[Accessibility] Introduction and brief explanation of UIA work Novell is doing

[Calvin Gaisford]

I realize I've already introduced myself in the conference calls but I  
thought I would send an email to the list introducing myself and the  
work I'll be involved with.

My name is Calvin Gaisford and I work at Novell on the Linux Desktop.   
I've recently become the engineering lead on a team at Novell that  
will be focused on accessibility for the Linux Desktop.  You may have  
seen that recently Microsoft and Novell announced a collaboration to  
bring an implementation of the UIA spec to Linux.  Part of our work  
will be dedicated to this and bring accessibility to the Windows Forms  
implementation on Mono and the Moonlight project.  Our team will also  
be dedicated to working with this group and others on furthering the  
accessibility efforts on Linux.

I have put up a brief outline of the project and a very rough outline  
of a schedule here: http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/UIA_on_Linux
I hope to have more information on the work we are doing but I hope  
that gives you an idea of what it's about (you might also note that we  
are looking for a11y engineers!)

Also, in several of the meetings that I've had with Microsoft, there  
have been a handful of issues discussed on the current IAccessible2  
spec.  I'm not sure the best way to start a discussion on the issues  
but I wanted to raise the issues with the group.  I read in a previous  
post that the correct protocol to follow was to file bugs in bugzilla  
and allow the discussion of the issues to go on there.  That being the  
case, I went ahead and opened the following bugs:

http://bugs.linux-foundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=112
http://bugs.linux-foundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=113
http://bugs.linux-foundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=114
http://bugs.linux-foundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=115
http://bugs.linux-foundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=116
http://bugs.linux-foundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=117
http://bugs.linux-foundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=118

I'm excited to be a part of this important work and hope that this new  
team and myself can be of help to all of the great work everyone here  
is already doing.  I've signed up to attend the ATIA and CSUN  
conferences and hope to meet a lot of you there.

Thanks!

----
Calvin Gaisford
Software Engineer Consultant
cgaisford at novell.com

Novell, Inc.
SUSE® Linux Enterprise 10
Your Linux is ready
http://www.novell.com/linux