Microsoft, Novell turn attention to accessibility

Stephen Withers
Friday, 09 November 2007 00:42

Business IT - Open Source

Microsoft and Novell have marked the first anniversary of their collaboration agreement with the announcement of a project to take Windows' User Interface Automation accessibility specification to the Linux world.

User Interface Automation (UIA) is Microsoft's approach to providing the hooks needed to allow assistive technology products such as screen readers to hook into applications and other software.

The company has announced it will make the UIA specification available and has provided a patent pledge allowing its implementation on any platform by open source or proprietary software developers.

Novell's role will be to use this information to create an open source adaptor so that UIA can interoperate with the Linux Accessibility Toolkit included with Suse, Red Hat and Ubuntu.

"Microsoft's commitment to make the specification for UIA freely available to others to implement, coupled with Novell's plans to develop and deliver an adapter that allows Linux accessibility projects to work well with the UIA framework, are tremendous examples of how industry can come together to tackle interoperability problems for blind persons," said Marc Maurer, president of the National Federation of the Blind.

"The NFB challenges the entire IT industry to continue to look for creative opportunities such as this to solve longstanding interoperability challenges and reduce development barriers to accessibility."