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CSUN 2004 report (3/2)(笑)
- To: bug@..., bep@...
- Subject: CSUN 2004 report (3/2)(笑)
- From: Koichi INOUE <inoue@...>
- Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 17:06:05 +0900 (JST)
- Delivered-to: mailing list bug@argv.org
- Mailing-list: contact bug-help@argv.org; run by ezmlm
井上です。
これで終わりです。
----
o The final session Sun hosted was "Gnopernicus - the open source
Screen Reader/magnifier" - which was a double-length presentation
covering all aspects of Gnopernicus: how it works, the motivation
behind developing it, the voices & Braille displays supported,
demonstrations of Gnopernicus on the Sun Java Desktop System, and
also a special guest presentation from Oracle Corporation discussing
their use of Gnopernicus with their large Java application
JDeveloper 10g. This presentation was given by Thomas Friehoff of
BAUM Retec AG, Marc Mulcahy and Peter Korn of Sun's accessibility
team, and Kerstin Goldsmith and Mike Pedersen of Oracle Corporation.
Thomas began the presentation with a discussion about who BAUM is
and why they are developing an open source screen reader for the
UNIX and GNU/Linux desktop. He noted that BAUM has been developing
products for the blind and visually impaired for over 20 years,
focused on the mission: "To offer Products and Services to Blind and
Visually impaired persons, to make them more successful in their
business and private life!" However, he said, lately they are
frustrated with the current situation for accessibility: Windows
is dominating the market, and they and their customers are looking
for alternatives, so BAUM decided to be early adopters of the new
accessibility infrastructure and technology for UNIX and GNU/Linux.
Thomas also said that GNU/Linux is growing in popularity in Germany:
many users (mostly private individuals) are asking for access to
the graphical environments in Linux, the German Parliament recently
decided to use Linux on their desktops, and there is a lot of interest
in the public sector as well.
Thomas said that Gnopernicus is targeted for x86 "PC" hardware
running GNOME, X Windows, and Linux; and also for Sun hardware
running GNOME, X, and Sun Solaris. He said that architecturally,
Gnopernicus is simply another application running on the system,
using the platform accessibility infrastructure to communicate with
other applications in a standard and supported fashion. Furthermore,
Thomas noted that Gnopernicus doesn't patch the operating system or
graphical framework, nor does it replace any video or keyboard
drivers. Rather, he said, it functions by virtue of the
accessibility framework built into the platform. Thomas noted that
because of this, Gnopernicus supports all "native GNOME applications
that use the GTK+ graphical library, all Java applications using
the Swing graphical library, StarOffice and OpenOffice.org, and
Mozilla. And now that the KDE community is working on support for
the accessibility framework developed for GNOME, Thomas said that
in the future KDE/Qt applications should also be supported.
Thomas then walked through a series of slides that showed the
Gnopernicus user interface. He showed the Gnopernicus main menu,
General Settings dialog, where a user turns on or off support for
Braille, Magnification, Speech, and the Braille Monitor window
(a software "Braille display" which shows what is rendered on a
physical Braille display). He went through the Magnification
settings dialogs, which contain the following features: mouse
cursor display on/off, mouse cursor magnification & color choice;
full-screen cross-hair on/off, size, color, and inversion; zoom
magnification factor (2x, 3x, etc.) separate in the x & y dimension;
zoom region placement on the screen; inversion on/off, panning on/off,
smoothing mode, and mouse magnification tracking mode. Next Thomas
talked about Braille settings: the choice of Braille device and
serial port; language translation table; Braille cursor cell choice;
Braille position switch action (move the mouse & click, move the
caret, or output one of a wide range of information about the letter
or object at a particular Braille cell). He also noted that
Gnopernicus supports over 50 different Braille displays. Thomas
talked about the speech settings, with the ability to tune how
punctuation is spoken, turn on character or word echo, have speech
count multiple consecutive characters, echo modifiers, echo cursor
changes, and whether spaces should be spoken. He also noted the
Gnopernicus pronunciation dictionary. Thomas showed the voice
settings dialog, where the user can change the way different things
in the user interface are spoken: names of objects vs. their roles
vs. their accelerator keys; each one of these can be spoken by
a particular text-to-speech engine with a particular set of settings
(pitch, volume, and rate) - thus allowing the user to quickly
tell from how something is spoken what sort of thing it is.
