Linux Screen Reader

» see wiki.gnome.org/LSR as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

IBM made the decision on the last day of May 2007. On the Friday afternoon that followed, 1 June, Peter Parente sent a mail titled "Status of IBM a11y" to five lists at once, including the one that belonged to the project he maintained, and told everybody what the company had chosen. IBM was no longer funding its work on GNOME accessibility. The Linux Screen Reader was one of the things that ended with that sentence.

LSR had been going for twelve months. The first commit landed on 19 May 2006, and what it built was a screen reader written in Python that sat on top of AT-SPI, the accessibility bus of the GNOME desktop, and spoke whatever had focus. Braille and magnification came as extensions around the same core. The project described itself as a reusable platform for building interfaces for people with a range of disabilities, and the screen reader was the first thing built on it.

It started under IBM's own Common Public License, which nobody in the GNOME world wanted, and moved to the New BSD license with version 0.3.2 on 29 November 2006. That is the sort of housekeeping a project does when it expects to be around for years.

~ the record ~

~ two screen readers on purpose ~

Orca already existed and was already the default. The LSR FAQ did not pretend otherwise, and it did not frame the overlap as a mistake either. Two independent implementations push on the accessibility stack in places a single one never reaches, and a user with two options can pick the one that suits the task in front of them. That argument is written down in the project's own FAQ, under a heading about why there should be two of these at all.

~ the email ~

Parente's mail is still in the GNOME archive and it is worth reading for the tone, which is a maintainer doing careful work on the day the funding stops. Development on LSR as a screen reader would cease, with one last release, 0.5.3, going out on the Monday so that it landed in line with GNOME 2.19.3. After that the project would go dormant until somebody decided whether the core would drive other open source assistive projects or be abandoned altogether, and in the meantime he would spend a few weeks writing documentation in case anybody wanted it later.

The same mail handed off the other pieces IBM was dropping. Accerciser was far enough along under a Mozilla Foundation grant to survive on light maintenance, and the Python bindings for AT-SPI were already carrying Accerciser and were being adopted elsewhere, so those two lived. The screen reader was the part with nobody waiting to catch it. IBM had withdrawn its commercial talking browser, Home Page Reader, roughly six months earlier, so this was the second accessibility product the company put down inside a year.

~ what reads the screen now ~

Orca is still there, still the GNOME screen reader, nearly twenty years on. LSR stopped at 0.5.3 and went dormant exactly as announced, and the wiki address the project lived at now answers with a storage error from the bucket GNOME archived its old wiki into.

Assistive technology is the layer of a desktop I have only ever read about. I have never had to run a screen reader, which means I spent two decades using software whose accessibility I never once tested, like most people who write any. The useful thing about an obituary for a project like this one is the reminder that the work was being done over there the whole time, by two or three people, on a budget that one strategy meeting could end.

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