Today, I am envious of the SWT developers. Clearly they have made a huge difference in at least one person’s life…
Yesterday committer Scott Kovatch checked in some accessibility code for the Cocoa port of SWT. In his post to the platform-swt-dev list, he describes accessibility as an “enormous pain in the behind” (update: if you read Scott’s post, it’s pretty obvious he’s being facetious; it was a lot of work, and—as Steve notes—all code is an “enormous pain in the behind”).
Jim Corbett’s response blew my mind. It reads:
I understand what you mean when you say a pain in the behind…. however consider that the work of yourself and others has allowed a former commercial diver, millwright, welder, machinist to lose his entire eye sight literally overnight and then to be back in full time community college learning the fine art of programming.
It’s accessibility of programs, IDE’s etc that afford me and many others the level playing field that we have been seeking, hats off to you and your kin.
Jim seems like a downright interesting guy who has clearly led a pretty interesting life so far. I guess Eclipse is helping him to keep it interesting. It’s a good day to be an Eclipse developer.
I’ve been tinkering with accessibility with a little help from the ACTF project. I think I need to take some time to make sure that the Examples Project components are all properly accessible.
