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David,<br>
<br>
While screen readers are indeed a proven technology, adding them can be
a surprisingly difficult task - especially depending upon the screen
reading approached used. All of the "screen scraping" screen readers
(what I call "second generation screen readers") depend upon specific
idiosyncrasies of how graphics rendering is done - and require that
(for example) text rendering go through a single shared bottleneck in
order to find out what that text is and track it in an Off-screen
Model. The third generation approach is built on top of a platform
accessibility API or set of accessibility services (such as Orca on
GNOME using AT-SPI or VoiceOver on Macintosh). This requires that the
platform in question make such an API/services and that the apps expose
information via that technique.<br>
<br>
The long term expectation for OLPC is that something like the Orca
screen reader would work on top of AT-SPI. Since Sugar makes use of
many GNOME libraries, this is a natural assumption. Unfortunately the
inter-process communication mechanism for AT-SPI is CORBA, which is
very heavy-weight and not easily stuffed into the small RAM envelope of
OLPC. This is being addressed by a project to migrate AT-SPI to DBUS,
which is much lighter weight. That process/project can be monitored at
it's "web home" at
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Accessibility/ATK/AT-SPI/AT-SPI_on_D-Bus">http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Accessibility/ATK/AT-SPI/AT-SPI_on_D-Bus</a><br>
<br>
Once that is done, it should be possible to bring Orca to the OLPC, at
which point the task(s) will be focused around Sugar and the apps. <br>
<br>
<br>
Meanwhile, as Jim Gettys points out, it is also possible to stuff a
general Linux + GNOME desktop (+ CORBA + Orca) onto an OLPC, though you
may need to beef it up a bit with flash, etc. And it'll be rather
slow, and it looses some of what makes OLPC special and interesting at
the software level (so in that case, perhaps what would be better is a
netbook that will run Fedora or Ubuntu or OpenSolaris much better than
you would get with any of those on OLPC hardware).<br>
<br>
<br>
As to why this work I've described above hasn't already been completed,
with resources dedicated to it by the OLPC project itself (vs. waiting
for the open source community to get around to doing this at a somewhat
slower pace), I'll have to leave that topic to Jim Gettys. I would
point out from my own experience at (smaller) commercial companies
prior to coming to Sun and working on open source accessibility - you
must always be sensitive to what your customers are telling you they
want, even when you know about needs that those customers may not be
asking about. Software engineering is something of a zero-sum game: if
you are putting effort in one area, it means that effort can't be going
into some other area. If you are adding features explicitly requested
by customers, those same staff are probably not available to add
features that customers aren't asking for. And it is still a bit too
rare of a thing for a customer to place accessibility high on their
list of required features (something Section 508 in the U.S. has been
incredibly helpful in doing for Federal sales in America). I expect
that with ratification of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of
Disabled Persons (see
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.un.org/disabilities/countries.asp?navid=12&pid=166">http://www.un.org/disabilities/countries.asp?navid=12&pid=166</a> for
the list of signatory countries and
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.un.org/disabilities/documents/maps/enablemap.jpg">http://www.un.org/disabilities/documents/maps/enablemap.jpg</a> for a nice
world-map showing signatory status), many more potential OLPC customers
are going to start asking about accessibility, which will help enable
engineers working on Sugar and OLPC generally to bump up the priority
of accessibility work.<br>
<br>
<br>
Regards,<br>
<br>
Peter Korn<br>
Accessibility Architect & Principal Engineer,<br>
Sun Microsystems, Inc.<br>
<br>
<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:11c18ce10811271955n66761b5r972b7bb9f5df290f@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">In reading more about accessibility and OLPC project, it
seems to me that designing accessibility features into the laptops
wasn't a priority. I would suggest that accessibility needs to be added
to the mission statement. Once this happens I feel that accessibility
would be give the proper attention an resources it deserves.
<div><br>
</div>
<div>According to the OLPC wiki<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Our_software#Accessibility" style=""><span
class="Apple-style-span"
style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-decoration: none;"> </span></a><a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Our_software#Accessibility">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Our_software#Accessibility,
"</a><span class="Apple-style-span"
style="font-family: Arial; line-height: 19px;">We've heard that 10% of
the world's population, or more than 600 million people, live with life
altering disabilities, and two thirds of those persons are in
developing countries (UN statistics)" </span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><br>
</span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;">This
would seem to justify incorporating accessibility into the mission
statement.</span></div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;">Again,
screen readers are a proven technology. It shouldn't be difficult to
add this functionality. There are more than enough blind kids in the
world to justify this.</span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><br>
</span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;">I
don't mean to offend those working on accessibility for this project. I
think this is a great project but more attention should be given to
make the laptops more accessible.</span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><br>
</span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;">Thanks,</span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;">David</span></div>
<div>
<div>
<div><br>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 11:41 AM, <span
dir="ltr"><<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:tim.pennick@bt.com">tim.pennick@bt.com</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote"
style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div>
<p><font face="Arial" size="2">Hi All,</font>
</p>
<p><font face="Arial" size="2">I have an OLPC machine on loan. I'm
blind, and am wondering about the current state of play regarding
facilities such as screen readers which would allow me to access this
machine. Can anyone tell me if there are features currently built into
the OLPC machines which will give me screen reader functionality, and
if so how to access them. Alternatively, is it possible to load an
application such as Orca onto the oLPC machine and is there
documentation about how this works?</font></p>
<p><font face="Arial" size="2">Regards,</font>
</p>
<p><font face="Arial" size="2">Tim Pennick</font>
</p>
<p><font face="Times New Roman">Tim Pennick<br>
Senior Researcher<br>
BT Innovate<br>
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<br>
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</p>
<br>
<br>
<br>
</div>
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</blockquote>
</div>
<br>
</div>
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