Wednesday October 26, 2005

GNOME Accessibility now 5 years old

Last week the GNOME Accessibility project had another birthday. The GNOME Accessibility effort was born 5 years ago at the Closing the Gap conference in in Minneapolis Minnesota. Last year I listed many of the accomplishments of the first 4 years of the GNOME Accessibility project. Here are some of the key things that happened in GNOME accessibility, or closely related to GNOME accessibility, this past year:

• GNOME Accessibility continued to improve in GNOME desktop releases 2.10 and 2.12

• The Ubuntu Accessibility project has started up.

• Accessible GNOME desktops are shipping from Sun in Solaris 10 and from Ubuntu in release 5.10. In the Solaris case, we know that over 2 million of them have been installed!

• With the collaboration of ONCE - the Spanish National Organization of the Blind - the folks at Guadalinex are shipping a GNOME desktop with accessibility support in Spanish in Andalusia (there is a nice press release noting this work). ONCE is likewise working with the LinEx Linux distribution to do the same in Extremadura.

• We've begun a new, flexible, script-based, open source screen reader effort - the Orca screen reader (see lots of great documentation about Orca)

• StarOffice 8 and OpenOffice.org 2.0 have been released, both supporting the GNOME accessibility architecture.

• Adobe Reader 7 for Linux and Solaris was released with support for the GNOME accessibility architecture.

• We clarified and formalized the relationship between the GNOME and KDE Accessibility efforts.

• The GNOME On-screen Keyboard turned version 1.0

• The FreeTTS text-to-speech engine turned version 1.2

• BRLTTY turned version 3.7

So Happy Birthday to GNOME Accessibility. It's been another fine year! (2005-10-26 19:57:36.0) Permalink