- From: by way of Harvey Bingham <peter.korn@SUN.COM>
- Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 23:49:33 -0400
- To: w3c-wai-ua@w3.org, w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
- Cc: Peter Korn <peter.korn@SUN.COM>
[With Peter's permission, I forward this. I'm impressed at the reception for accessibility at that conference.] Regards/Harvey -------------- Greetings, Last week was the annual JavaOne conference in San Francisco. Over 21,000 developers came to the conference to spend 4 days learning about the latest technologies for the Java platform. Java Accessibility was one of the technologies highlighted at the conference, and was featured prominently in 5 sessions including one of the keynote sessions to an audience of 10,000 - 15,000 people. As part of the "Java Foundation Classes Technology: Intro and Roadmap" session, held on Tuesday and then repeated again on Thursday, we gave an overview of the Java Accessibility API and how to write applications to be accessible, followed by a demonstration of the Accessible ATM prototype. Slides from that talk can be found at: http://industry.java.sun.com/javaone/99/event/0,1768,672,00.html The Java Accessibility team held a Birds of a Feather (BOF) session on Wednesday afternoon, where we went into depth on the new Java Accessibility APIs we are introducing in the next release of the Java platform, JDK 1.3. We also announced that in JDK 1.3 we will be implementing "lightweight" support for the Java Accessibility API in the AWT. While we will not be able to fully implement the Java Accessibility API on every one of the AWT components, it will be there for most of them in JDK 1.3, and in particular this means that GUI components which are built on top of AWT will have a very easy time of implementing the Java Accessibility API because most of the work will already be done. We hope to finish the AWT work in a follow-on release to JDK 1.3 (e.g. it might be done in 1.3.1). The new APIs we are adding to the Java Accessibility package are: AccessibleTable - a way to interact with 2-dimensional objects such as the Swing JTable component AccessibleIcon - a way to get detailed information about Icons, which will be implemented by the Swing Icon class AccessibleRelation & AccessibleRelationSet - a way to encode relationships between components, such as a label and the object it is labeling, or a spreadsheet cell title and the elements in the row or column underneath that title, so that assistive technologies can provide appropriate context information in their feedback to users. Sun will provide an Early Access release of JDK 1.3 for public review later this year. The IBM Special Needs Systems (SNS) team held a BOF session on Tuesday evening, at which they demonstrated the features of their Self-Voicing-Kit (SVK), and described in detail the architecture of the AccessEngine technology which underlies the SVK. Phill Jenkins of the IBM SNS team demonstrated how the SVK could be configured to load additional code - Perks - into itself to provide more specialized support of specific applications, or simply to extend the functionality and user-interface provided by the SVK. In particular, he showed how a Perk could be used to read the output of a two-dimensional graph in a simulation of plant photosynthesis written for the Java platform. Both the Thursday and Friday morning keynote sessions included a discussion of Accessibility to the Java platform. Probably somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 people attended these keynote sessions. On Thursday morning one of the main keynote speakers was Patricia Sueltz, General Manager of Java Software at IBM. Patricia mentioned IBM's focus on Java Accessibility, and the importance of designing software that everyone could use. Then on Friday morning John Gage and Peter Korn of Sun Microsystems demonstrated the IBM Self-Voicing-Kit with the WGBH example application of a multimedia educational application which teaches students about photosynthesis. John and Peter described step-by-step how the application, written using the Java Foundation Classes and thereby implementing the Java Accessibility API, was accessible to blind students wanting to learn about photosynthesis alongside their sighted colleagues using the SVK, the Java Speech API, and the IBM ViaVoice OutLoud software speech package. In addition to the talks and presentations mentioned above which focused on Java Accessibility, there were a few other events and announcements of interest to the Java Accessibility community. Sun announced at JavaOne that they would be providing a reference version of Personal Java - a slimmed down version of the full desktop and server Java environment - for Windows CE. Also at the conference in the "JavaOne Pavilion" were quite a few vendors providing hardware devices and prototype boards for running the Java platform. Some of these were based on Sun's JavaOS for Consumers (which is the Sun Chorus real-time-OS with Personal Java sitting on top of it), others based on other real-time OSes (e.g. EPOC, Simbian, etc.), each with a Java Virtual Machine (Personal Java or the full enterprise JDK) running on top of them. Notable among this latter group was Psion, makers of a popular line of hand-held computers, with full JDK 1.1.x support. Finally, one of the highlights of the show was 3Com, which sold 10,000 of their Palm V hand-held computers at a steep discount, complete with version 0.2 of their Java platform support. For more information about JavaOne '99, visit the JavaOne web site: http://java.sun.com/javaone On behalf of the Sun Accessibility team, Peter Korn <peter.korn@SUN.COM> =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to listserv@java.sun.com and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA-ACCESS". For general help, send email to listserv@java.sun.com and include in the body of the message "help".
Received on Thursday, 19 August 1999 23:50:24 UTC