KDE Statement on the Creation of the Free Standards Accessibility Workgroup

Statement

Although there are many ongoing efforts to help persons with disabilities use Linux systems, most Linux GUIs are still inaccessible to blind persons and present many obstacles to people who cannot operate a standard keyboard or mouse.
We do not want to support this social exclusion but rather see the support for handicapped persons as an important feature for every software. The KDE accessibility team knows about the problem and they are working on improving the accessibility of KDE.
In order to get a completely accessible system, applications that use other toolkits need to be accessible as well. In this sense KDE based assistive technologies need to interoperate well with applications using other toolkits and vice versa. We appreciate the foundation of the FSG Accessibility Workgroup and are very pleased to announce our participation.

(KDE statement on the Creation of the Free Standards Accessibility Workgroup, as discussed on the kde-promo and kde-accessibility mailing lists)

About the KDE Accessibility Project

The KDEAP is a small on-line community of developers and other volunteers dedicated to ensure that KDE is accessible to all users.

KDE already contains a number of accessibility features, and there are some assistive technologies for KDE. We are working on further improving the accessibility of KDE in the next KDE versions. Some of our ongoing work is documented in our developers' section. Especially important will be AT-SPI support, which Trolltech has promised to implement for KDE 4.0.

About the FSG Accessibility Workgroup

The goal for the Free Standards Accessibility Workgroup is to define a number of standards around accessibility. You can find more information on the FSG Accessibility Workgroup site.