GNOME Accessibility Project

This page is a place holder for the GNOME Accessibility Project (GAP). See the Accessibility page for the refactor in progress as of Jan-2008.

Introduction

All software products should incorporate accessibility features to enable people with disabilities to use the software easily and efficiently. Recent legislation such as Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act heightens awareness of the need to provide accessible software. The GNOME Accessibility Project is free software, licensed under LGPL. It makes the GNOME Desktop easy to use and incorporates many accessibility features.

Every supported application and utility in the GNOME Desktop is designed with accessibility and usability in mind. Users with physical disabilities such as low vision or impaired motor skills can use all of the functionality of the GNOME Desktop thanks to the customization tools that are available. The customization tools enable you to customize the appearance and behavior of the desktop. The ability to easily customize the GNOME Desktop contributes greatly to the accessibility of the desktop. This guide describes the various customization options that you can use to tailor the desktop to suit your particular needs.

Latest News

(14-Jul-2006)

• A Statement of Intent from the FSG Accessibility Workgroup, the KDE Accessibility Project, and the Gnome Accessibility Project has been posted. We hope that this statement will help clarify the goals, plans, and policies which are guiding ongoing standardization and interoperability work between the Gnome Accessibility Project another working groups.

• ATK and AT-SPI Documentation has recently been updated. AT-SPI tarballs now include HTML documentation of the IDL, which we hope will be especially helpful to python developers in conjunction with pyORBit.

  • For those who are interested in ongoing development, a set of draft IDL documentation for an enhanced AT-SPI is also available for comment.

GNOME Accessibility Stack

GNOME Accessibility Architecture Overview

• Accessible Applications

• Bridge

• AT-SPI

• Assistive Technologies

Hot Topics

• Notes from Boston2006/AccessibilitySummit at GNOME Boston 2006.

• Multi-user accessibility for Gnome 2.17/2.18

• AT-SPI/Collection design and implementation for Gnome 2.19

• AT user selection Gnome 2.19

• Unified Python AT-SPI wrapper

• Accessible Table Implementation

• Reengineering accessibility on Dbus

Accessibility documentation for Application Developers

Every GNOME developer should read

• GNOME Accessibility for Developers : How to make GNOME 2.0 Applications Accessible

• Testing GNOME Applications for Accessibility document, written by Wipro Technologies.

• Making Applications Accessible (includes information on ATK support for custom widgets)

Downloads

For downloads, see ftp.gnome.org and GNOME CVS please.

Documents

• GUADEC 2004 Talk: Making Accessibility Work in 2.8 (OpenOffice format): GUADEC-2004.sxi

• Accessibility Test Suite: Overview - (26-Jun-2004)

• GNOME Accessibility Test Suite: Details - (26-Jun-2004)

• Testing GNOME applications for Accessibility - (29-Jul-2003)

• GNOME Accessibility for Developers : How to make GNOME 2.0 Applications Accessible - DRAFT 0.7 (30-Aug-2002)

• IBM Document on general application accessibility principles (does not include information on how to provide ATK support)

• Accessibility Testing Guidelines document from IBM

• Keybinding Comparison/Proposal Table - (1-Feb-2002)

• Other keybinding documents - (1-Feb-2002)

Audio

In May/June 2003, Marc Mulcahy of Sun Microsystems presented a four-part radio show on ACB Radio exploring the GNOME desktop with Gnopernicus.

• GNOME v. Windows architecture, Introduction to Gnopernicus - (9-May-2003)

• GNOME panel and Control Center - (16-May-2003)

• DECtalk, speech settings, Nautilus, and gedit - (22-May-2003)

• Mozilla, Balsa and Java applications - (14-Jun-2003)

Background information

• Accessibility Overview

• Assistive Technologies

• Types of Disabilities

• Accessibility Design Guidelines

• Relevant Laws

Architecture

• Project and Architectural Goals (somewhat dated)

• The ATK API for GNOME/GTK+ Accessibility

• The AT-SPI Accessibility IPC framework for assistive technology support (C Bindings)

• The AT-SPI Accessibility IPC framework for assistive technology support (IDL)

• Block Diagram showing how the AT-SPI registry, applications, and assistive technologies interact

  • 

    • more Architectural and Technical Documentation...

Contributing

If you have the interest and skills, you can help us in areas including:

• code contributions to ATK and its implementation library
• contributing to assistive technology building blocks such as text-to-speech
• user testing
• additional user requirements gathering
• documentation.

• Here's a list of GNOME bugs marked with the "accessibility" keyword. Please feel free to jump in and help fix some! You can find more information about getting sources from GNOME CVS HEAD and submitting patches here: http://developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html.

Assistance of all kinds is very valuable, and in fact we will need your help to make Gnome usable by the widest possible user community.

Application developers and widget maintainers can be especially helpful, since some engineering work will be required in order for big applications and custom widgets to support our accessibility framework.

Please join us!

Mailing List

The present Gnome Accessibility point of contact is the accessibility development list:

• General Accessibility List (or mail to Gnome-accessibility-list-request@gnome.org)

• List for Accessibility Developers (or mail to Gnome-accessibility-devel-request@gnome.org)

Meeting Notes and Presentations

• Presentations

References

• Guidelines for Writing Accessible GNOME Applications HTML, Wiki

• Application Implementation Overview

• Accessibility Toolkit (ATK)

• Gtk Accessibility Interface Library (GAIL)

• AT Service Provider Interface (AT-SPI)

• Proposed AT-SPI

• Gnome 2.14 Desktop Accessibility Guide

• AT-SPI Design Overview

• Gnome Accessibility Architecture

• Exposing HTML//DOM via ATK/AT-SPI

• Gnome and Corba

• Boston2006/AccessibilitySummit

• Interactive testing with Accerciser

• Propose Firefox AT-SPI Support

• Other Assistive Technology Projects

• Pretty stack diagram

CategoryAccessibility