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Gecko-1.9 actually has a propper accessibility implementation for *nix, see this page for the details on using firefox with Gnome/Orca.

Yes, I do use Linux for most of my daily work, and it's mostly okay, although for GUI things at the moment, windows still beats it hands down. See here and Here.

This release, despite the whole digit change, doesn't change this. This is all the more ironic since Tiger now ships with an integrated spoken user interface! Blind folks, as a generalization, are at least as passionate about music and technology as the rest of us. This is a real shame.

I'm responsible for accessibility and user interface consistency across Visual Studio, hence my interest in this topic

It's interesting to note that blind users aren't the only ones who can benefit from screen readers. I was chatting with a program manager with dyslexia recently. She relies on JAWS a good deal of the time; it just makes things easier for her.

As far as more resources go in terms of Microsoft, Accessibility and everything else I highly recommend checking out these resources:

Enable

Sara Ford's old VS Accessibility blog

the new VS Accessibility blog

Blind Programming.com (check out the mailing lists too)

OK, as a blind person myself, let me try and address these questions.

1. games for the blind
2. 
   

   There are actually quite a few games out there that the blind can play. Most of them are specially designed for us. For more information, I'd dirrect you to some of the manufacturers. For something that's a little closer to what the original poster was looking for, check out this, this is the closest to a virtual world we have. The majority of these games are actually pretty good considering the size of the development staff for them.

   
   
3. open source software
4. 
   

   Unfortunately, accessibility is not high on the priority lists of many of the open source projects out there. Even if it were, I am not sure a huge number of blind people would switch. I'm sure us blind techies would look at the software just like anyone else, but you'd have a much bigger problem getting your blind grandmother to switch than your sighted grandmother. The reasons for this are extreemly complicated, and get into basic issues of how blind people look at technology in general. Most, however, beleive that Microsoft solutions work for them, and unless an open source solution can offer them something really compelling, and I mean to them specifically, they won't see a need to switch. As a result, most of the adaptive technology vendors do not see it worth their time to provide support for open source software at this point. Adaptive software vendors are concentrating on software a blind person would use in an employment situation, and for most work environments, Microsoft is it. Remember most blind people are not in IT related jobs, and those that are many times role their own solution. Also from my experience, your average IT person is really scared of putting adaptive software on their network. All of that said, there are some small efforts. The biggest example is the Window-Eyes screen reader, which as of 5.0 will offer support for the Mozilla Suite (NOT FIRE FOX)

   
   
5. MP3 players
6. 
   

   For all the wonderful things I've heard about the IPOD, unfortunately its useless for the blind. There are some MP3 players out there that would work, however. One interesting product is a device called the Book Courier, which not only plays MP3 files, but also reads text and Microsoft Word files. The Book Courier will also play content from Audible, a service which sells audio books online, much like the many music download services. Unfortunately, only a limited number of MP3 players support this service. I do not know if the IPOD is one of them.

   
   

Honestly, from my perspective, the adaptive technology world is several years behind the mainstream world. The reasons are rather obvious, but still I consider the situation pretty sad. Adaptive Technology is a pretty small, but in my view largely untapped, nitch that has a lot of room for improvement.

Hi, I'm in college now, and I'm mostly blind. In high school, with maps, I either used a CCTV (the overhead visualiser?) or display sized maps, that a teacher would use at the front of the class room. Another good solution Tech wise, would be to scan a regular book size map in and use it as a PDF and be able to maginify it as much as you want. Unfortuanatly I'm not sure to the extent, but a solution for extreme situations such as being fully blind would be to print out the map, take a thing of elmers glue or puffy paint, and outline the maps, and have the text written in braille. Reading wise of just text, there are always text to speech engines for computers, the microsoft of the blind would be Freedom Scientific they make the application called JAWS currently at relese 5.1. Another good TTS would be WIndows Eyes by GW Micro currently at 4.5sp3. Magnification on a computer would be best done by Zoom Text, made by AI Squared. http://www.freedomscientific.com/ http://www.gwmicro.com/ http://www.aisquared.com/ Hope what I have said, was helpful and not to much best of luck to your son

Beeing blind, I feel uniquely qualified to comment here. Yes, absolutely the blind person does benefit from proper markup! In fact, if you use proper markup, you will go a long way twoards making an accessible site. Perhaps an example is in order here.

