas are fairly frequently confused with one another - especially to folks who are new to either or both ideas. A longer exposition of these ideas can be found in a presentation I gave titled "Accessibility, Standards & Open Document Format" (available here in both Open Document Format and also HTML format).

The basic distinction is this:

1. A standard can be a "de-facto" standard that we've all come to agree to over time (e.g. the width of a road), a "decreed" standard imposed upon us (like the Imperial measure system of inches and gallons) or an "open standard" that was arrived by an open and commonly concensus process by experts in the field. In all of these cases however, it is something that a broad group of folks can use and share, and build things on top of. Examples include systems of measure which we all use, systems of roads upon which an entire transportation system has been built, and the Internet and World Wed Web (which is actually made up of a large number of standards). Of these three flavors of standard, a truly open standard provides the greatest benefit to the largest community because experts and interested parties can join the effort and improve the standard (as accessibility has done in joining the standards underpinning the World Wide Web). Wikipedia has a useful definition of open standard.

2. Open source software is a system of software development where the source code for the software is published, and available for use by others. There are a variety of open source software licenses (and debate about whether a license meets specific tests of openness and use by others). One of the key benefits of just about all of these licenses is that open source development means that experts and interested parties can join the effort and make changes to the software (either for everyone, or just for their own use) in order to make it meet their needs. One popular example of open source software is the Firefox web browser. Because the source code is open, it has been ported to a number of different platforms by interested parties and experts (running more places than Internet Explorer, for example). Likewise interested parties have translated the user interface into a plethora of languages (and so more people can use it in their native tongue than Internet Explorer, for example). And of particular interest to this discussion, accessibility experts from places like Netscape and IBM and my own company Sun have contributed accessibility improvements to Firefox (see the Firefox/Mozilla accessibility project page) - and now Firefox supports a number of critical things for accessibility that aren't in Internet Explorer (and these work with leading Assistive Technologies on Windows like WindowEyes and JAWS). See Wikipedia has an good definition of open source.

The Joint Statement, both in its title and in the first sentence, which says:

sees this as a move to open source as well as to the Open Document Format standard. In fact, they address this issues explicitly further down in the document:

From everything I've read, and from my discussions with the staff in the Executive Branch of Massachusetts government and former CIO Peter Quinn, I understand this move to Open Document Format is explicitly a move to an open standard, and NOT a move to open source software, let alone an open source desktop. A move to an open standard like ODF is a move that allows choice in software and potentially in desktop, but in no way does it require such a move. Just like requiring a web page meet the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative guideliness in no way requires that it be read in the Lynx text-only web browser running on a GNU/Linux desktop (an open source, text-only browser on an open source desktop). Most folks will continue to read those web pages in English with an English user interface in a proprietary web browser running on a proprietary desktop. And that is just fine. But it also means that people can browse those same web pages using a web brwoser with a user interface in their native tongue (which may be too obscure for Microsoft to ship), on their choice of desktop (which Microsoft may not care to support). An open standard allows choice. Choice like that which Scott Seder argued for in recent article.

I'm also scratching my head at the suggestion that the move to ODF "exhibits a symbiotic relationship with OpenSource vendors". This feels like an echo of false and ugly accusations that Peter Quinn went on lavish junkets funded by open source vendors in order to entice him to choose ODF. This mischaracterization weakens an otherwise thoughtful and well reasoned set of concrete recommendations for moving forward.

This "open source vendor" (which is to say, a vendor of commercial software products, most of which are available under open source licenses) has been working on accessibility for over 15 years now. Another "open source vendor", IBM, has made numerous major accessibility contributions over multiple decades. Our work in "open source accessibility" didn't start with Massachusetts, isn't driven by Massachusetts, and will continue whatever the outcome in Massachusetts. To the extent that Massachusetts is interested in StarOffice for reading/writing ODF files (in Windows or on a UNIX platform), they are a potential customer of ours whose needs we seek to serve. To the extent that people with disabilities in Massachusetts are interested in our UNIX platform Solaris, they too are potential customers of ours whose needs with seek to serve. As I have noted elsewhere, I believe that for some disability needs our StarOffice offering is already a good and competitive choice on Windows and on UNIX systems, while for other disability needs it isn't there yet and we stive to address those shortcomings.

