Linux accessibility efforts at Novell
Time: Aug 29, 11:30 a.m.
Location: SI 091
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Accessibility involves the creation of software that is easy to navigate and use, especially for people with disabilities. The User Interface Automation (UIA) specification is an advanced accessibility framework that Microsoft has released to the community including an irrevocable pledge of patent rights for anyone implementing the specification. At Novell we are working to build a Linux implementation of the UIA and an adapter to make it work well with Linux accessibility projects. This work is being done in Mono, an open source implementation of the Microsoft .NET architecture, to augment the already great accessibility of Linux. Microsoft created the UI Automation specification to enhance the existing technologies available on the Windows platform. The UI Automation specification has a similar architecture to the Gnome Desktop in that there is a mechanism for accessibility technologies (ATs) to communicate with applications and the desktop out-of-process. In UI Automation, the ATs bind to the UIA Client interfaces and the desktop and applications write to the UIA Provider interfaces. The communication between the two processes is called the Core. To make UI Automation integrate with the GNOME Desktop, UI Automation needs to integrate into the existing accessibility frameworks; namely at-spi and ATK. The UIA Client interfaces will be written on a bridge that will act as the UIA Core and provide a translation layer to at-spi. Similarly, the UIA Provider interfaces will be written on a bridge that will act as the UIA Core and provide a translation layer to ATK. The accessibility of a program also makes it very useful for being tested in an automated fashion. On the Mono accessibility team at Novell, a test harness written around the open-source application Strongwind is being used to carry out automated testing. Our testing techniques could be used by anyone wanting to test their (accessible) GUI applications in Linux--such as GTK applications.
About Brian Merrell
Brian Merrell (Novell)
Brian is a long-time SUSE user. He is currently working on Mono accessibility for the Linux desktop team at Novell. Brian is also a GNOME contributor and GNOME foundation member.