Thomas discussed the powerful Find feature of Gnopernicus, which
can search within the window, application, or desktop for text,
specific text attributes, or named graphics.
Leaving aside the graphical user interface portion of Gnopernicus,
Thomas next discussed the keyboard interface. He said that
Gnopernicus uses the numeric keypad for commands, and groups
related commands together into a "layer". The 0 key on the
numeric keypad is used to switch between layers. Gnopernicus
provides two navigation layers containing commands for screen
review movement, describing the surroundings of the focused
object, navigating the UI hierarchy, and immediately speaking
the title bar, status bar, toolbar, and menubar. The mouse
layer allows the user to simulate mouse button clicks. The
two magnification layers provide commands for increasing and
decreasing the magnification level, setting cursor size and crosshair
thickness, toggling cursor magnification on/off, toggling picture
image smoothing, changing the panning mode, and changing the
focus tracking mode. The speech layer provides commands for
increasing and decreasing the rate, volume, and pitch, as well
as a pause/resume command. Finally, the Braille layer includes
commands to scroll the Braille display in various increments.
All of these commands can be remapped by the user to different keys
in different layers of the numeric keypad, and in addition
there are a variety of commands assigned to keys on a Braille
display so that Braille users can execute them without taking their
hands off of the Braille display.
Thomas ended the slide portion of his talk with a few conclusions:
that Gnopernicus is open source, and is bundled with the GNOME 2
platform; that it is targeted at GNU/Linux and Solaris systems;
and that it is under heavy development with testable versions
available in source code form in the GNOME source code repository.
Marc Mulcahy then took the stage, and gave a brief demonstration
of all of the voices supported by Gnopernicus. Gnopernicus uses
the gnome-speech architecture, and there are gnome-speech drivers
for the open source Festival and FreeTTS engines, as well as
drivers for the Cepstral line of commercial text-to-speech engines,
and for the Fonix DECtalk engine. Marc demonstrated all of the
voices, in multiple languages, that are available with these
engines. In addition, Marc gave a preview of gnome-speech support
for the IBM ViaVoice engine, though he noted that there are still
a few issues to work out before this will be ready for end users.
After Marc, Peter Korn came up and gave a series of Gnopernicus
demonstrations on the GNOME desktop. He launched Gnopernicus and
then took the audience on a tour of the desktop through speech.
He noted that his copy of Gnopernicus was configured so that the
text of objects was spoken in one voice, and information about those
objects in another (thus pressing F10 to bring up the File menu
resulted in "File" being spoken in one voice, and "Menu, shortcut
Alt F, 11 items" in a somewhat softer and quieter voice). Peter
then reprised a demo he gave earlier in the day, launching the
Mozilla web browser, following a bookmark to the Microsoft web
site, browsing that page, and downloading a PowerPoint slide
that was then automatically opened in StarOffice, where he
proceeded to use the keyboard navigation features of StarOffice
to go through the graphical slide and read that slide's text.
Observing that some of the text on the slide was in boldface, Peter
move the text caret to that boldface text and noted to the audience
that the software Braille display in the Braille Monitor window was
correctly indicating the text was bold in the four status cells on
the far right end of the display. Peter continued his demonstration
in StarOffice, entering text in the word processor and opening a
spreadsheet where he navigated through the cells (being told by
Gnopernicus always which cell he was on, as well as the cell's text).
The final segment of this lengthy presentation was given by
Kerstin Goldsmith and Mike Pedersen of Oracle Corporation.
