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Sun Announce GNOME Accessibility Lab
CC writes "LinuxWorld Australia is reporting that Sun are establishing an accessibility technologies lab to build utilities and device drivers so that GNOME can be brought to those who cannot access a computer via the keyboard. Interesting moves from Sun this week." So far, this is all future tense -- "will begin working" and so on -- but any moves which increase the accessability of systems running Free software to the keyboard-impaired are good for everyone, at the very least for the way they force a re-evaluation of The Best Way To Do X.
My wife is disabled and has only partial use of one arm. Her biggest challenge to using Linux is the lack of stable, intuitive, feature rich sticky keys. On Windows, she runs sticky keys and selects which keys she wants to be sticky (typically, shift, alt and cntl). She hits the key once to make only the next letter she types affected by the sticky key or twice to make all characters affected until she hits the sticky key again.
The best Xfree86 program I've found will do one or the other of the above but not both (you can configure the program to react one way or the other but not both ways depending on how you hit the sticky key).
Sticky keys, keyboard free input, speech recognition and voice synthesis are IMHO the most important areas that need to be improved under Linux (and the BSDs).
What good is a revolution if we leave people out by design?
regards,
-l
... and it's not even fully modular.
The Best Way To Do X is, of course, to chuck it out and replace it with something better. Mark this as flamebait if you must, but the X architecture is too complicated, creaky, and old to support the new features everyone wants in an efficient way. The only advantage of X is remote display, and 95% of the time no one uses it. And, surely that can be provided in another, better, graphics system. A new system can take into account the improvements in hardware and user interface design made in the last 20 years. And, X Defenders, don't jump on me to point out that X isn't a user interface. I know it's just a glorified, networkable display driver. But its limitations are imposed on any toolkits that use it. GTK cannot do anything that X cannot -- unless it ignores X (see the Gnome Canvas). And please don't jump on me pointing to the installed base of applications. So what? Rewrite. IT happens all the time. And any new system can provide an X interface for backwards compatibility.
Do we want to continue to emulate the limited systems of the past, or truly create something new and good? Or will the world have to continue to use the Macintosh if they want a good user interface? Mac OS X does look pretty schweet!
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Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I've been working for the last year
to build a morse-code shell that
has voice and speach synthesized feedback.
http://morseall.org
I don't have many users yet, but I'd
love to hear comments and feedback.
Please try it and let me know how
it works for you. Sound can be
turned off from the config file.
Combined with autologin, it feels like
it is at the point of being reliably
useful for quadrapalegics in need of
a reliable terminal.
gnome/gtk developers have been ignoring this for quite some time, in spite of it coming up several times. To do voice control you need fairly low level hooks in the gui (so, for example, you can add menu options to the current vocabulary, or read them to blind users). accessibility has to be built in from the ground up -- not tacked on as some separate project.