Willie Walker

Under much appreciated support from my employer, Sun Microsystems, I'm the lead for the Orca Screen Reader project, and I also try to keep some organization going around the GNOME accessibility project (GAP) general. I've been involved in Making the X Window System Accessible to People with Disabilities for nearly 20 years, having helped create things such as:

• AccessX - the good part of XKB.

• The RAP - the Remote Access Protocol for the X Window System (the first service oriented approaches to accessibility for our platform, which led to the Java Accessibility API, which led to the AT-SPI)

• Mercator - one of the first screen readers for the X Window System. My role was mostly working on RAP. The folks at Georgia Tech did the hard stuff.

I'm also the maintainer for gnome-speech, though the work I put into it is mostly for sustaining purposes. I'd like to migrate it off of Bonobo/ORBit someday and move it to something else (DBUS?), but I just don't have time.

Other things I've have led in the past include:

• FreeTTS - an open source speech synthesis system.

• Sphinx-4 - a speech recognition system.

You can usually find me on the #orca channel on irc.gnome.org. Check out my band, too: Russell Hill. It's one of the most pleasant musical groups I've ever been in.

Willie Walker (irc.gnome.org nick -- WillieWalker)