Kerstin and Mike talked about one of Oracle's developer tools -
Oracle JDeveloper 10g - a large application written entirely
in the Java platform and designed to be accessible to people with
disabilities. Kerstin said that JDeveloper 10g is a powerful
integrated development environment (IDE) for creating Java
applications and web services. Filled with features, Kerstin
noted that JDeveloper 10g includes the Oracle Accessibility
Checker, an extension which provides tests for Section 508 1194.22
and WCAG Double-A, and works on all kinds of HTML files. Mike -
a blind Oracle employee - then gave a demo of JDeveloper 10g.
Mike launched Gnopernicus from his GNOME desktop (which he compiled
himself from the public source code repository), and then launched
JDeveloper 10g. With Gnopernicus reading along as he used JDeveloper
10g, Mike opened a Java source file containing an intentional
programming error and showed how to use JDeveloper 10g to find the
error, fix it, and then run the resulting application from the IDE.
Mike noted that this demo was similar to the kinds of tasks he does
every day as part of his job at Oracle. Then together with Kerstin,
Mike demonstrated the Oracle Accessibility Checker (again with
Gnopernicus), which pinpointed several accessibility issues with a
sample web page and provided assistance in fixing those issues.
Mike and Kerstin invited attendees to come to their station in the
Sun booth for hands-on demonstrations of JDeverloper 10g on both
the GNOME desktop with Gnopernicus and Microsoft Windows with JAWS.
Thomas and Peter ended the session by taking questions from the
audience.
For more information about BAUM Retec AG and Gnopernicus, please
see the following web pages respectively:
http://www.baum.ro/gnopernicus.html
http://www.baum.de
For more information about the open source text to speech engines:
Festival and FreeTTS, and the commercial text to speech engines:
Cepstral, and Fonix DECtalk, please see the following web pages
respectively:
http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/
http://freetts.sourceforge.net/
http://www.cepstral.com/
http://www.fonix.com/page.cfm?name=espeech_dectalk
For more information about Oracle's JDeveloper 10g, please see:
otn.oracle.com/products/jdev
In addition to the Sun hosted talks on Thursday, Sun participated in the
Free Standards Group presentation on Friday morning:
o "Developing Accessibility Standards for Free and Open Platforms" -
was a presentation on work by the Accessibility Working Group of
the Free Standards Group on developing free and open standards
for accessibility and for interoperability with assistive
technologies. It was given by Janina Sajka of the American
Foundation for the Blind and chair of the Accessibility Working
Group, and Peter Korn of Sun's Accessibility team (and a Sun
representative to the Accessibility Working Group).
Janina began the session with an overview of the Accessibility
Working Group's charter and goals. She talked about the growing
popularity of open source operating environments such as GNU/Linux
and the open source graphical desktops of GNOME and KDE, as well
as the use of other UNIX and non-UNIX computing environments which
are looking to adopt accessibility standards as they are
developed. She noted that there is a large body of existing
open source GUI software that isn't accessible for these environments,
and stressed the importance of establishing and promulgating
accessibility standards that open source GUI software can use.
Janina then discussed the existing open source solutions available:
AccessX, the GNOME Keyboard Accessibility Preferences dialog, and
the XKB specification which all address keyboard accessibility needs;
the GNOME Accessibility Toolkit (ATK), the Java Accessibility API,
and the UNO Accessibility API (from OpenOffice.org) which are all
accessibility APIs for applications; the GNOME Assistive Technology
Service Provider Interface (AT-SPI), Java Accessibility API, kttsd
speech API, gnome-speech text-to-speech API, gnome-mag magnification
API, and the Macintosh accessibility API which are all interfaces for
assistive technology applications; and then the end user solutions
such as BRLtty, Emacspeak, Console508, Speakup, the GNOME On-screen
Keyboard, Gnopernicus screen reader/magnifier, KMagnifier, KMouseTools,
and KMouse.
