Orca Interesting Approach to Creating Accessible Applications

[Rich Caloggero <rich_caloggero wgbh org>]

Here is a paper I found by TV. Raman, the guy who built emacspeak.  In 
short, he proposes "aspect-oriented programming" methodologies as a sort of 
general approach to deploying accessible applications. His "case study" is 
the eclipse IDE - essentially an IDE builder, but it essentially comes with 
a Java IDE already built. It is very complex, and in my opinion, very 
difficult to use with Jaws.
http://www.webcollab.com/alee/papers/avios05-docbook/

Teaser follows:
"In order to provide such rich user experiences adapted to users with 
diverse abilities, it would be necessary to modify the application code and 
maintain
multiple code bases. This is neither feasible nor practical. However, we 
argue for an alternative approach that views accessibility and different 
accessibility
needs as a cross-cutting concern of usable and accessible software systems. 
Accessibility enhancements would be realized as different sets of aspects 
and
enhanced application functionality packaged as add-ons. Users with diverse 
needs would run the standard application in combination with the selected 
add-ons
to experience the application adapted to their needs. This aspect-based 
approach makes the development and deployment of accessible software both 
viable
and manageable. We describe the aspects-based approach, the access 
framework, and several illustrations of speech enablement for the Eclipse 
platform.
We discuss how our approach to access-enable the Eclipse platform is general 
enough to speech-enable the Eclipse IDE and other Eclipse rich-client 
applications.


Furthermore, when the aspect-based approach is supported by an extensible 
and open application platform such as Eclipse, developers can leverage the 
combined
capabilities to facilitate the development and deployment of accessible 
software. We share some situations where accessibility enhancements using 
aspects
is simplified by a framework-rich platform and where accessibility 
enhancements can leverage a framework-rich platform without the need for 
using aspects."


-- Rich