Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Releases Accessibility Support for NetBeans IDE

Our team at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville has released the first official version of Sappy in NetBeans. Sappy in NetBeans is a custom set of plugins (module suite), that adds text-to-speech support and screen reader support out of the box, including when no screen reader is installed. This first release is an alpha, which means it is not yet feature complete, but it does add a significant number of accessibility and text-to-speech fixes for NetBeans. We hope this release will provide some accessibility support in NetBeans even if no screen reader is installed. All of us here would like to encourage the community to offer patches and fixes to any problems you encounter and to give us feedback on how you think our tools can improve.

Sappy in NetBeans can be downloaded from our website:

http://sodbeans.sourceforge.net/download.php

For instructions on how to install Sappy:

https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sodbeans/wiki/SappyNB/setup

For information on which platforms are currently supported, see:

https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sodbeans/wiki/SappyNB/platforms

For release notes:

https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sodbeans/wiki/SappyNB/ReleaseNotes

Any bugs or problems you have can be uploaded to our bug tracker and wiki under Trac, under the next release, Sappy 0.7 (a free source forge account is required --- choose New Ticket after you have logged in):

https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sodbeans/wiki

I would like to thank everyone that has helped make this release possible, including my university, SIUE, the Sappy and Sodbeans teams (Neelima Samsani, Andrew Hauck, Susanna Siebert, and Louie Most), the fantastic developers out at Oracle (especially Tim Boudreau), Tom Wheeler and Jamal Mazrui for help understanding the NetBeans Platform and Screen reader APIs respectively, and the National Science Foundation, which is supporting our project under award CNS-0940521.

Thanks to all. Without your help, this release would not have been possible.