Thought LordGregGreg was going to get out of the third-party viewer biz after parting ways with the Emerald viewer team? Not so, folks.
Press Release
Virtual Ability Launches Project to Make Second Life® Viewer More Accessible
Virtual Ability, Inc. today announced the inauguration of a new project to help enhance the Second Life® viewer by making it more accessible to people with various disabilities.
Working in alignment with Linden Lab’s Snowstorm project, Virtual Ability will bring together Second Life® users with a range of physical disabilities, manufacturers of assistive technology, and the technical resources needed to make targeted improvements in the Second Life® viewer software.
Virtual Ability’s technical team for this project will be led by LordGregGreg Back, a veteran developer whose most recent contributions helped the Emerald Viewer become the most widely used third-party viewer for Second Life®.
Alice Krueger, President of Virtual Ability, Inc., said, “The improvements we plan to make will benefit thousands of people who use Second Life every day to help overcome their Real Life disabilities, as well as attract additional government, education, and enterprise users to the Second Life platform. We are very pleased and honored that Greg will be working with us on this important and exciting initiative.”
LordGregGreg states, “I will be able to continue working on open-source viewer development for Second Life, just focused in a way to make it more accessible to people who really need it.”
Virtual Ability, Inc. is a non-profit corporation based in Aurora, Colorado, dedicated to enabling people with a wide range of disabilities by providing a supporting environment for them to enter and thrive in online virtual worlds like Second Life®.
For more information on Virtual Ability, Inc., including the benefits of virtual reality for people with disabilities, please see www.VirtualAbility.org or contact Alice Krueger at akrueger@virtualability.org or in Second Life as Gentle Heron.
For more information about Linden Lab, Second Life®, and the Snowstorm project, please see www.secondlife.com and http://bit.ly/a8Qdf1
Virtual Ability, Inc. is a Non-Profit, Tax-Exempt Organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code
Please see our web site at www.VirtualAbility.org
For my money, Second Life and Linden Lab are really sloppy and half-hearted on accessibility issues. There are practical and reasonable limits, certainly, but past efforts with the official viewers and practices have barely scratched the surface of what is feasible and useful.
This sounds like good news; it would be a waste to lose LordGregGreg’s experience and skill with the SL Viewer codebase…
+1 Gwenn.
I’m not physically disabled. But I’ve had friends that are either blind or deaf. I gotta say, the thought that I could easily join either group is a very frightening one. I cannot help but admire those who deal with the challenge of adapting to a mainly audio-visual medium, when they lack senses for either or both. And you don’t have to be able to code a new viewer to help with this.
How many times have you edited a prim, but haven’t bothered to edit its name or description? I’m certainly guilty of that. These are invaluable bits of metadata to our fellow users who cannot see as we do. Text-to-speech utilities can make direct use of that information.
Are you streaming music or playing a sound? A little bit of extra effort with scripts can deliver important cues to our friends who cannot hear as we do, by way of textual clues.
Assets in general lack metadata that could go a long way toward improved accessibility for all users. Encouraging LL to expand object and media metadata would be a great step forward. They’ll probably have to alter some database schemas (Oh! The horror!) but it’ll be worth it.
Oh! And Tateru! Your Tom Scott style press release disclaimer image didn’t go unnoticed. Bravo!
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I’ve made a couple of those images for posts, recently. Four, so far from memory. It seemed like such a good idea, and saves me writing additional disclaimers