Re: List of software accessible

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

On Mon, 2002-12-30 at 16:18, Daniele Medri wrote:
> Hi all,
> i'm writing an article over accessible software and I need to know a list of 
> software compatible with Gnome for that. Could you help me?

Hi Michele:

Maybe ;-)

It's not clear exactly what your question is; are you asking "what
assistive technologies/accessibility aids are available for GNOME", or
are you asking "what GNOME programs are compatible with GNOME
accessibility"?

You may want to look at the GNOME accessibility project developer pages,
particularly the overview and the "Assistive Technologies" sections.

In short, GNOME is accessible in several ways:

* it is compatible with XKB's keyboard accessibility features;
* it provides a user interface for interacting with these 'accessX'
features;
* it provides a number of special 'themes' for low-vision users,
including contrast control, large-size icons etc., and control over font
sizes.  

* All GNOME-2 applications built on the GTK+-2 toolkit include built-in
support for compatible assistive technologies.  (GNOME 2 applications
that have not been ported to the GTK+-2 family of libraries do not
include assistive technology support).  Such applications include all of
the core GNOME desktop and a growing number of GNOME-2-based
applications.  Some other "non-gtk+-2" applications are also compatible
with GNOME accessibility (see below).

* Assistive technologies under development for GNOME include 'GOK', the
GNOME Onscreen Keyboard (www.gok.ca), and Gnopernicus
(www.baum.ro/gnopernicus.html), an integrated screenreader and
magnifier.  These two projects, while still "pre-1.0", are becoming more
fully functional each week and will provide quality access to the GNOME
desktop by people with visual impairments including blindness, and those
with severe mobility difficulties.

* Some other applications are fully compatible with the GNOME
accessibility features; examples are the latest developer versions of
Mozilla, and the latest developer builds of the OpenOffice.org and
StarOffice productivity suites.  The accessibility support in these last
two products is still evolving but accessibility-enabled "releases" are
expected "soon".  Also fully compatible with GNOME accessibility are
Java applications based on Swing and/or the Java Accessibility APIs. 

As some of the people on this list can tell you, this software stack
hasn't yet been packaged into a convenient "release" that will work "out
of the box", though this is clearly a big priority for us and we are
working hard to reach that point in the coming few weeks/months.


Best regards,

Bill

> 
> Thank in advance.
> 
> bye
-- 
Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>