The GNOME Accessibility Team has made great strides over the last two years, allowing ever more users access to their computers. Accessibility on the desktop is an oft misunderstood topic and as a result sometimes ignored by developers. However, accessibility is really about usability – making computers easier to use for everyone, including those with disabilities. As a result of improved accessibility overall usability also improves, which in turn benefits everyone.

The Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface (AT-SPI) is an accessibility framework which defines protocols, and provides application accessibility information. GNOME began migrating to the new AT-SPI2 standards in 2006, by migrating from CORBA to the D-bus Inter-Process Communication protocols, and in so doing allowing cross-desktop accessibility support. The migration to ATK and AT-SPI2 was completed in late 2010 & early 2011. As more desktops support ATK/AT-SPI2 users will have ever more accessible applications to choose from, rather than those solely developed by/for their preferred desktop environment, whatever that may be.

The Accessibility ToolKit (ATK) defines a set of interfaces that must be implemented by all those graphical toolkits that want to be accessible using a common bridge to AT-SPI2. Toolkits which use and support ATK include GTK+, Clutter, Mozilla’s Gecko and WebKitGtk+, Java/Swing and SWT as well as OpenOffice/Libre Office. Advances in ATK over the last two years include:

• GAIL, the former ATK implementation of GTK+ has been merged and is no longer a separate library.
• Development of WebKitGTK+ which is an HTML engine used by Epiphany (GNOME web browser), Yelp (help viewer), and others, implements n the ATK interface for accessibility in those applications.

The free and open source, extensible screen reader Orca is one of the stars of accessibility in Gnome. It provides access to a graphical desktop via customizable combinations of speech and/or braille, by working with applications that support the AT-SPI2 protocols to pass on relevant information to the user. Many improvements to Orca have been made over the last two years, two key examples are a new system voice, and the new Profiles system. The Profiles sysxztem allows for multiple alternative keyboard layouts and languages and the ability to quickly switch between them. The new system voice allows users to better distinguish between on-screen text and the accompanying supplementary information which Orca provides.

GNOME-Shell has a built in on-screen keyboard, built using the Caribou library. Caribou's goal is to make it easy to implement new on-screen keyboards, where developers provide the language and layout and Caribou provides the model and controller. It aims to provide a solution for those whose primary access to the computer is through a switch device, and may also be useful for users of touch screens & tablets.

Finally the Gnome-Shell Magnifier allows for magnification of virtually anything on the Gnome Desktop, allowing users with low vision better access to the desktop. Support for more than simple magnification is in the works, with planned support for color, contrast, brightness & inverse video functions in upcoming releases.

There have been four Accessibility hackfests over the last two years. In March of 2010 Accessibility team members traveled to San Diego, USA for the first ever GNOME Accessibility Hackfest, where they focused on the teams organization & the (then) upcoming release of GNOME 3, while there they also manned the booth at the 27th Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference, commonly known as CSUN. A second Accessibility hackfest was held in October in Sevilla, Spain coinciding with the Open Accessibility Everywhere, Groundwork, Infrastructure, Standards (AEGIS) Conference. In May of 2011 the ATK/AT-SPI Hackfest was held at Igalia in A Coruña, Spain where an intensive analysis of the current state of ATK was held and design for ATK 3 was begun. Finally the team participated in the Desktop Summit in where two presentations on the current status of GNOME Accessibility were given by Alejandro Piñeiro , one at the Summit and one for the Annual General Meeting.