![]() ![]() Initially his duties focused on Orca, but over time expanded to include accessibility overall.ĪPO served several purposes, Walker said, including that of a " centralized organization to help guide, consult, etc., all things related to accessibility" in addition to software engineering itself. Walker joined APO in 2005, after several years working on accessibility at Sun Labs. Walker described Sun's support of open source accessibility as the " best in the industry" and said he was lucky to have been part of it. Over the years, Sun's APO contributed to considerably more than Orca alone. Beyond that is where the future becomes less certain. ![]() Specifically, Walker said he remains committed to seeing through the upcoming 2.30 release of GNOME. Joanmarie Diggs, assistive tech specialist with the Carroll Center for the Blind, published an open letter to Oracle, challenging it to " embrace the opportunity to continue this important work." Fernando Herrera wrote to the GNOME Foundation board urging it to " take this issue very seriously" and approach Oracle representatives for a resolution.įor his own part, Walker assured the Orca and accessibility communities that he would continue to devote as much of his time as he could to the projects as a volunteer, but said that he would have to seek employment regardless of whether or not he found another position that allowed him to contribute to Orca and GNOME full-time. Discussion on the Orca list ranged from the pessimistic to the unconcerned, with some confident that the work would continue and others advocating the immediate search for alternate project funding. Orca user Mike Gorse blogged his fear that Orca development would slow down and suffer. Several accessibility experts and developers voiced concern through mailing lists and blogs. The reaction to Walker's layoff was swift, with members of the Orca and GNOME projects expressing their support and calling for a public display of that support - and concern over what the move said about Oracle's commitment to accessibility. Reports were circulating in the first week of February that two APO jobs were being cut, one of which belonged to Will Walker, leader of GNOME's Accessibility Project and the project maintainer for Orca, the open source screen reader. ![]() Custom components require additional work than all-stock-GTK+, of course, and any application must take steps to be accessible through associating textual descriptions with all user interface elements, including buttons, canvases, and status indicators. For example, GNOME's Accessibility Toolkit (ATK) API enables assistive technology applications to read a program's existing GTK+ widget labels. Linux and open source community members have publicly taken Oracle to task this week for its decision to cut the jobs of developers at Sun's Accessibility Program Office (APO), which contributes heavily to GNOME's accessibility efforts, as well as to accessibility work in Firefox, OpenOffice, and other applications.Īccessibility in open source incorporates assistive technology tools for users with disabilities, including screen readers, magnifiers, speech interfaces, on-screen keyboards and other input mechanisms, but it includes toolkit and application features in the rest of the software stack as well. In the wake of Sun's acquisition by Oracle, the future of MySQL has attracted the most voluminous (and often, the most heated) debate, but it is far from the only open source project to feel the effects. This article was contributed by Nathan Willis
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