Technology that's accessible from the start means that accessibility need not cost more — costs typically borne by those with the fewest resources. Accessible solutions that are open source mean that people who need and use those solutions are fully able to participate in their development. Our commitment to eliminate the digital divide means that we must address the needs of people with disabilities as well as the economic divide for accessible solutions.
Our Approach
Building accessibility into the network and network clients requires work in multiple areas:
- Defining accessibility at a technical level and implementing that definition in platforms and operating systems, applications, application frameworks, development tools, and document formats
- Building assistive technology tools that adapt technology to people with more severe disabilities such as blindness and low vision
- Working with standards organizations to ensure that technology standards support the needs of people with disabilities
In addition, our approach adds three key components:
- Building communities that share in the development of open source accessibility solutions, including communities around accessibility for operating systems, applications, application frameworks, development tools, and assistive technologies
- Delivering accessibility on open source platforms, in open source applications, with open source assistive technologies so that access solutions are affordable and available to everyone, regardless of their economic situation
- Ensuring that the standards processes themselves include the voices of disability experts and people with disabilities where the technology standard has a direct impact on the human-computer interaction
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Our Performance
OpenDocument Format
In 2007, as co-chair of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) OpenDocument Format Accessibility subcommittee, we helped deliver the OpenDocument Format v1.1 as an OASIS standard, containing critical improvements to accessibility that make the OpenDocument Format (ODF) the most accessible office file format ever defined. These improvements came from a peer-review process involving disability experts and people with disabilities. As part of that subcommittee, we also helped deliver a guidelines document — the first of its kind — describing how developers of applications that implement the OpenDocument Format should ensure that those applications take full use of the accessibility support in the format and make their applications accessible to people with disabilities.
Orca
Orca has been adopted by the GNOME community as the official GNOME desktop screen reader. Hundreds of users are actively participating in the community — suggesting features, critiquing changes, and quickly responding with feedback to each new weekly build. Developers in the community contributing to Orca now outnumber Sun Orca developers; and many of those community developers are themselves visually impaired users of the screen reader. The Orca community has taken ownership of the project and feels empowered through Orca to actively improve its members' own computing experience.
Orca development is currently focused on the office productivity environment. Over the past year, the emphasis has been on efficiency and productivity with word processing and spreadsheets, with e-mail and calendaring, and with access to the Web. Localization has also been a focus, and Orca is being translated into more than 50 languages and is in use in classrooms around the world.
For more details, see Sun's Accessibility Program site.
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