By Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility Team
The annual CSUN Conference on Technology and Persons with Disabilities, was held in March. Accessibility to the Java platform was one of the themes of the conference, and there were a number of conference sessions devoted to the topic, as well as a 3 hour evening session on Java Accessibility hosted by Sun Microsystems; Henter-Joyce, Inc. and Sun were showing access to a variety of Java applications in their booths and suite. A number of mainstream companies showed applications and technologies they were developing for the Java platform, and demonstrated access to those applications via JAWS and the IBM Self-Voicing-Kit technology. These companies included Oracle Corporation, Discover Financial Services, American Management Systems, Inc., and Keystone Systems, Inc.
The first Java Accessibility presentation was by Earl Johnson of the Sun Accessibility team, titled "The Basics of Java(TM) Technology" on Wednesday morning. In this presentation, Earl gave a broad overview of the history of Sun's development of Java technologies and the Java Accessibility effort. The presentation paper can be found at: http://www.sun.com/access/wp-csun00/
The next presentation was from Peter Korn and Jeff Dunn of the Sun Accessibility team, titled "The Fundamentals of Java(TM) Platform Accessibility" on Thursday afternoon. In this presentation, Peter went into depth discussing the support for accessibility built into the Java platform, and strategies for fully using that support. Jeff Dunn gave a preview of Sun's Accessibility Helper, an application Sun is developing to evaluate how well a Java applet or application implements the Java Accessibility API.
On Thursday evening, Sun gave a three-hour presentation outside of the normal conference agenda. Jon Kannegaard, VP of Sun Labs and former head of the Java Software division during the initial development of the Java Accessibility architecture, led this presentation. Jon talked about the incredible speed with which Java technologies are being adopted by the industry (almost 1.18 million registered developers in over 200 countries, 190 Java partners, over 1,000 Universities teaching courses in Java technology, etc.)
The remainder of the evening was taken up by presentations from Sun's Java Accessibility partners, Frank Beier of Oracle Corporation talked about the work
Oracle is doing to implement the Java Accessibility API on their own EWT graphics libraries for the Java platform. Glen Gordon and Eric Damery of Henter-Joyce, Inc. then
demonstrated access to a Java applet built with Oracle's EWT libraries through their shipping JAWS for Windows Andi Snow-Weaver of the IBM Accessibility Center talked about the work IBM continues to do with Java Accessibility, and their Self-Voicing-Kit technology. Marko Pilecky of Discover Financial Services Inc.
demonstrated a call-center application they have developed entirely with Sun's Java Foundation Classes (JFC), which is currently being used by 1,500 employees. This
application was developed specifically to be accessible so that Discover could employ visually impaired associates in their call centers, and he demonstrated access to it via
IBM's Self-Voicing-Kit technology.
Oliver Small, Elizabeth Brady, and Rekha Kengeri of American Management Systems (AMS), Inc. demonstrated Momentum Financials, a huge Java application which handles accounts payable, receivables, and numerous other financial aspects of an
organization. AMS's team of eleven programmers implemented the Java Accessibility API on a number of custom components, including a fully accessible drag-and-drop desktop. Momentum Financials was shown with the JAWS for Windows screen reader
Mitake Holloman Burts of Keystone Systems, Inc. talked about their forthcoming Keystone Library Automation Systems (KLAS), which is being developed entirely with the Java Foundation Classes specifically in order to support accessibility. Keystone's customers include libraries for the blind and visually impaired, and KLAS will
be used both by employees and library patrons.
On Friday and Saturday Dan Clark of Henter-Joyce talked about the new features in JAWS for Windows 3.5, specifically showing various Java Then in a session on Friday afternoon in their suite, Dan held an hour-long session on the Java Accessibility support in JAWS for Windows 3.5, including a step-by-step demonstration of the process
of installing Sun's Java virtual machine and the Java Access Bridge in order
to enable the Java Accessibility support.
At Sun's booth at CSUN, paper and Braille copies of our papers and handouts were available. The booth handout is also available on-line, at: http://www.sun.com/access/csun/java-ccess.html
Finally, available for the CSUN show were two articles on the Sun web site discussing
Java Accessibility. In the front-page article titled "Java Accessibility API Goes to Market: Leading Assistive Technologies Spring to Life" http://java.sun.com/features/2000/03/accessibility.html
Steve Meloan looks at the year in-review, and the strides we have made
since CSUN '99. In addition to talking about the new Java Access Bridge,
Steve describes in detail recent additions to the Java Accessibility, and
talks about the impact they will have to users with disabilities.
Also on the front page was the article "Bridging the Gap: Java Access Bridge
Links Windows-based Assistive Technologies to the Java Platform by Mary Smaragdis.
http://java.sun.com/features/2000/03/accessbridge.html
This article discusses the Java Access Bridge in detail, and describes how products like Henter-Joyce's JAWS for Windows use it to provide access to Java applications All in all, it was quite a conference!
