Monday May 19, 2008

In Memorium - Cynthia Ice

We lost one of our own last week: Cynthia Ice, the "accessibility focus" for Lotus Notes at IBM has passed away. Please see blog posts about this from Mary Beth Raven and Tom Spine. There is a nice writeup about Cynthia in USA Today from January 2007.

I first met Cynthia at a CSUN presentation I was giving on Java Accessibility something like 10 years ago, showing off the Java Access Bridge for the first time and demoing how Slimware Windows Bridge was able to provide text attribute information from a Java app. Her persistent questions put into my head the idea of leveraging the Java accessibility framework for a non-Java app. In her case, she was thinking about Lotus Notes. But we took that idea and put it into practice for OpenOffice.org, which on Windows re-uses the Java Access Bridge for compatibility with a handful of Windows AT products. More recently I had the pleasure of co-presenting with her to a group of folks in Massachusetts who were concerned about the accessibility of OpenDocument Format files. She was there to talk about IAccessible2, and the great work IBM/Lotus did in collaboration with several Windows AT vendors to make ODF accessible via those AT products on Windows - using essentially a derivative of the original Java Accessibility approach we discussed nearly a decade earlier.

Cynthia was a tireless advocate for accessibility - a great ally (and at the same time a foe you didn't want to have if you were getting in the way of accessibility work). As others (in the blog posts above) have commented, she had a keen (and snarky) sense of humor, and was a delight to work with.

Cynthia, you will be missed. (2008-05-19 13:29:01.0) Permalink Comments [1]