You can find the papers etc. from CSUN 2004 at the following URL: http://www.csun.edu/cod/conf/2004/proceedings/csun04.htm Read on for an interesting report. Thanks, Bob Wiley (AT Specialist) Department of Assistive and Rehabilitative Services Assistive Technology Unit Email: bob.wiley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Voice: (512) 377-0309 Fax: (512) 377-0400 NOTE: My old email of "bob.wiley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" may no longer be = available. My new email address is: bob.wiley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -----Original Message----- From: Sturdivant, Patrick [mailto:Patrick.Sturdivant@xxxxxxxx] Sent: Thursday, April 22, 2004 6:43 AM To: Wiley, Bob Subject: FW: CSUN 2004 trip report -----Original Message----- From: Java Accessibility interest mailing list [mailto:JAVA-ACCESS@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Peter Korn Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2004 10:26 PM To: JAVA-ACCESS@xxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: CSUN 2004 trip report Greetings, Last month was the annual CSUN Conference on Technology and Persons with Disabilities. Sun Microsystems highlighted accessibility solutions for computers running UNIX (such as the newly released Sun Java Desktop System, the Solaris operating environment, GNU/Linux, and other computer systems). A series of 5 sessions on Thursday hosted by Sun went into accessibility topics in depth, and a special guest from Oracle corporation demonstrated how he uses Gnopernicus daily on his GNU/Linux system as part of his job to develop and test software and web pages using Oracle's JDeveloper 10g (a large Java development tool). A session on Friday given by members of the Accessibility Working Group of the Free Standards Group discussed the development of open and free standards for accessibility. Visitors to Sun's booth could try all of the technologies demonstrated in the sessions, as well as see both JAWS and ZoomText supporting Java applications and StarOffice. Many also signed up for the hands-on guided tours of the Sun Java Desktop using the Gnopernicus open source screen reader (shown with both BAUM and Alva Braille displays) and GOK dynamic on-screen keyboard (shown with both the Tash USB switches, the Madentec Tracker and Origin Instruments HeadMouse). Below is a fairly detailed summary of each of the five sessions Sun hosted on Thursday: o The first session Sun hosted was "The Accessible Sun Java(TM) Desktop System" - which detailed a compelling and accessible desktop alternative built on GNU/Linux with built-in assistive technologies. It was given by Peter Korn of Sun's accessibility team. Peter began with an overview of the Sun Java Desktop, noting that it is built on top of the open source GUN/Linux operating system, and uses the open source GNOME graphical environment. Sun adds to that base the StarOffice application suite which reads & writes Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files; the Mozilla web browser; the Evolution e-mail and calendaring application that can use Microsoft Exchange servers; an instant messaging application that supports all of the instant messaging systems; and of course a full Java platform environment - all for a remarkably affordable $100/year/desktop license. Peter showed what the Sun Java Desktop System looks like, with a Launch menu that will be familiar to users of the Windows Start menu, and many other elements that will be familiar to Windows users (such as the Accessories menu, desktop icons and the trash, and Network Places that supports Windows file sharing). Peter also highlighted some of the many desktop applications that come with the Java Desktop System including PDF & Postscript viewers, the CD-player and sound recorder, a digital camera capture application, Macromedia Flash, Real Player, and a video conferencing application. Peter then demonstrated the accessibility features built into to the shipping Java Desktop System. He first showed how the entire desktop was operable from the keyboard, launching applications, moving their windows, and navigating through complex applications. He then demonstrated "AccessX" keyboard functionality (also known as the TRACE keyboard accessibility features): StickyKeys, RepeatKeys, SlowKeys, BounceKeys, and MouseKeys. Finally he showed several of the desktop themes, including the high-contrast, low-contrast, and large-print themes for people with mild visual impairments. Peter noted that one of the key problems that schools and enterprises face today in deploying accessible desktops is the effective requirement of dedicating a system to classes of users with different disabilities. He demonstrated an alternative hardware desktop solution from Sun that nicely addresses this issue: the SunRay Ultra-Thin network terminal. He described SunRay as an inexpensive network appliance with little more intelligence (and no more state) than a telephone system handset: all of the action is in a server with the SunRay simply acting as a remote display and input/output system for the user. Describing a typical work-day at Sun, he took his actual employee badge - which is also a JavaCard smart chip card - and inserted it into one of the SunRay terminals on stage. He then logged into his Solaris GNOME desktop, and choose the high-contrast large-print theme setting. Just