Wednesday February 09, 2005
Solaris 10 - another first, for Accessibility
As you may have heard from numerous other sources, Sun released Solaris 10 last week. And as has been noted elsewhere Solaris 10 contains a lot of groundbreaking new features.
But for me, the most important thing about Solaris 10 is the groundbreaking accessibility support - the culmination of a little over 4 years of work in GNOME Accessibility. And as this includes Java 2 Standard Edition version 5 it it can fairly be termed the culmination of 8 years of work (here is the original press release for the Java Accessibility work from June 1997).
So, what is in Solaris 10 accessibility that deserves the term "groundbreaking"?
- Like most other desktop environments, Solaris 10 can be operated completely from the keyboard (no mouse use required). With only a very few exceptions, the keyboard commands will be familiar to Windows users (though we've had to introduce a few new ones to provide access to desktop features not found on Windows like multiple workspaces. We also provide full keyboard navigation in our web browser (again unlike Windows where you cannot select a range of text and cut it to the clipboard in IE). This functionality allows people with a range of mild physical impairments to operate Solaris 10 - and is also very popular among "power users".
- Like other other desktop environments, Solaris 10 includes a collection of keyboard enhancements pioneereed by the TRACE Center under funding from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) - StickyKeys, MouseKeys, BounceKeys, etc. which we call AccessX in UNIX land (and which go by other names in other desktop environments). While versions of this have been available in Solaris for a while now, this new edition integrates very nicely with the GNOME desktop on Solaris 10, including a nifty panel applet to show the current settings. This functionality allows people with a variety of mild to medium physical impairments to operate Solaris 10 (e.g. hand tremors from Parkinson's disease).
- Also like other desktop environments, Solaris 10 (by virtue of GNOME) supports a range of desktop themes. For accessibility, these include High Contrast, High Contrast Inverse, and Large Print themes. Part of a theme definition is a collection of specially designed icons that make using these themes easier (something you won't find in Windows or Macintosh). The user can also turn on several additional accessibility themes (see /usr/share/themes on your Solaris 10 system, go into a theme subdirectory [e.g. HighContrastLargePrintInverse] and rename the file "index.theme.disabled" to "index.theme" to turn it on). This allows people with a range of mild vision impairments to operate Solaris 10.
- Going beyond what is available elsewhere, Solaris 10 comes with a full-featured, commercial quality screen reader and screen magnifier! Unlike the very simple, basic magnifier and reader available in Windows, in Solaris 10 with the included screen reader/magnifier you can:
- browse the web
- work with office documents (you can even use StarOffice on Solaris 10 to read your Microsoft Office files that Windows XP won't read to you without first spending many hundreds of dollars to get a commercial screen reader)
- work with e-mail clients (you can connect to a Microsoft Exchange mail server with a small "connector" utility which you cannot do under XP without first spending many hundreds of dollars to get a commercial screen raader)
- get screen magnification of up to 16x in 0.5x increments
- have smoothing in the magnifier, with an optional full screen cross-hair, and numerous other features
- use multiple, user-configurable voices with the screen reader (and assign different voices to different things in the user interface)
- have rich Braille output support from the screen reader, and use the Braille display cursor routing keys to manipulate editable text
- use review mode with the screen reader to read everything in the window (not just what is in the TAB/focus traversal) - and have that information rendered spatially on your Braille display
In fact, I want to emphasize those last items: Solaris 10 is the first graphical desktop environment on the planet to support Braille, built-in! This allows people who are legally blind - or completely blind - or even deaf-blind! - to operate Solaris 10.
- Further going beyond what is available elsewhere - in fact, going beyond anything available commercially, no matter how much you pay - Solaris 10 includes an on-screen keyboard which reaches inside running applications and dynamically builds "keyboards" to rapidly interact with every application on your desktop. Thus if you are trying to save a file, the on-screen keyboard will provide a keyboard with the contents of that dialog box. Editing a document? The on-screen keyboard will show all of the toolbar entries of StarOffice. Browsing the help system or the web? The on-screen keyboard will present all of the hyperlinks for rapid access. And you can edit the keyboards (they're just XML files) for best efficiency for your situation. Of course, like any quality on-screen keyboard (but not like those built into other desktop environments), you can drive the on-screen keyboard from a wide array of access methods (including automatic scanning with switch selection, dwell selection with a head pointer, and of course direct selection). This allows people with a range of severe physical impairments (including quadriplegia, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, and ALS) to operate Solaris 10!
- Finally, these features can be had not just once you've gotten to the desktop, but at the login screen itself! Solaris 10 includes an optional login screen which can be themed, is of course fully keyboard navigable, which works with the AccessX suite of tools, and at which you can run the two assistive technologies noted above.
Solaris 10 includes a lot of documentation on the built-in accessibility support. In addition to the on-line help system, the Java Desktop System Release 3 Accessibility Guide for Solaris 10 on docs.sun.com is chock full of information about things like navigating the desktop via the keyboard, how to use theming and other aspects of appearance customization, aspects of launching and using the assistive technologies (the screen reader/magnifier and on-screen keyboard), and the details of enabling accessible login.
A number of the people who have been following the GNOME Accessibility work over the past 4 years have been a bit frustrated, as getting all of this functionality working on a desktop hasn't been easy (at least until now). As UNIX and GNU/Linux vendors haven't shipped desktops with all of the GNOME Accessibility support available (other than perhaps some open source efforts like Fedora), people seeking this functionality have had to build it all themselves from the public source trees. Building it yourself means:
Now there is an alternative! You can simply download Solaris 10 for SPARC or x86 processors (though we like to call them x64 processors now). It's much quicker, and it's a free download! As has been said before: groundbreaking!
(2005-02-09 17:42:19.0)
Permalink
|
|
|
|
|
