ACTF: Making Even One Life a Little Better

One promise of computers is that they will make life better--and by "making life better" I don't just mean a new sports car that follows an IPO. No, what I mean is making life better for those people who have the hardest row to hoe; people who have vision or mobility impairments, for instance.

And there are a lot of them. According to the World Health Organization, for instance, there are approximately 314 million visually impaired people worldwide, and between 750 million and 1 billion of the world's 6 billion people have speech, vision, mobility, hearing, or cognitive disabilities. These are the people for whom we'd like to think computers can make life just a little bit better.

Which is why it is significant that IBM is donating to the Eclipse Foundation the Accessibility Tools Framework. The ACTF is designed to help developers build accessibility tools, such as those for accessibility checking, usability visualization, and alternative accessible interfaces for persons with disabilities. These tools will be integrated into a single accessibility tooling environment as part of the Eclipse platform. Initially, ACTF will support content based on HTML, OpenDocument Format (ODF), Flash, Java application GUIs such as Java Swing and Eclipse SWT, and accessibility APIs such as Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) and IAccessible2 to provide unified accessibility to web contents and applications.

I don't know about you, but this sure feels good to me.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 07:06 PM  Permalink