as if he were moving to another Sun building down the street, he removed his badge, moved to another SunRay terminal (which he said could be in another building), and inserted it - and instantly saw his high-contrast large-print desktop running. He said that because his session is running on a central, networked, Sun server - and not on a physical box on the desk in front of him - he had the freedom to move to any SunRay in any Sun building in Northern California (and later this year to any Sun building in North America!) and get his personal, customized desktop immediately. He finished the SunRay demonstration by describing plans to support assistive technologies on SunRay, so that a screen reader user would have the same facility with SunRay as anyone else - without having to use only the special computer that has the screen reader installed. Moving into the development realm, Peter switched to a recent build of the open source GNOME 2.6 beta desktop, to demonstrate the assistive technologies in development for inclusion in a future edition of the Sun Java Desktop System. For people who are legally blind, Peter gave a brief demonstration of the Gnopernicus open-source screen reader and screen magnifier with Braille support. He noted several of the key features, including support for over 50 Braille display, magnification to 16x with picture smoothing, and screen review functionality. He urged attendees interested to learn more about Gnopernicus to return in the afternoon for an extended session on it. Then for people with severe physical disabilities, Peter gave a brief demonstration of the GOK dynamic on-screen keyboard. He showed that GOK is far more than a simple rendition of an alphanumeric keyboard on the screen, but makes use of the accessibility framework in the GNOME desktop to present a series of dynamic keyboards containing things like the current application's menus, toolbar, and dialog box items for much more rapid use by single-switch users. He urged attendees interested to learn more about GOK to return in the afternoon for a dedicated session on it. Peter then discussed why Sun was leading the open source accessibility work in GNOME. He talked about the four themes behind this work: (1) building accessibility in from the start (vs. bolting it on as an afterthought); (2) the evolution of screen access technologies from the original text console, through the GUI and off-screen models, to the approach Sun pioneered first with the Java platform and now in GNOME of direct access through supported programming interfaces; (3) Sun's proposal of a formal division of responsibility for accessibility: the job of the platform, of the application, and of assistive technologies; and (4) the idea that the platform, the accessibility infrastructure, and even the assistive technologies themselves can be open-source, which brings tremendous new opportunities to those developing accessibility technologies and the ultimate users of desktop computers. Peter noted that today users of accessible desktop computers face several problems, including the costs of specialized assistive technology, the need to dedicate systems for use by various (and different) user populations in public settings, that accessible systems today are very brittle (don't let a non-disabled user mess with it!), and that upgrades are frequent and expensive. Peter then compared this to the Sun Java Desktop System: everything is built in at a great price, accessibility is an explicitly supported part of the design, and the assistive technology is delivered from the same vendor as all of the applications providing a single source for service & support. Peter asked, and then answered the question of who is using the Sun Java Desktop System today: the UK Office of Government Commerce is standardizing on it and the UK National Health service is deploying it on 800,000 desktops; and the China Standard Software company has adopted the Sun Java Desktop System and is deploying 500,000 to 1 million copies across China in 2004, the first installment on their bid to meet a government mandate of 200 million open source desktops in China by the end of the decade. Peter also asked, and then answered the question of who is using GNU/Linux: the city of Munich has rejected Microsoft for Linux on 14,000 desktops; the Brazilian government has decreed that all government desktops shall move to Linux; the South African government offices are to use Linux; and the Nigerian Ministry of Education has adopted Linux. Finally Peter ended the presentation with bonus demonstration, showing Dasher, an innovative assistive technology developed by the University of Cambridge that is optimized for eye-tracking and head-mouse systems. Dasher is available on for a number of desktop and palmtop systems, but when it is running on GNOME it takes advantage of the rich accessibility framework there to allow users direct control of all of their applications through the Dasher interface. For more information about the Sun accessibility effort, the GNOME open source desktop, the GNOME accessibility framework, the Sun Java Desktop System, and the SunRay Ultra-Thin client, please see the following web pages respectively: http://www.sun.com/access http://www.gnome.org/start http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap http://www.sun.com/software/javadesktopsystem http://www.sun.com/sunray