Tuesday September 19, 2006 
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. |
Tuesday September 19, 2006 OpenOffice.org Conference presentation videos availableThe OpenOffice.org community hosts a OpenOffice.org yearly conference. This year it was in Lyon, France from September 11-13. Videos of the presentations are now available - and can be viewed within your browser or downloaded (in of course the open standard Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis formats). I would particularly recommend the following presentations for those interested in accessibility and Open Document Format (alas none of them are close captioned):
There are many other talks you might find interesting; things like using OpenOffice.org in high schools in Slovenia, the "re-computerisation of Cambodia" based on OpenOffice.org 2.0, Novell Corporation's migration to OpenOffice.org, and OpenOffice.org in Vienna City's Administration. The OpenOffice.org conference is not a high budget affair, and the videos don't have broadcast television production values. But the information is very educational, timely, and wonderfully available to all. (2006-09-19 13:31:34.0) Permalink Congratulations Jim, MacArthur "genius"!Jim Fruchterman has been a force in the accessibility and assistive technology field for nearly two decades. He started Arkenstone in 1989, a nonprofit company producing reading machines for the disabled community. After having sold that to Freedom Scientific, he founded another nonprofit - Benetech - that continues to work on technologies for people with disabilities (such as their Bookshare.org on-line library for people with print impairments), but has expanded into Human Rights issues, and Landmine Detection among other work. Today Jim received today one of the MacArthur 'genius' awards - a "no strings attached" $500,000 "vote of confidence" in his work at Benetech. The San Francisco Chronicle has a nice article about it. Also, the MacArthur Foundation has a writeup of Jim's work Congratulations Jim! (2006-09-19 10:47:18.0) Permalink Comments [1]
Tuesday September 05, 2006 Orca turns 1.0.0, as part of GNOME that turns 2.16 tomorrowSeveral of my colleagues in the Sun Accessibility Program Office - along with quite a few folks in the open source community and in several different blindness organizations and our friends at BAUM in Germany and Romania - have been working diligently for the last many months on the open source scripting screen reader Orca. Over the weekend Willie Walker (Orca team lead) announced the release of version 1.0.0 of Orca. Orca is part of the open source graphical desktop GNOME 2.16. This Orca release is part of the GNOME 2.16 release, which is set for tomorrow. Willie's announcement notes the version 1.0.0 goal "to provide usable access to key office productivity applications", including the GNOME graphical desktop, the desktop help system, simple text editing, the text terminal, electronic mail, an enterprise calendar and contact manager, instant messaging, rich text editing, and spreadsheet access. Another way of saying this is that Orca 1.0.0 works with the GNOME desktop, yelp, gedit, gnome-terminal, evolution, gaim, and OpenOffice Writer & Calc (and also StarOffice Writer & Calc). Also notable in Willie's announcement is the translation work of over 60 individuals who have worked to translate Orca into over 40 different languages/locales. I understand that some of these - like the Spanish translation - are already being use by blind individuals mated to one of the Spanish voices for the open source Festival text-to-speech engine (available today with the Ubuntu GNU/Linux desktop, Edgy version release Knot-2). (2006-09-05 18:12:41.0) Permalink |
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