E-mail List Archives

Search E-mail List Archives for

Number of posts in this thread: 3 (In chronological order)

From: John Foliot - Stanford Online Accessibility Program
Date: Thu, Mar 08 2007 11:30AM
Subject: Releasing HomePageReader (was RE: HPR 3.04 - IE7 - WinXP -Complete Doctype)
No previous message | Next message →

Jared Smith wrote:
> <rant>
> It's a bit of a shame really. HPR was the best screen reader for
> developer use and I imagine that a large share of their customers
> were from the seeing community. But between lack of support, no
> responsiveness on bugs and new features, and implementing a crippled
> demo version, it's no wonder that IBM reported that sales were down
> and they were discontinuing HPR. They essentially killed it
> themselves. Wouldn't it be nice if the code were put into the open
> source realm for the community to continue working on? </rant>

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.

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?

JF

(* Many regulars on the WebAIM list also frequent the WAI-IG list, the GAWDS
list, WSG list, and others. How can we pool our myriad members and ask with
a unified voice?)

From: Jared Smith
Date: Thu, Mar 08 2007 12:10PM
Subject: Re: Releasing HomePageReader (was RE: HPR 3.04 - IE7 -WinXP - Complete Doctype)
← Previous message | Next message →

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

From: Rainer Wagener
Date: Thu, Mar 08 2007 2:00PM
Subject: Re: HPR 3.04 - IE7 - WinXP - Complete Doctype
← Previous message | No next message

Jan Hunt wrote:

> Now the weird thing is that NOT ALL web pages caused HPR
> to freak. I did
> some investigating and it turns out that if the web page uses an
> incomplete or no doctype then HPR reads along fine, but
> add a complete
> doctype to the page and the problem is triggered.

I think this behaviour is due to the fact that IE 7 without proper
doctype behaves completely like IE 6 in "quirks" mode, apart from
zooming. Basically I think that IE 7 when put in "quirks" mode _is_
IE 6.


Rainer

--

www.rohschnitt.de