o The second session Sun hosted was "StarOffice 7 - the Accessible Office Suite" - which described and demonstrated this rich suite of accessible office applications that can read and write files from Microsoft Office,. It was given by Peter Korn of Sun's accessibility team. Peter began with a history of StarOffice - that it was developed by the Germany company Star Division GmbH which Sun purchased several years ago. Sun decided to re-license the overwhelming majority of the StarOffice code as open source, creating the OpenOffice.org community and application around it. Peter detailed the 6 key components of StarOffice and OpenOffice.org: Writer (a full-featured word processor), Calc (a powerful spreadsheet), Impress (the slide presentation package that in fact Peter was using for this presentation), Draw (a drawing application supports many image formats), Base (a programmable database system), and the equation editor with support for MathML. He then noted that these application ship with Sun Solaris, the Sun Java Desktop System, and many GNU/Linux distributions; and also that they are available on Windows, bundled by Sony and others with their PCs. Peter then described in detail the key features of the various applications that are part of StarOffice/OpenOffice.org. He noted that Writer reads/writes MS-Word, RTF, text, HTML, DocBook, Palm, Pocket Word, and Word Perfect file formats; that it will export to PDF; that it can create complex documents, embed charts, spreadsheets, etc. all within the document; that it has full style-sheet support; and that it provides automatic spelling correction. He described Calc's features, including that it reads/writes MS-Excel, dBASE, SYLK, Lotus 1-2-3, DIF, Pocket Excel, HTML file formats; it will export to PDF; it can create 3-D charts & graphs; that it supports multiple sheets per file; and that it has a large library of functions, including Database, Financial, Logical, Mathematical, and Statistical functions. He noted Impress' features, including that it reads/writes MS-PowerPoint files; that it will export to PDF, HTML, and Macromedia Flash; that it includes a large library of transition, animation & 3-D effects; and that it has a built-in spell checker. Finally, Peter talked about the Draw application features, including that it reads/writes AutoCAD, EPS, Pict, SVG, Bitmap, GIF, JPEG, Photoshop, TIFF, & PhotoCD files; that it will export to PDF, HTML, and Macromedia Flash; that it includes vector and bitmap image manipulation tools; and that it has a built-in spell checker. Peter also noted that the native file format for all StarOffice and OpenOffice.org files is an open, published XML standard, and that the office suites have been translated into many languages, with Sun specifically supporting: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Simplified & Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Peter then discussed the accessibility features in StarOffice and OpenOffice.org. He noted that for people with mild physical disabilities, virtually every aspect of the office suite is operable entirely from the keyboard. For people with mild visual impairments, the office suite supports the selected desktop theme (on both GNOME and Windows desktops) - including large print, and high & low contrast themes. And for people needing to use assistive technologies, Peter described that both StarOffice and OpenOffice.org implement the Java Accessibility architecture - thereby supporting the use of JAWS and ZoomText on the Windows platform, and Gnopernicus and GOK on the GNOME desktop. Peter continued with a demonstration of StarOffice accessibility. He first showed theme support by switching to the high-contrast theme of the Sun Java Desktop, and then launching StarOffice Calc, which rendered the window in the high-contrast theme. Staying with Calc, Peter built a small spreadsheet using only the keyboard. He then switched to a different computer running the Sun Java Desktop but also running the Gnopernicus screen reader/magnifier, where he inserted a StarOffice demo CD (handed out to everyone in this session) and proceeded to install StarOffice with the entire installation voiced and magnified by Gnopernicus. Finally he closed Gnopernicus and launched GOK to demonstrate single switch access to StarOffice. Peter discussed the difficulties single switch users have in navigating complex dialog boxes and then showed how with GOK and the ability to grab the StarOffice toolbar a single switch user could change text attributes to bold, italic, and underline for entering text in only three keystrokes per attribute change - a dramatic improvement compared to single switch users in Windows or Macintosh. Not to leave Windows users out, Peter then switched to a computer running Windows, and repeated some of the same demos there. He showed StarOffice support for the Windows desktop theme (this time using the large-print theme), and he operated the office suite using the keyboard exclusively. He then launched JAWS, and showed JAWS reading text in the Writer application. Exiting JAWS, he launched ZoomText, and demonstrated speech and magnification in the Calc spreadsheet application. Finally he showed the Accessibility Options dialog, and noted the special accessibility features in StarOffice: whether it should support the system colors & fonts, whether it should load support