Accessibility Collaboration with Microsoft
FAQ
Read the press release: Microsoft and Novell Celebrate Year of Interoperability, Expand Collaboration Agreement.
1. What was announced?
Novell and Microsoft are collaborating to deliver an adapter that allows Microsoft's UIA framework to work with Linux accessibility projects.
2. Is Novell abandoning / competing with IBM and Sun frameworks?
No. It is just the opposite. Novell is building the adapters necessary to have Microsoft's UIA accessibility framework work well with current open source accessibility projects. Novell is building a bridge that will enable applications written with the common Windows Forms, or Silverlight toolkits on Windows to integrate seamlessly with an impaired user's existing Linux accessibility environment. Novell's desire is to make applications more accessible to those with disabilities and to allow users on both Linux and Windows platforms to take advantage of technology.
3. Will SUSE Linux Enterprise be the only Linux platform with this capability?
No. Novell wants this technology to be used across Linux distributions and encourages other distributions to take advantage of this engineering effort. Accessibility for the disabled is very important and Novell's intent is for this work to be shared within the open source community.
Novell's work will be open source and will make the UIA framework cross-platform while enabling UIA to interoperate with the Linux Accessibility Toolkit (ATK), which ships with SUSE Linux Enterprise and other popular Linux distributions.
4. When will Novell's accessibility adapter be ready?
- We expect to ship WinForms a11y around Q4 2008 / Q1 2009
- Improvements to the Linux accessibility stack Novell will be making will start to filter through to users incrementally as work is completed
5. What are winforms?
Winfoms is a .NET toolkit used to build graphical user interfaces. The Mono project provides a compatible implementation of Winforms for Linux. Many vertical applications are written using Winforms.