Wednesday August 09, 2006

Desktop accessibility - the [built-in] bar keeps rising

As I noted around a year ago, the quality and functionality of accessibility support being built-into our desktops continues to improve. Two recent events, and the ongoing strengh of an existing effort, underscore this argument.

First is the announcement earlier this week from Apple at their Worldwide Developer Conference: notable improvements in the accessibility support being built into Leopard, the next release of their operating system. With Leopard, the Macintosh will become the second commercial graphical desktop with Braille support built-in (the first being Sun Solaris 10). And in addition to Braille support, Leopoard should come with a number of other accessibility improvements, including a new text-to-speech voice, closed captioning improvements, and a number of VoiceOver screen reader improvements. While still likely not yet competitive with the commercial screen reader offerings for Windows (costing $750 to $1,200), these improvements bring increasing (and increasingly affordable) options to people with disabilities.

And speaking of improvements in affordable accessibility, the second piece of news is that the open source, scripting screen reader Orca is now a core part of the GNOME graphical desktop as of the forthcoming GNOME 2.16 due in September. Like the premier commercial screen readers for Windows, Orca derives much of its functionality from application-specific scripts that allow for exquisite customization of screen reader behavior for each application a user is running. And via BRLTTY it supports a large number of Braille displays - over 70 different models at last count. Sun is already "shipping" Orca in our bi-weekly builds of OpenSolaris, and is also very easy to install builds of Orca onto the Fedora and Ubuntu Linux distributions.

And speaking of Ubuntu, the third thing to note in built-in desktop accessibility improvements isn't so much a new event, but rather the continuing strengh of the Ubuntu Accessibility community. Ubuntu is one of the fastest growing Linux distributions (we're delighted it also runs on Sun's high-end servers), and it is great to see their focus on and care of accessibility. [check out their Accessibility forum and the active accessibility mailing list]

Computers are becoming accessible to an increasingly broad range of users with disabilities, right out of the box! (2006-08-09 15:07:58.0) Permalink