Last week Oracle laid off two members of Sun’s Accessibility Program Office (APO), including GNOME a11y team lead, Willie Walker. Joanmarie Diggs, who works with the team contributing to GNOME’s Orca screen reader, says that as a result of the layoffs that “the accessibility of the GNOME desktop will become the open source equivalent of an unfunded mandate, doomed ultimately to fail,” if Oracle doesn’t reverse its position or if another company doesn’t step up to help.

This is really sad news.