Novell is carrying a new project related to accessibility (technology needed to open or improve the use of software for people with disablities, or just improve the usability experience) which tends to finish the following objectives:
- Make mono applications (servers, in AT terminology) accessible by current Linux AT clients (such as screen readers like ORCA, or inspectors like accerciser).
- Make .NET modern AT clients be able to inspect Linux applications that are currently accessible by the open source infrastructure (at-spi, ATK, IAccessible2).
By ”.NET modern AT clients” we understand applications that use the new UIAutomation API (which is the next generation to the old MSAA API).
And by “mono” applications we mean:
- .NET-based applications based on the System.Windows.Forms toolkit GUI and can be executed with Mono.
- Silverlight applications that can be executed with Moonlight.
These objectives are being done thanks to two important efforts:
- Creation of bridges that go in both directions (UIA server side translation to ATK, and AT-SPI integration to UIA client side).
- Improvement of the overall infrastructure in order to revamp the toolkits by the migration from CORBA to DBUS technology.
