I was really pleased to read about an accessibility review of ORCA in a KDE blog post. It’s a pointer to a bit of study on the integration of ORCA in Gnome and the good news is, it’s really very positive. Thanks to super work on AT-SPI, a11y is starting to shape up on the Linux desktop, and the source of the blog post suggests that BOTH the desktop heavyweights care about it.

Even better was the news that the German federal government is funding several full-time developers to work on accessibility in Orca and Ubuntu and by extension other free software distributions too. There seems to be a growing consensus that the needs of key constituencies, such as those with special accessibility needs, or those who need independent access to public sector documents and data, are best served through collaboration around content and code that is licensed in a truly open fashion.

Full Post.