All of us in the Sun Accessibility team look forward to continuing to work with the Bay State Council of the Blind and the Disability Policy Consortium, as well as the Mass Office on Disability, the Mass Commission for the Blind, the Mass Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, the Mass Rehabilitation Commission, the Information Technology Division and the Executive Branch of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts - help ensure that people with disabilities have a accessible, productive, and efficient options for reading and writing Open Document Format files. (2006-01-12 14:22:14.0) Permalink

Wednesday January 11, 2006

"Déjà Vu All Over Again" - Carroll Center for the Blind on ODF in Mass

I'm bummed I hadn't seen this before now! JD at the Carroll Center for the Blind in Massachusetts has a lengthy and thoughtful blog entry on the accessibility issues and implications of the Massachusetts decision to move to Open Document Format. Titled "Déjà Vu All Over Again", it starts with reminder of what blind folks went through in the DOS-to-Windows conversation. It goes on to make the argument that - access issues temporarily being placed on hold - moving to an open file format is of tremendous value to users generally. Then it enumerates some of the challenges that need to be overcome, and suggests that this whole endeavor is actually probably quite good in the long run for the disability community - by focusing attention on the issue and helping bring a lot more energy to solving accessibility problems.

In addition, JD suggests a very useful "accessibility test": can you write a resume without formatting errors, that you would be proud of and use to get a new job, all while your monitor is turned off? What if you would loose your current job if your resume looked bad? And going beyond that, how usable and productive was that task (JD notes some of the cool features in JAWS versions 6 and 7 that would significantly help with that task). A good suggestion/test for our StarOffice/OpenOffice.org accessibility engineers (perhaps I should tell their boss about it?). (2006-01-11 17:28:14.0) Permalink

Thursday January 05, 2006

Visually Impaired User Weighs In on Assistive Technology Debate

Scott Seder has a very thoughtful and articulate article in LinuxPlanet today about the Microsoft accessibility monoculture, the issues he is fighting with using assistive technologies on Windows, and the struggle in Massachusetts. See: Visually Impaired User Weighs In on Assistive Technology Debate: Why a Windows-Only Argument Is A Bad Idea.

My favorite quote is at the end:

Wednesday January 04, 2006

Nightly builds of Firefox on Solaris (and other OSes)

One of the frustrations lots of folks had working with Mozilla was trying to get the lastest accessible Mozilla to work with. For a bunch of internal-to-Sun reasons we were working on our own branch of Mozilla 1.7, and since Sun engineers were doing the UNIX accessibility work, that's where it went first (and only later did it migrate into the main Mozilla source repository).

Sun is now working off of the main Mozilla repository, or "trunk", and our accessibility work is focusing on Firefox. Furthermore, we now have nightly builds of Firefox for Solaris SPARC and Solaris x86 available for your downloading & testing pleasure. Note though that it is still early days in Sun's UNIX Firefox accessibility work - that team is still ironing out some of the basic issues.

See the main contributed nightly builds page and for the latest contributed builds, and go here for Solaris SPARC and here for Solaris x86/x64. Note: nightly Firefox builds for Linux are built by the core Firefox/Mozilla team (vs. contributed to the Mozilla ftp site by folks like Sun), and can be found here for Linux x86. Other nightly binaries built by the core team are in the core nightly build directory. (2006-01-04 17:21:28.0) Permalink

Tuesday January 03, 2006

Solaris 10 1/06 released

The end of 2005 was a busy time for releases! Just before the Sun end-of-year break, we released Solaris 10 1/06 (the first major update to Solaris 10).. This release contains fixes for some 36 accessibility bugs in the core accessibility libraries and the assistive technologies. Still more accessibility bug fixes in individual applications like Mozilla and Evolution - and numerous keyboard navigation and theme bug fixes. The key core accessibility bug fixes are contained 5 patches (among the many patches that make up Update 1 to Solaris 10) - the same 5 patches fix the same 36 bugs in both SPARC and x86 versions:

• 119414-05 – GNOME 2.6.0: Gnome Accessibility Libraries Patch
  Fixes bugs: 6192805 6205225 6182499 6182502 6217152 6192693 6205004 6216843 6226723 6228329 6260441 6283137 6315241 4768049 6340516

• 119416-01 – GNOME 2.6.0: Gnome Text-To-Speech Engine Patch
  Fixes bugs: 6216843 6226723 6228329