for assistive technologies, whether it should support keyboard selection in read-only text (where normally there is no text caret), and whether it should turn text animation off. Peter ended the presentation talking about who is using the popular StarOffice suite: the 800,000 employees of the U.K. Ministry of Health who are moving the Sun Java Desktop System; the 500,00 to 1 million users of the Sun Java Desktop system that is being deployed in China this year; every user of a Sony PC sold outside of the United States, and the ~240 million students worldwide attending schools that received StarOffice through a $6 billion donation Sun made two years ago. Finally, Peter noted that StarOffice is available for purchase directly from Amazon.com, CompUSA, Fry's Electronics, Staples, Circuit City, Best Buy, Micro Center, OfficeMax and Office Depot, and that it can also be purchased directly from Sun. For more information about the StarOffice & OpenOffice.org accessibility effort, to purchase StarOffice from Sun, or to download OpenOffice.org, please see the following web pages respectively: http://ui.openoffice.org/accessibility/ http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/get http://download.openoffice.org/1.1.0/ o The third session Sun hosted was "Evolution and Mozilla Accessibility: e-mail, calendaring, and the web" - which described the features of these two applications in detail, as well as a bonus demo of the GAIM instant messaging client. It was given by Peter Korn & Marc Mulcahy (along with a special guest appearance over the Internet by Bill Haneman), all of Sun's accessibility team. The session began with Evolution, which Peter described as a "look-alike" alternative to Microsoft Outlook (only without the viruses). He described how Evolution will work with most existing mail and calendaring environments, supporting IMAP, POP, SMTP, and Authenticated SMTP servers; and that it specifically works with Sun Java System Calendaring & Messenging servers, with Lotus Notes servers, and with Microsoft Exchanges servers (this last one via a 3rd party connector). He also noted that Evolution will import mail from Eudora, UNIX mbox, MH, Maildir, Netscape, and Outlook Express mailboxes; and it supports multiple account management and Palm synchronization. Next, Peter noted some of the key features of Mozilla, including tabbed browsing support, the popup ad blocker, "find as you type" functionality for typing the contents of a hyperlink to select it, and the sophisticated junk mail filtering capabilities in the Mozilla e-mail application. He then described the key accessibility features of both Evolution and Mozilla: keyboard operability of the user interface and in manipulation of content; support for the GNOME desktop theme, and support for the GNOME accessibility architecture and thereby interoperability with the Gnopernicus and GOK assistive technologies. Peter then gave a demo of Evolution, showing it on the Sun Java Desktop System with the Gnopernicus screen reader/magnifier. He noted that assistive technology support in Evolution is still in the early stages, and that he was using a special build of Evolution with accessibility support that was in the process of being put back to the open source master cod repository. Peter opened his e-mail in Evolution, read one of the messages, and composed a reply all while using Gnopernicus with speech and magnification. Exiting Evolution, Peter launched Mozilla and demonstrated access to the web through Gnopernicus on the Sun Java Desktop System. He noted that there were still a number of keyboard navigation issues that were being worked on for Mozilla accessibility, but nonetheless managed to successfully browse the Microsoft Web site. In fact, he went to a page listing an example PowerPoint slide for education, and when he activated the link Mozilla downloaded the slideshow, which was then automatically opened in StarOffice. Using Gnopernicus, Peter proceeded to read through the contents of the first slide, with Gnopernicus correctly indicating when the text he was reading on the slide was in boldface! At this point Marc Mulcahy came on stage for a discussion and demonstration GAIM, the open source GNOME instant messenger application (which also ships as part of the Sun Java Desktop System). Peter noted that GAIM supports more instant messaging protocols than any other IM client, including AIM/ICQ & TOC from AOL, Yahoo Messenger, MSN, IRC, Jabber, Napster, Zephyr, and Gadu-Gadu. He said that GAIM supports web proxying (to get outside a firewall), allows you to maintain buddy lists and be informed when your buddies are on-line, and provides rich sound events inform you when things happen (like your buddy goes on-line). In order to ensure that GAIM worked well with Gnopernicus and other assistive technologies, Marc made a few modifications to the GAIM source code, with were accepted back into the open source project. Thanks to these small changes, Marc then demonstrated how he uses GAIM for having IM conversations with Gnopernicus. Not to be left out, Peter opened another GAIM session on another computer running the Sun Java Desktop System, this time using the GOK dynamic on-screen keyboard. And to round out the IM chat session, they were joined by Bill Haneman from Dublin Ireland chatting over the Internet. Peter invited people in the audience to interact with