[Accessibility] Statement of Intent
Olaf Schmidt
ojschmidt at kde.org
Wed Jul 27 01:09:16 PDT 2005
Hi!
This is a draft for a possible "Statement of Intent" by this working group.
Olaf
The FSG Accessibility Workgroup aims for interoperability between the various
applications, toolkits and desktops. We have come to the conclusion that we
can achieve the best results for accessibility by cooperating closely, and by
allowing the users to you their application of choice with the assistive
technology that best fits their needs.
Some parties have suggested to endorse a particular desktop or toolkit for
accessibility, thereby focusing only on a selected number of applications and
assistive technologies. This would be harmful for accessibility. It would
force a rewrite of all assistive technologies available in other toolkits,
and this time could be better spend on improving interoperability between the
existing solutions. It would also reduce the number of applications available
to the users of assistive technologies.
We will therefore standardize a number of toolkit-neutral interfaces. An
example for this approach is AT-SPI, a service provider interface for
assistive technologies supported by Gtk2, Qt4, GNOME, Java, OpenOffice and
Mozilla, with support coming for KDE4. While the current implementation
relies on a small number of libraries written by the GNOME project, we will
allow for other implementation using other technologies, using the same IDL.
The standardization process will also include bridges between the various
implementations.
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