Janina stated that one of the key goals of the Accessibility Working
Group was to gather together all of the stake holders working on
these existing solutions and out of them build a set of open and
free standards which would then be adopted by the community and
become available on the various GNU/Linux, UNIX, and graphical
desktop systems. She went on to state the three goals for the first
year: standardize on the Assistive Technology Service Provider
Interface (AT-SPI) which comes from the open source GNOME accessibility
work; standardize on AT device shared I/O to coordinate use of
AT devices among multiple software clients and for uniformity of
the AT device interfaces across all systems; and standardize on
keyboard accessibility components (e.g. the "StickyKeys" family).
Peter Korn then gave a demonstration of the existing GNOME
accessibility framework through the assistive technologies Gnopernicus
and GOK - which utilize AT-SPI and provide access to a large number of
GNOME and Java applications already on the GNOME desktop, as well
as access to Mozilla and StarOffice/OpenOffice.org through that
same interface - which is the subject of standardization by this
group. Peter also noted recent work by the KDE desktop, which
is in the process of implementing support for AT-SPI in their
suite of desktop applications and graphic user interface libraries.
For more information about the Accessibility Working Group, the
Free Standards Group, and for the proceedings from this session,
please see the following web pages respectively:
http://www.a11y.org/
http://www.freestandards.org/
http://www.csun.edu/cod/conf/2004/proceedings/264.htm
On Friday and Saturday, Sun hosted a series of "Accessibility Experience"
sessions in their booth. Up to six attendees at a time attended these
hands-on hour-long sessions on either the Gnopernicus screen
reader/magnifier, or the GOK dynamic on-screen keyboard. Several of the
systems were set up with the BAUM Vario 40-cell Braille displays, some with
either the Madentec TrackerOne head-tracking device or the Origin
Instruments HeadMouse, and all with the Tash USB switch devices. Many users
signed up for these sessions, and attendees were quite enthusiastic about
the technology.
This was an exciting conference, with a dizzying series of demonstrations of
accessibility on the UNIX platform, on GNU/Linux, and on the Sun Java
Desktop system. The features and flexibility of the assistive technologies
under development is very impressive. The promise from Sun that these
assistive technologies will be bundled with their desktop computers, and the
expectation that various Linux vendors will also bundle these technologies
with their UNIX offerings, is particularly exciting!
I would like to thank Tash Inc. for their loan of a USB Switch Click and USB
Mini Click single switch devices for use at CSUN. These switches work well
with the GOK dynamic on-screen keyboard on both x86 GNU/Linux systems and
Sun Solaris workstations, as was demonstrated last month at the conference.
Numerous people used these switches in Sun's booth and also as part of
their hands-on Accessibility Experience sessions (see above). You can get
information about these switches at: http://www.tashinc.com/
I would also like to thank Madentec for their use of their Tracker One head
pointing device. Like the Tash switches, these USB head trackers work very
well with the GOK dynamic on-screen keyboard on both x86 GNU/Linux systems
and Sun Solaris workstations. Numerous people used the Tracker One at CSUN
in Sun's booth and also as part of their hands-on Accessibility Experience
sessions (see above). You can get more information about the Tracker line
of head pointing devices at: http://www.madentec.com/
I would like to thank Origin Instruments for their use of their HeadMouse
Extreme head pointing device. Like the Tash switches and the Madentec
Tracker line, these USB head trackers work very well with the GOK dynamic
on-screen keyboard on both x86 GNU/Linux systems and Sun Solaris
workstations. Numerous people used the HeadMouse Extreme at CSUN in Sun's
booth. You can get more information about the Origin Instruments line of
HeadMouse devices at: http://orin.com/
Finally, I would like to thank BAUM for their loan of several Vario 40 cell
Braille displays, which work flawlessly with the BAUM Gnopernicus screen
reader/magnifier on both x86 GNU/Linux systems and Sun Solaris workstations,
as was demonstrated at CSUN. Attendees seemed particularly pleased by the
degree to which Gnopernicus supported all of the features of these displays.
Sincerely,
Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team
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