Re: Accessibility for users with disabilities

[Matt Campbell]

I personally know one blind programmer who is currently a university 
student, but he doesn't seem interested in GNUstep, though he might be 
if it was accessible to blind users and was compatible with PyObjC. 
More importantly, he doesn't know Cocoa or Objective-C.  Still, he might 
be able to help me find an interested student who does have the needed 
skills.

It might be easier to raise interest among the blind community if we 
knew of a GNUstep-based application that is used by some major 
university or must be used by employees in some major organization or 
government agency.  It may be significant that Sony is using GNUstep in 
its SNAP platform.  Of course, Sony will have to do significant work to 
make SNAP-based devices accessible to blind users, but GNUstep could at 
least provide some of the infrastructure.  I wonder what the most 
widely-used GNUstep-based application is.  That's probably a hard thing 
to determine.

The problem is that, as the GNUstep team is no doubt painfully aware, 
GNUstep is by no means the most popular cross-platform GUI toolkit; that 
would probably be a tie between wxWidgets and Qt (and maybe GTK).  And 
of course, web apps and mobile apps are drawing much more attention than 
desktop apps these days.  Still, GNUstep is at least a useful tool for 
porting Mac-native apps to other platforms.  And when such apps are 
ported to other platforms using GNUstep, as I know they sometimes are, 
they should be accessible to all users, including users with 
disabilities.  I just hope we can find someone who has time to work on this.

Matt