First off, like most other blind people I know, I use IE as the underlying browser. Unfortunately at this time, its the only one that supports accessibility to any real extent for a blind person. IE actually passes all page information to a screen reader, in my case Window-Eyes, which then reformats the information into a method I can use. I can move around a page by links, headings, paragraphs, etc. Many times, for example, if I'm trying to get an over view of the page, I just jump from heading to heading to get an over view of how things are layed out, and then can read just what I want to read. If something starts to get borring, fine, just jump to the next heading. Also, Window-eyes automatically expands acronym and abreviation tags, so I strongly recomend using them. My software can even use language attributes on a page to make sure parts of the page are read in the proper language. So to summarize, proper markup is crutial. In fact, it and alt tags are my two biggest issues.

For more info on just how this works, you can take a look at this page describing just how these navigation features work, and even download a demo so you can try it for yourself and see just how it works.

Beeing blind, I feel uniquely qualified to comment here. Yes, absolutely the blind person does benefit from proper markup! In fact, if you use proper markup, you will go a long way twoards making an accessible site. Perhaps an example is in order here.

First off, like most other blind people I know, I use IE as the underlying browser. Unfortunately at this time, its the only one that supports accessibility to any real extent for a blind person. IE actually passes all page information to a screen reader, in my case Window-Eyes, which then reformats the information into a method I can use. I can move around a page by links, headings, paragraphs, etc. Many times, for example, if I'm trying to get an over view of the page, I just jump from heading to heading to get an over view of how things are layed out, and then can read just what I want to read. If something starts to get borring, fine, just jump to the next heading. Also, Window-eyes automatically expands acronym and abreviation tags, so I strongly recomend using them. My software can even use language attributes on a page to make sure parts of the page are read in the proper language. So to summarize, proper markup is crutial. In fact, it and alt tags are my two biggest issues.

For more info on just how this works, you can take a look at this page describing just how these navigation features work, and even download a demo so you can try it for yourself and see just how it works.

Beeing blind, I feel uniquely qualified to comment here. Yes, absolutely the blind person does benefit from proper markup! In fact, if you use proper markup, you will go a long way twoards making an accessible site. Perhaps an example is in order here.

First off, like most other blind people I know, I use IE as the underlying browser. Unfortunately at this time, its the only one that supports accessibility to any real extent for a blind person. IE actually passes all page information to a screen reader, in my case Window-Eyes, which then reformats the information into a method I can use. I can move around a page by links, headings, paragraphs, etc. Many times, for example, if I'm trying to get an over view of the page, I just jump from heading to heading to get an over view of how things are layed out, and then can read just what I want to read. If something starts to get borring, fine, just jump to the next heading. Also, Window-eyes automatically expands acronym and abreviation tags, so I strongly recomend using them. My software can even use language attributes on a page to make sure parts of the page are read in the proper language. So to summarize, proper markup is crutial. In fact, it and alt tags are my two biggest issues.

For more info on just how this works, you can take a look at this page describing just how these navigation features work, and even download a demo so you can try it for yourself and see just how it works.

You're looking at someone who doesn't need a screen, as a blind person they just get in the way anyway. I mean, a screen reader works just the same anyway. Oh, for more screenless laptops, check out this.

The thing about the SouthWest case is that they do include alt tags, they're just really dumb. res is the alt tag for a graphic that says reservations. sched is the alternative to a graphic that says schedules. click is the alternative to click 'n save.

So SouthWest created a site, demonstrated their ability to include the alt tags that make browsers for the impaired work, but then populated those alternatives with garbage. It may or may not be illegal, but it's definitely ignorant.