aKademy Hosts First Unix Accessibility Forum

    2004
    26
    Aug
    Community and Events

    On Sunday and Monday the first Unix Accessibility Forum took place
    at aKademy and was said by participants to be extremely successful.
    The most notable thing was that amongst all participants there was a good spirit of cooperation and
    consensus that standards for assistive technologies
    would ensure success in the accessibility of graphical user interfaces like KDE.

    The forum, organised by the KDE Accessibility Project, had representatives
    from IBM, Sun Microsystems, Novell, GNOME, Trolltech and Free Standards Group and others. Several projects and companies were
    given the opportunity to discuss these standards for assistive technologies like X Accessibility, assistive device
    support, speech synthesis and more.

    In the slipstream of this event several interviews were conducted, one of which has already been published on
    CNET.

    Comments

    Score: 0

    KDE TTS

    If you are interested in what is happening on the KDE Text-to-Speech synthesis front, go here:

    http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/kttsd/index.php

    Score: 0

    Re: KDE TTS

    It would be fantastic if Konqueror support speech synthesis using kttsd as the last Opera will do.

    khmtl-plugin can do this but I am talking of voice-* CSS attributes.

    http://my.opera.com/community/dev/voice/
    http://www.voicexml.org/specs/multimodal/x+v/12/spec.html
    http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-speech/
    http://www.ibm.com/software/pervasive/multimodal/demos.shtml

    Score: 0

    Translation

    Currently no OSS corpus based rough translation engine exists. This is very sad. We often use Systran (=Babelfish), but I think automatic translation could benefit a lot from the open contribution model.

    Score: 0

    Opencyc

    http://www.opencyc.org/

    Perhaps it is an option to use a database like cyc to model knowledge about KDE. This could improve help functions. Integration of a gigantic project like opencyc may be very fruitful for KDE and Accesibility.

    Score: 0

    Logical desktop