New Standards and New Initiatives
From Open A11y
- Title:
- New Standards and New Initiatives From Open A11y
- Abstract:
- Open A11y has completed three standards covering keyboard and
desktop accessibility, providing APIs, and
specifying minimum platform accessibility. A companion testing tool will
also be introduced. Meanwhile, new initiatives are forming.
- Session Level:
- Advanced
- Track:
- Other
- Length:
- 60 Minute session
- Panel:
- Chair: Janina Sajka, Open Accessibility
- Pete Brunet, IBM
- Earl Johnson, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
- Gregory J. Rosmaita: vice-chair, Open Accessibility
- Willie Walker, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Proposal:
First chartered in 2004 as the Free Standards Group Accessibility
Workgroup (FSGA), the Open Accessibility (A11y) Group functions today within The Linux Foundation to
establish free and open standards that enable comprehensive universal
access to various computing platforms, applications, and services. Open
A11y exists to make
it easier for developers, ISVs, and distributions to
support assistive technologies (AT).
Assistive technologies enable individuals to make full use of computer-based
technology despite variability in physical or sensory abilities due to
illness, aging or disability.
Our standards and works in progress can be found on-line at:
http://a11y.org.
New standards from Open A11y
completed and adopted during the past year include:
- 1) AT-SPI For Linux & Unix
- Originally developed for GNOME, the Assistive Technology Service
Provider Interface (AT-SPI) is the toolkit-neutral interface between
applications and assistive technologies. It enables assistive
technology tools, e.g. screen readers,
magnifiers, and even scripting interfaces to query and interact with
graphical user interface (GUI) controls. As such it facilitates access
for individuals who cannot use the standard GUI. It enables
developers (or a third party) to build applications that are, or can be
made accessible.
- For GNOME applications AT-SPI is implemented through libatk. Open A11y is also developing a test suite which
will enable developers and distributions to validate end to end
accessibility for libatk based applications with a reasonable level of
confidence.
- 2) Keyboard Accessibility On Linux & Unix
- Persons unable to use a keyboard and mouse sometimes use alternative
devices. However, many users can be accommodated programatically through
software that causes a standard keyboard to behave differently. Among the
most mature of accessibility accommodations commonly available on
computing platforms, many of these features and behaviors have long been
available in XKB: The X Keyboard Extension, Revision 6.4
- Open A11y has standardized on
a subset of the XKB specification in order to provide standard keyboard
features and behaviors required by persons with mobility impairments in
Linux and Unix distributions through two standards specification
documents:
- Individuals with mobility impairments will benefit
by having such features built-in and available through standard activation
strategies, such as tapping the Shift key five times to activate StickyKeys. The routines provided by the API will also benefit assistive technologies such as on screen
keyboard and screen reader applications.
- 3) IAccessible2 for Microsoft Windows
- IAccessible2 complements and extends, the
capabilities of Microsoft's MSAA (Microsoft
Active Accessibility) API to address gaps on
Windows computers that have been addressed by later generation
accessibility APIs. IAccessible2 was modeled
after the OpenOffice accessibility API called
the UNO Accessibility API (a.k.a. UAAPI). The OpenOffice UAAPI and GNOME ATK/AT-SPI are, in turn,
both modeled on the Java Accessibility API which
IBM and Sun jointly defined.
- There was a pointed effort within IBM to harmonize the IAccessible2 API
with the ATK/AT-SPI API. This harmonization is proving to be very helpful as advanced
accessibility features are added to Firefox 3 which will provide
accessibility on both the Linux and Windows platforms. IAccessible2 is
currently supported in applications such as the IBM Lotus Notes 8 Productivity Editors and Firefox 3; accessibility
tools, such as AccProbe; and screen readers such as JAWS, Window-Eyes, and NVDA. This newest
Open A11y accessibility standard will
further help developers create cross-platform applications by reducing the
need for platform specific customization.
- New and continuing initiatives at Open A11y include:
- Expert Handlers
- Generalized content markup (such as HTML) is complimented by markup specifications that
facilitate more semantically precise content markup. Examples include MathML and MusicXML. Assistive technology (AT) typically handles generalized
content markup, but does not know about specialized markup. Because of
this, users of AT are
unable to access or navigate specialized markup effectively.
- The Open A11y
Expert Handlers group is exploring a standardized plug-in mechanism for AT software to allow the expert
software to provide enhanced, semantically rich access to specialized
markup.
Please address any technical problems you encounter with this document or the resources to
which it links, to the Open A11y Webmaster
<webmaster@accessibility.linux-foundation.org>