With last year's lay offs at IBM and last week's lay offs at Sun, the future of large scale accessibility projects in free/open source software looks pretty disorganized at the moment. Marco (with whom I used to work at Freedom Scientific) is really dedicated but the overwhelmingly large Windows market share leads the understaffed Mozilla to pretty much focus on Windows accessibility with proprietary screen access tools like JAWS and Window-Eyes.
While this is unfortunate, it does reach the majority of users so, without Apple or some other big organization to underwrite an accessibility effort, it's all up to volunteers. I would think that orca itself would require at least one full time paid staff member and we ain't got the cash for a part timer in a lower cost environment like China. Project GNU (www.gnu.org) is kicking off its first ever accessibility effort. This project has zero money and only me to look after it in my spare time. We will, of course, be focussing on GNU/Linux distros and I can't say that I know enough about Apple accessibility API to know how similar it is to what I think is iAccessible2 at the heart of Firefox access on Windows. I do not know what it uses on GNOME but I would assume it is the GNOME accessibility API. The bad economy in the US and EU is killing large scale free software efforts. We're back to mostly volunteers and scholars working randomly on their favorite issues. I'm going to try to add some order to all of this but it will be a cat herding effort and there are a lot of cats involved. cdh Happy Hacking, cdh On Feb 10, 2010, at 1:02 PM, Chris Blouch wrote: > Looking forward to trying out Firefox with VO working someday. FF has really > good ARIA support so it would be nice to have a browser on the Mac that works > well with this standard. Safari currently is weak. > > CB > > E.J. Zufelt wrote: >> >> Good morning, >> >> This morning I posted a new blog article on my site: First Glance at Firefox >> Accessibility on OS X Snow Leopard, which can be accessed at >> http://tinyurl.com/ygkfqoj >> >> >> Thanks,Everett >> >> Follow me on Twitter >> http://twitter.com/ezufelt >> >> View my LinkedIn Profile >> http://www.linkedin.com/in/ezufelt >> >> >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "MacVisionaries" group. >> To post to this group, send email to macvisionar...@googlegroups.com. >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >> macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. >> For more options, visit this group at >> http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "MacVisionaries" group. > To post to this group, send email to macvisionar...@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionar...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
