GNOME accessibility developers concerned about Oracle's commitment

[Posted February 8, 2010 by jake]

There are concerns in the GNOME accessibility development community about what the Oracle takeover of Sun means for the efforts led by Sun's Accessibility Project Office (APO). Orca project lead Willie Walker has been laid off and is looking for work, possibly in areas that will not allow him to continue contributing to Orca. In addition, assistive technology specialist Joanmarie Diggs has published an open letter to Oracle concerning the future of the APO and its work. "Last week, Oracle laid off two more members of Sun's already-decimated APO. One of those let go happened to be both the Orca project lead and the GNOME Accessibility project lead, Willie Walker. I truly hope this was an oversight on Oracle's part, and one that will be rectified very soon. Because if it is not, and if no other company steps forward to continue this work, the accessibility of the GNOME desktop will become the open source equivalent of an unfunded mandate, doomed ultimately to fail."

GNOME accessibility developers concered about Oracle's commitment

Posted Feb 8, 2010 16:36 UTC (Mon) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (4 responses)

Would it not be a good idea to try and get public sector funding (say from the EU) for accessibility
work? There are enough people who would like to see more use of free software in the public
sector, and accessibility is a major stumbling block for that.

What about Qt/Nokia's accessibility stuff actually? I thought that Qt had its own accessibility
framework. Would it be feasible to combine them?

GNOME accessibility developers concered about Oracle's commitment

Posted Feb 8, 2010 16:57 UTC (Mon) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (1 responses)

This is a good write-up noting the Qt/KDE issues:
http://jpwhiting.blogspot.com/2010/02/state-of-free-acces...

GNOME accessibility developers concered about Oracle's commitment

Posted Feb 8, 2010 17:05 UTC (Mon) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

Based on that then, it might make sense for Nokia to look for EU (or whoever) funding to work on
at-spi. It would obviously be good for them if they had a part in shaping it. Of course, it might
even make sense for them to put down the money themselves, depending how important
accessibility is to them.

GNOME accessibility developers concered about Oracle's commitment

Posted Feb 8, 2010 18:35 UTC (Mon) by sthibaul (✭ supporter ✭, #54477) [Link]

The work to merge both is already being done. But KDE doesn't have a
screen reader like orca.

GNOME accessibility developers concered about Oracle's commitment

Posted Feb 8, 2010 20:47 UTC (Mon) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link]

Funny you should mention that. The new EU Commissionaire for IT issues might actually be very open to fund open source projects, since she is known to be very open source friendly. But more importantly, she may have a soft spot for any project that is now in trouble due to being abandoned by Oracle.

The moral of the story: Doesn't hurt to ask!

GNOME accessibility developers concered about Oracle's commitment

Posted Feb 8, 2010 17:46 UTC (Mon) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link] (7 responses)

This will be fixed somehow ..

There are so many people wanting to sell Linux desktops .. someone will have pay for development. The LF might be a good place to start asking the right questions.

GNOME accessibility developers concered about Oracle's commitment

Posted Feb 8, 2010 18:00 UTC (Mon) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link] (6 responses)

So many people wanting to sell Linux desktops. Funny that it's Sun who have
been funding this rather than, say, Ubuntu.

GNOME accessibility developers concered about Oracle's commitment

Posted Feb 8, 2010 20:29 UTC (Mon) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (5 responses)

You forget, Ubuntu doesn't contribute back to the community. <yes there was at least a little sarcasm in that>

GNOME accessibility developers concered about Oracle's commitment

Posted Feb 8, 2010 20:56 UTC (Mon) by Hanno (guest, #41730) [Link]

Funny how everybody knows what someone else should do.

GNOME accessibility developers concered about Oracle's commitment

Posted Feb 8, 2010 21:27 UTC (Mon) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (3 responses)

I would say that it does indeed. Ubuntu contributes more community.