Bill through us, and as Marc and Peter entered their questions, Bill's responses were spoken to the room from Marc's computer via Gnopernicus. Peter ended the session by noting that GAIM was more than a nice way to keep in touch with your friends - the GNOME development team actively uses instant messaging and the IRC service for all manner of engineering discussions. GAIM accessibility is critical if developers with disabilities are to participate successfully in many open source projects. For more information about the Mozilla accessibility project in general, and Mozilla accessibility on UNIX platforms, please see the following web pages respectively: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ui/accessibility/ http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ui/accessibility/unix/ o The fourth session Sun hosted was "GOK - the open source Dynamic On-screen Keyboard" - which went into depth on the on-screen keyboard developed by the University of Toronto Adaptive Technology Resource Center and which is a core part of the GNOME desktop starting with GNOME 2.4. Jan Richards of University of Toronto ATRC gave the presentation, along with demonstrations by Peter Korn of Sun's accessibility team. Jan began the talk with an overview of GOK: it is an on-screen keyboard and more that utilizes the GNOME accessibility framework to provide a series of dynamic keyboards on screen for rapid access to applications and the desktop. He stated that it was free software - using the LGPL library - designed for UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems, and that it had been fully translated into ~30 languages. He said the mission of GOK is to "give the user access to all the functions of the UNIX and GNU/Linux desktop in the least number of steps." He said that UToronto choose GNOME because it is one of the two popular desktops for UNIX and GNU/Linux, and that Sun Microsystems and the open source community have have built a powerful accessibility infrastructure into GNOME which is necessary for the advanced features of GOK. He noted that KDE, the other popular desktop for UNIX and GNU/Linux systems, is presently working to support the same infrastructure in a future edition of that desktop. Jan then talked about the project's history, and GOK's philosophy. He said that work began in 2002 by a group of clinicians, students, programmers and visionaries with a lot of experience with users with motor impairments. Their philosophy is to put the user first, and GOK is designed to enable clinicians to asses people with motor impairments who would then configure GOK to take best advantage of the motor function of that particular user. Jan showed a series of pictures of the GOK preferences dialog. He show the Actions pane, and described how a clinician (or user) would define a set of actions a user could perform (with switches or a joystick) for an x or x,y axis movement. He showed the Feedback pane, where a clinician (or user) would define the visual and/or auditory feedback to associate with various actions. He showed the Access Methods pane, where the clinician (or user) would choose the method by which the user would generate input, and the actions (defined earlier) that trigger that input - including direct selection, dwell selection, and scanning (automatic, inverse, row/column, column/row, and single key scanning). He showed the Appearance pane, where a clinician (or user) has great control of the visual appearance of the on-screen keyboard. And finally he showed the Prediction pane, where a clinician (or user) can enable word completion and command prediction, as well as load an auxiliary word list for word completion. Jan described the GOK user experience, starting from a "main" keyboard with the buttons "Compose", "Window", "Mouse", "Launcher", "Activate", "GOK", "Menus", "Toolbars", and "UI Grab". He said that additional dynamic keyboards come up as the user interacts with their desktop and applications. Jan then described in detail each keyboard and its function. He first described the static keyboards: the "Compose" keyboard - the basic alphanumeric hardware keyboard rendered as a window of buttons on the screen; the "Window" keyboard presenting buttons for moving the GOK window around on the screen or docking it to the top/bottom of the screen; the "Mouse" keyboard for moving and the clicking the mouse; the "Launcher" keyboard which is based on a user-editable XML file and lists applications a user can launch; and the "GOK" keyboard for getting help, opening the GOK preferences dialog, and exiting the application. He then described the dynamic keyboards: the "Activate" keyboard which lists all of the running applications on the desktop for rapidly switching between them (much faster than scanning to ALT, then scanning to TAB, then scanning again to TAB, etc. to switch); the "Menus" keyboard which reaches into the running application and dynamically builds a keyboard of the menus for rapid selection; the "Toolbar" keyboard which likewise reaches into the running application and dynamically builds a keyboard of the toolbar for rapid selection; and the "UI Grab" keyboard which examines the topmost window and dynamically builds a keyboard with all of the "user interface elements" on it (the buttons, checkboxes, popup menus, editable text fields, etc.) for rapid access - especially useful in dialog