[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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