Jeff Jaffe’s Blog

Part of every company’s values is to contribute positively to the communities we serve. In that regard, computer firms work together on some initiatives, such as improving access to computers by people with disabilities.

We were recently privileged to expand our technical collaboration with Microsoft and improve accessibility for Linux.

Current status

Currently, our SUSE Linux Enterprise (as well as most other popular Linux distributions) ships accessibility support based on the Accessibility Toolkit (ATK), developed in conjunction with Sun and others. Although this adequately serves its purpose, we nonetheless felt it was worthwhile to expand the accessibility developer’s toolkit in this area:

• It is part of our general philosophy of interoperability. We want to make sure that techniques, algorithms, programming interfaces, etc. from the Linux world and Windows world work well together.

• There are particular applications that come from Windows that are being moved to Linux. Examples include the Mono and Moonlight projects that we are working on within Novell. It makes sense for those projects to add accessibility in a compatible/interoperable way.

• Part of a general open source philosophy is to introduce many technologies into the mix as we look for communities of programmers to compare and contrast – and then use the comparative learning to come up with newer and better approaches.

• Access for the disabled is a social value that we support.

Our accessibility project with Microsoft

Microsoft has their own specification for accessibility called User Interface Automation (UIA). Today, it is focused on the Windows platform, but Microsoft, to their credit, would like this to be available on Linux as well. They proposed making it available – and in a step that Novell found to be very exciting – proposed not to assert patents needed for implementing this specification against open source (or proprietary) implementations – regardless of platform. With that important step this became very interesting to Novell.

The particular project that we are focusing on is an interoperability adaptor. First it makes the UIA API available for Linux applications to use. Second, we will be adding accessibility support for Winforms and Moonlight. Our implementations will be released under an open source license. Moreover, there are other accessibility frameworks that are available in the industry; notably the IAccessible2 standard supported by IBM and others. The freedom from patent assertion allows our work to complement IBM’s and, we hope, allow movement towards a harmonized set of accessibility APIs cross platform, easing the implementation of accessibility.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 2:21 pm and is filed under General, Identity, Security and Systems Management, Linux Operating Systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.