Hi Michael, Like you, I also believe that getting the word out regarding accessibility issues with Java Swing might help persuade Oracle, IBM, or a combination of the two to get together and resolve the issue. Therefore, I am going to return this message back onto a couple of lists in hopes that it will somehow make its way to folks at Oracle and IBM who are responsible for solving the current accessibility problems. Let me give you a concrete example of the situation that professors like myself face regarding accessibility for blind and visually impaired students. I teach three sequential OOP courses using Java. The first two courses use the following textbook exclusively and the the third course uses this textbook in combination with another textbook: http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/academic/product/0,3110,0131496980,00.html As is most often the case, this textbook was chosen because it is an outstanding textbook for sighted students. This textbook includes a CD that contains an outstanding Java multimedia library covering images, audio, video, and some other topics as well. The library is completely written around Swing, and is therefore not accessible to blind students. Obviously many of the images that one might produce with the library wouldn't be accessible under any circumstance. However, many of the images could be embossed and made accessible if Swing were accessible. For example, one of the programs that I assign is to write a graphic edge detector program using a Swing JSlider component in a Swing JFrame object to adjust the edge detection threshold. If Swing were accessible, a blind student could write the program, load an image file, adjust the slider, take a screen shot, emboss the screen shot, and get some feel for what graphic edge detection means. By repeating this process for different slider values, the student could get a feel for the the impact of the edge-detection threshold. With proper adjustment of the threshold, many digital images would produce meaningful embossed images, which itself might be a useful tool for a blind person. The edge-detected image is also displayed in a Swing JFrame object using methods from the library. If a JFrame could be easily and reliably integrated into an SWT program, I could redesign the problem to have the student write the GUI using SWT components and integrate the display into the SWT program. However, whether it would be reasonable to expect students to learn to program GUIs using both Swing and SWT in a single semester is open to question. Another possible assignment involves writing an audio spectrum analyzer making heavy use of the classes and methods from the library. If Swing were accessible, a blind student could write the program, speak or whistle into the microphone, capture and emboss a screen shot of the analyzer output, and possibly understand a little about digital signal processing and audio spectrum analysis. That is a topic that might be of particular interesting to a blind student. And the list goes on and on. However, for me to pull that off, it would be necessary for me to completely rewrite the entire library using SWT instead of Swing. That would not only require a lot of effort to rewrite the GUIs, but would also require the integration of multithreaded Java code into SWT, which I have yet to conquer. After that, it would require me to essentially rewrite the entire textbook substituting SWT GUI images for Swing GUI images and substituting SWT code for Swing code. Since someone else owns the copyright for the book, that would not be possible even if I had time available to do it. To my knowledge, a comparable textbook and class library written around SWT does not exist. My point is simply that by making SWT only marginally compatible with Swing, IBM has precluded the use of many existing libraries for a variety of purposes. The impact of precluding the use of those libraries goes much deeper than the GUI level. That impact penetrates all the way into the information processing layers in the libraries that lie behind the GUIs. These limitations apply not only to the educational environment, but also to the workplace as well, and probably have a negative impact on the marketability of blind programmers. Along those same lines, by not making Swing accessible, Sun/Oracle has caused Java to be marginal as a programming language for blind students and blind programmers. This also probably has a negative impact on the marketability of blind programmers. Presumably, Oracle could still correct the situation from their end by making Swing accessible, and I wish that they would. In my opinion, that would be the best solution and would eliminate the need to use SWT for accessibility. Because of apparent multithreading conflicts (or at least multithreading difficulties), it might be more difficult for IBM to correct the situation from their end and provide for smooth integration of Swing into SWT, but it would be good if they did, especially if Swing continues to be inaccessible. Dick Baldwin -- Richard G. Baldwin (Dick Baldwin) Home of Baldwin's on-line Java Tutorials http://www.DickBaldwin.com Professor of Computer Information Technology Austin Community College (512) 223-4758 mailto:Baldwin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.austincc.edu/baldwin/