[Accessibility] X-server moving part of its code into the kernel

Peter Korn Peter.Korn at Sun.COM
Tue Apr 29 10:46:02 PDT 2008


Hi Janina,

There is a tremendous amount we can start doing for accessibility with 
the screen display, base with the various underlying improvements coming 
from Keith and freedesktop.org and the X-server changes.  Some of the 
things you cite below are things that are possible today, but at too low 
a performance level to be practical.  Other things are becoming possible 
through things like Compiz or some other tight integration between what 
the window manager knows and can do, and what a compositing engine knows 
and can do (combined with specific accessibility logic and at the AT-SPI 
infrastructure).  At this point most of this potential is sitting in 
folks' brains or sketched on napkins and whiteboards.  I'm hopeful that 
will start to change over the next 12 months.

As to whether and which of the specific changes Keith discusses in his 
paper can/will enable which specific accessibility features - I'm an 
insufficient expert of the underlying X layers to say. 

For me, your sharing general X server developments/improvements with 
this list is useful and newsworthy (with the caveat that any specific 
one may or may specifically be of use to us).


Regards,

Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

> Thanks, Michael. You may indeed be correct. Certainly you're more
> qualified than I to say whether there's anything here we need totake up.
>
> I did think it prudent to give our people the heads up, though. Perhaps
> there are implications for magnification development here. And, I
> suspect there's opportunity a bit beyond simply "more robust and
> faster." For instance, I suspect we'd like magnifiers capable of
> creating several panels made up of disjunct bits of the standard on
> screen experience--something like magnify this and this other at 2X, but
> take most of the screen for this other app at 8X. Am I wrong that we
> aren't so able to do this now? Am I wrong that this development of
> Keith's can take us there? Seemed to me a naturl result of being able to
> launch multiple X sessions--and if I'm wrong, perhaps we can explore an
> additional design RFE.
>
> So, just my thought that we should consider the implications. I suspect
> we'll quickly agree the implications are excellent. But, at the least
> we'll want to be well poised to take advantage of them early. We lag in
> magnification today.
>
> Janina
>
> Michael Meeks writes:
>   
>> On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 14:17 -0500, George Kraft wrote:
>>     
>>> FYI, during the Linux Foundation Summit, Keith Packard from Intel spoke
>>> about the X-server moving part of its code into the kernel.  This will
>>> help bring the X Window System into the new millennium.  :-)  His team
>>> will integrate and test for the Intel architecture. 
>>>       
>> ..
>>     
>>> Janina would like a11y.org to discuss how to take advantage of this
>>> enhancement.
>>>       
>> 	It's not clear to me how this impacts a11y, beyond the obvious faster,
>> better, smaller, hot-pluggable-display type bits.
>>
>> 	Regards,
>>
>> 		Michael.
>>
>> -- 
>>  michael.meeks at novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Accessibility at lists.linux-foundation.org
>> https://lists.linux-foundation.org/mailman/listinfo/accessibility
>>     
>
>   

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