Microsoft and Novell Celebrate one year of progress and bring accessibility to the forefront of collaboration
I volunteered at a local hospice for a few years while I was in school. During that time, in addition to some administrative support at the main office, I spent a significant amount of time with a young teenager who had been diagnosed with Duchenne ’s muscular dystrophy. The young man with whom I spent time had been diagnosed with the disease in early childhood and - at the time of our first meeting - was bed-ridden and could only move his fingers. Aside from visits from me, spending time with his family, and watching TV – the remainder of his time was spent on the computer by way of a trackball mouse and special voice recognition technology.
What strikes me, when I think back about it, is that his use of the computer was probably the only autonomy and freedom he had. Any other activity - at all - was dependent on someone else. At that time, the Internet was still young by consumer standards and multimedia PC’s were just blooming. He was thrilled! Chat rooms, surfing the web, games, and email became a great past-time for him. I am happy that he had that freedom and I cannot stress how important technology was for improving his quality of life.
Now it goes without saying that technology improves everyone’s quality of life to some degree, but for those who have limitations for whatever reason – immobility, blindness, hearing loss – technology can be life changing. The challenge these days – as computing has become truly ubiquitous yet more complex – is how to offer consistent and predictable experiences across form factors for those who are impaired.
Enter the latest collaboration between Microsoft and Novell: The User Interface Automation specification (details here). In short, Microsoft is releasing the specification to the technical community while working with Novell to improve cross-platform accessibility experiences. We’re already hearing positive feedback from the community, including the National Federation for the Blind, and look forward to a fruitful collaboration. After one year of working together, this announcement marks the sixth unique project that we are working on together to address our customers’ interoperability needs.
I am amazed to think about the progress we have made in such a short period of time.
As always, check out http://www.moreinterop.com for details.
For more on this announcement, see Microsoft’s presspass article here.
