Its been a long time coming, but about a fortnight ago we did the first release of AT-SPI2, the D-Bus port of our Linux accessibility framework. As mentioned in the notes the release had a warning label.

‘DANGER: Development release – may cause psychological harm’

Overall though I’ve been very pleased with the work we’ve achieved so-far. I have not been funded to work on the project for six months now, but I’ve found time to fix a few bugs, and most importantly help out those who want to get involved. I never really believed Linus “Release early, release often”, but it turns out that he  was right. Since the software has had an official release we’ve had a good number of people providing patches and generally poking at it.

Thanks go to Mario Lang, Stephen Shaw, Halim Sahin and others who have tried things out. Its been extremely useful. Mario especially finding a couple of serious bugs.

We still have a long way to go, but the end has been in sight ever since the hack-fest in Dublin. We need to get the cspi port up-to-date, help Mike Gorse work through the issues regarding reference count removal and fix bugs, lots of bugs. With EDS quickly shifting to D-Bus Gnome is well on the way to ORBit removal. A11y and GConf shouldn’t be far behind.