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Re: Releasing HomePageReader (was RE: HPR 3.04 - IE7 -WinXP - Complete Doctype)

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Mar 8, 2007 12:10PM

On 3/8/07, John Foliot - Stanford Online Accessibility Program wrote:
> Yes, this would be very cool. In fairness to IBM, while they may have
> walked away from HPR, they *have* continued to demonstrate commitment to and
> support of web accessibility (in their own way) through their contributions
> to the ARIA work currently under way.

Certainly IBM has done VERY much for accessibility. My disappointment
is solely regarding the abandonment of HPR. IBM has loads of other
very cool accessibility tools such as ViaScribe and CaptionMeNow,
though many of them are reserved for their corporate clients and
education/Liberated Learning partners.

> Is anyone aware if any kind of formal request has been made to IBM
> requesting the release of the source-code into the Open Source community?
> Has anybody actually asked nicely? If not, why not, and how can our
> combined communities(*) work together to see if this is possible?

As I wrote my previous message, I just had thought that it would be
cool. I'm aware of nothing more than that. Of course, with its
reliance on Internet Explorer, it would likely take much work for the
community to update it and support it over time. Also many in the open
source community wouldn't like the fact that it only works with IE.
But I think much could be learned from from the source code -
especially in HPR's methods of interacting with javascript. If there's
enough interest from the community, I'd be happy to forward on a more
formal request.

Perhaps our efforts could be better used by getting involved in Fire
Vox development - http://www.firevox.clcworld.net/
Charles Chen is doing some amazing work and in many ways that screen
reader already beats the pants off the mainstream screen readers for
web page access. It already supports WAI-ARIA live regions, CSS 3
Speech Module, and MathML, and it's fully cross-platform. Plus it's
free!

Jared Smith
WebAIM.org