GNOME accessibility developers concered about Oracle's commitment

Posted Feb 9, 2010 20:40 UTC (Tue) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link] (2 responses)

Contributing fanboys and blind adulation is a mixed blessing,
especially when most Ubuntu users hardly know the source that
Ubuntu uses as its bountiful upstream. Debian is still invisible
on the Ubuntu home page and it's not even obvious which of the first
tier links may mention it. That's unconscionable.

GNOME accessibility developers concered about Oracle's commitment

Posted Feb 9, 2010 22:08 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

no, that is free/open software in action.

if you want to force people to include your name (or your project's name) when they talk about their product you need to use the original BSD license.

There is a reason why almost nobody uses that anymore, and none of the commonly used license require attribution in derivitives.

GNOME accessibility developers concered about Oracle's commitment

Posted Feb 10, 2010 7:39 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]

Pretty much all the licenses require that you keep the attribution that exists in the program. What they don't require is for specific phrases to be included in advertising material.

GNOME accessibility developers concerned about Oracle's commitment

Posted Feb 8, 2010 23:52 UTC (Mon) by xnox (guest, #63320) [Link] (1 responses)

hacking a11y is not interest although it would be awesome to have VoiceOver
like text-to-speech framework so that other developers can freely use it
without worrying about language/speed/voice preferences of the user.

GNOME accessibility developers concerned about Oracle's commitment

Posted Feb 9, 2010 17:21 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

a11y stuff really needs to be integrated into the widget toolkit for
applications.

So application developers still need to do accessibility testing to make
sure they did not break something in a stupid manner*, but individually
GTK/Gnome, QT/KDE, Fltk, etc etc need to be the ones that put the most work
into accessibility.

The best you can do is probably create a freedesktop.org standard that
toolkit/desktop makers can use so that they don't have to create everything
from scratch.

Maybe something like this:
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/acc...

* the only way a developer can know how end users use their software is by
working with end users and doing real usability testing. Guidelines can
help you avoid the worst pitfalls when it comes to usability, but each
application is unique and rules that apply to one piece of software can't
be universally applied to all software.

GNOME accessibility developers concerned about Oracle's commitment

Posted Feb 9, 2010 22:44 UTC (Tue) by Karen.Tillman (guest, #63459) [Link] (3 responses)

Hi Folks - For a bit of perspective - Oracle has a substantial, well-
recognized track record on accessibility, and with Sun, our team becomes even
stronger. We have retained most of Sun's accessibility engineers, and will
continue our significant investment in accessibility across all of our
products. Changes in staffing do not indicate product strategy and
direction. Some food for thought.

Karen Tillman

GNOME accessibility developers concerned about Oracle's commitment

Posted Feb 9, 2010 23:10 UTC (Tue) by sthibaul (✭ supporter ✭, #54477) [Link] (1 responses)

Err that's rather food for questions, actually.

Will Oracle count the gnome desktop in its range of products?

- If yes, not keeping Willie on the project is an odd decision.

- If no, then your comment is completely irrelevant to this thread and
all the people who are using the gnome desktop and need Orca to do
it...

GNOME accessibility developers concerned about Oracle's commitment

Posted Feb 9, 2010 23:13 UTC (Tue) by sthibaul (✭ supporter ✭, #54477) [Link]

I don't know whether Oracle will count OpenOffice.org in its range of
products either, but the same two consequences do apply.

GNOME accessibility developers concerned about Oracle's commitment

Posted Feb 9, 2010 23:24 UTC (Tue) by eeejay (guest, #63460) [Link]

Karen,

What food for thought have you just provided? That the strategy and
direction of Oracle are unclear?

Sun's investment in GNOME accessibility had a far reaching scope. It
extended beyond their direct product, many end-users benefited from Sun's
work. Cynics like yourself might say that is why Sun failed as a company.

It's great that Oracle provides accessibility for it's products. I am sure
it helps you get lucrative government contracts, we all know there is no
hint of altruism there.

Whatever keeps your shareholders happy.