boxes. He noted that these dynamic keyboards know about the kinds of objects they are displaying, and optionally use color and other visual indicators to show the user the kind of object represented with each button on the keyboard. Further, selecting a button representing an editable text field will not only bring focus to that text field, it will also bring up the "Compose" keyboard for immediate editing. At this point in the presentation, Jan invited Peter to give a live demonstration of GOK on the Sun Java Desktop System. Peter began with GOK on the GNOME desktop and a TASH USB Mini-click single-switch device. He observed that with any other on-screen keyboard running on Windows, launching applications is a lengthy and painful process of scanning to CTRL to latch it, then scanning to ESC to bring up the Start menu, then scanning repeatedly to down and right arrow to navigate the Start menu to finally get to the application you want to launch (he started this process on the GNOME desktop from the GOK "Compose" keyboard, then gave up in frustration). He said that in GOK there is a better way: simply activate the GNOME menu panel from the "Activate" keyboard, choose the "Applications" menu from the "Menus" keyboard, and immediately select the application you want to run (or the submenu listing the application); dramatically faster! Alternately of course, Peter noted that frequently launched applications could be placed in the "Launcher" menu; in fact that's what he did before this presentation to put GAIM and StarOffice there. Peter proceeded to launch the GNOME Text Editor application, and using the "Compose" keyboard, he wrote a sentence. He then noted that if he wanted to edit this sentence, that on any other on-screen keyboard on any other platform he would have to slowly scan down to the arrow keys to slowly move character at a time (or latch the CTRL key to use the arrow keys to move a word at a time). But then he brought up the "Text-manipulation" keyboard, and demonstrated rapid selection by letter, word, line, and sentence, as well as immediate access to cut, copy, and paste functionality via the GNOME Accessibility architecture. He then used the "Menus" keyboard to rapidly choose "Save" from the "File" menu, and the "UI Grab" keyboard to put the contents of that dialog onto a dynamic keyboard to quickly choose a directory, a filename, and the "OK" button. Peter then exited Text Editor, and brought up the GNOME Help system. Again comparing GOK to other on-screen keyboards for other platforms, he noted that the normal and tedious way to select hyperlinks is to repeatedly scan to the TAB key until the correct link is focused, and then scan to the SPACE key to select it (and repeat this process again and again until you find the help document you want). But then he showed how the GOK "UI Grab" keyboard would immediately extract all of the hyperlinks and put them on a keyboard dynamically, for immediate selection. Going to the "Accessibility Guide" help document, he showed how the GNOME Help system displayed a table of contents in a tree-view pane on the left side of the window, and how GOK's "UI Grab" keyboard also listed that table of contents on the dynamic keyboard allowing him to rapidly go to Chapter 3.2 titled "Navigating the Desktop Background" in just three clicks of his single-switch device. Peter emphasized that this all works because of the GNOME Accessibility architecture, which is implemented across the entire GNOME desktop as well as in large applications like StarOffice and Mozilla and Java applications (all of which Sun is incorporating in the Sun Java Desktop System). To underscore this point, Peter then launched StarOffice and used the GOK "Menu" keyboard to open a new text document. Noting how difficult it usually is for a single switch user to navigate a complex dialogs like Character Font and Style dialogs, he used the "Toolbar" GOK keyboard to put the character attribute settings "Bold", "Italic", and "Underline" (among others) onto a keyboard, and in three clicks each quickly selected them. He then proceeded to enter text from the "Compose" keyboard that was italicized, boldface, and underlined! Having demonstrated GOK at length with single switch, Peter then changed the Access Method to "Dwell selection", placed a reflective dot onto his forehead, and used a Madentec Tracker to operate GOK. He re-launched the GNOME Help application and followed a few hyperlinks, all simply by moving his head. For more information about GOK and about the GNOME Accessibility architecture, please see the following web pages respectively: http://www.gok.ca http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap 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=3Despeech_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 =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D =3D=3D=3D To unsubscribe, send email to listserv@xxxxxxxxxxxx and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA-ACCESS". For general help, send email to listserv@xxxxxxxxxxxx and include in the body of the message "help". The department of Assistive and Rehabilitative services does not endorse any products or views expressed in messages to this list. The ideas expressed are solely the ideas of the sender, and do not reflect in any way the ideas or philosophy of the Department of Assistive and Rehabilitative services.