• 119418-02 – GNOME 2.6.0: Gnome On-screen Keyboard Patch
  Fixes bugs: 5109895 6200712 6211656 6223576

• 119598-04 – GNOME 2.6.0: Gnome Screen Reader and Magnifier Patch
  Fixes bugs: 6205770 6191352 6207171 5083128 6205765 6202337 6200573 6186020 5095976 6202897 6193299 6239339 6240135

• 121463-01 – GNOME 2.6.0: Gnome Accessibility Libraries Patch
  Fixes bug: 6347858

In addition you'll likely want to patch Mozilla and Evolution for improved keyboard navigation, theming, and assistive technology support:

• 119115-14 – Mozilla 1.7 patch

• 119117-10 – Evolution 1.4.6 patch

However, it is probably easiest (and recommended) to simply upgrade to Solaris 10 1/06 to have all of the latest accessibility bits, not to mention the other updates to the rest of Solaris 10. (2006-01-03 00:29:37.0) Permalink

Monday January 02, 2006

Keyboard Accessibility draft spec. from FSG available for comment

[Aside: why did tons of interesting & blog-worthy things have to happen just as I was taking two weeks of end-of-year vacation?]

The Free Standards Group Accessibility Working Group has announced the availability of Release Candidate 1 of the Keyboard Access Functional Specification (along with testing assertions). Comments on this draft are due no later than January 31st, 2006. My good buddy, co-worker, Sun Accessibility team founder, and keyboard accessibility committee chair Earl Johnson, has done a tremendous job sheepherding this draft standard. Kudos as well to the rest committee: Bill Haneman, Mark Novak, and Willie Walker. Excerpted from the announcement:

Please see the Keyboard Access Functional Specification and the Generic Assertions for Manual Testing for a special review-and-file-bugs interface to this draft specification. (2006-01-02 16:33:53.0) Permalink

They say "90% of success is just showing up"

In my case, it might better be "90% of being seen on video is showing up." Shortly before an end-of-year vacation, I took part in a press briefing about Open Document Format in San Francisco (on December 9th, coincidentally at same time as the Open Forum on the Future of Electronic Data Formats for the Commonwealth was taking place in Massachusetts). Turns out the folks at CNET videotaped the briefing, and posted an excerpt of the briefing. Maybe it was the the luck of lighting and camera angles, or maybe the cameraman just liked my fancy French tie, but whatever it was, the video excerpt both starts and ends with my mug. The ironic thing is, while I was there to talk about the accessibility issues around ODF (and in fact, did a fair amount of that), this video excerpt captures a comment of mine that has nothing to do with accessibility... (2006-01-02 12:41:22.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Gnopernicus 1.0 released

Just in time for the new year, and also timed to catch me on an end-of-year vacation away from blogging... The good folks at BAUM (and specifically their Engineering Group) have released Gnopernicus 1.0, their open source screen reader for the GNOME desktop. In development for the last several years, in parallel with the development of the GNOME Accessibility Architecture, Gnopernicus has been part of every GNOME desktop release since release version 2.4.

Through the GNOME Accessibility Architecture, Gnopernicus provides access for blind and low vision users to the many applications that make up the GNOME desktop, to the StarOffice 7 and 8 office suites (and the OpenOffice.org version 1.1 and 2.0 office suites), to Java applications that implement that accessibility architecture (like Oracle's JDeveloper 10g), Adobe Reader 7, the Evolution e-mail and calendar, and to the Mozilla browser (and as we finish the accessibility implementation in Firefox, to that browser as well). Gnopernicus is shipping as part of Solaris 10, Ubuntu 5.10, Guadalinex, and Linex.

Gnopernicus is a "one-size-fits-all" screen reader that provides speech, Braille, and magnification for users with a range of visual impairments. Gnopernicus provides for a fair amount of user interface customization - including customizing the speech output and voices, customizing the keystroke commands to drive it, customizing the Braille display key input, and customizing the way magnification is rendered. It is also possible to edit the XML files that describe the speech and Braille output renderings. Lots of questions about installing and using Gnopernicus are addressed in the on-line FAQ.

I'm proud to say that Sun helped support the Gnopernicus development effort - providing code review and programming assistance, and otherwise helping BAUM develop Gnopernicus; as BAUM has helped immeasurably in the development of the GNOME Accessibility architecture itself and in proving the accessibility implementations of the GNOME desktop and many applications.