Slashdot Mirror
What Accessibility Options Exist for Unix?
pll asks: "My wife is getting a Masters in Human Factors and Information Design.
Tonight she attended a session on Handicapped Accessibility in Technology. Evidently MS has spent years studying this area, and the
options one has under Windows is supposedly quite impressive (provided you install the accessibility packages). According to the lecturer, there are over 50 million handicapped people in the United States alone, and obviously even more worldwide. This got me thinking...the Free/Open software communities pay an awful lot of attention to i18n, but other than Emacspeak, what kind of attention have we paid to handicapped accessibility? I'm not aware of anything, other than Emacspeak, and that doesn't do much to enable the use of Gnome or KDE to a handicapped person." While Emacspeak does have some uses in this area, it's primarily only useful for the blind. What about people without the use of their hands, or features for the deaf, and so on?
frxdeclgvbhiosewmnuyjhsder
Hmm... It's pretty hard typing with your forehead!
This is pretty much it
Let the gibson go free! We need to haxor the gibson before it is too late
Take a look at the GNOME accessibility project to see what is being done under GNOME.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
They are making some serious headway too, their developers are very active on all of the Gnome development lists.
got drum'n'bass?
http://mp3.com/vitriolix
I doubt it unless you count farsighted as handicapped.
can use chopsticks in their teeth. I saw it done on Discovery.
Some work has been done in that area for GNOME - Here's the GNOME developer info about it.
They are working on getting specialized input/output devices like braille keyboards, screen readers etc. working with GNOME.
I have to say that the company i work for had to spend a lot of time writing a NON-i18N version of a bunch of standard library calls because after some profiling, we discovered that 75% of the CPU time this one app was using was spent in calls like toupper and isalpha and other things like that. Our code needed to deal with stuff in STANDARD ASCII only. We replaced them with an inline lookup table style function and got an immediate and _HUGE_ performance boost.
The point of this is that people adding any sort of strange feature creep (i know call me insensitive for not giving a damn about the handicapped and non-english speakers) should be kept modular so there is still a readily available fast and simple version of all functions that are polluted by slow and cumbersome new features.
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
woooo hoooo heeeheheeeeheehee!!!!
that post made my day.
Reading Slashdot for content is like picking peanuts out of shit.
This may be a wee bit offtopic, but I think this is another example of those self-serving misuses of statistics.
You know - like the wildly overstated incidence of spousal abuse on Super Bowl Sunday.
50 Million disabled Americans? Assume (generously) that there are 300 million people in the U.S. - does this mean that one in six people could benefit from accessibility technology?
Don't get me wrong - I believe that the ADA was an excellent law, and am all for accessibility enhancements for software. But grossly exaggerating the (statistical) need seems to weaken the argument more than strengthen it.
50 million is undoubtedly inflated as the total population of the US is around 300 million per last year's census.
kit to enable speech and speech recognition in various Linux projects. See here.
-- The Sage does nothing, and nothing is left undone. --Lao Tzu
As mentioned in a side discussion on the window-less office article, open source developers only develop stuff to scratch their own itch. If there isn't handicapped open source developers, you won't find much open source handicap software packages.
I don't agree that this is the way Open Source should go, but that's the reality of it.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Like people who use Linux, handicapped people who need specific functions on their computer to do certain things are a minority. Given the population of the States is around 270,000,000 and about 50 million are 'handicapped', i'd say only %1 of those require any special functions while using their computer.
No offense to people with dissabilities, but what's the point in coding something noone will get any usage from?
People generally are limited by two things when it comes to their computer. The input and the out put. The input... the muscle control it takes to type or move a mouse. This typicall is taken care of via nifty specialized input devices. There are tons of these devices... all of them are odd looking but serve a specific function. As for out put... persons that are blind are the people that are hurt most in this area. People that are deaf are not terribly disadvantaged by having a computer without sound (unless they are playing games... then they get fragged quite easily.) In fact most of the NT/Win2k machines on the campus where I work do not have speakers attached to them.
I had a flame... but she had a fire.
Windows XP ships with a decent magnifying utility (called "magnifier") but even they recommend in the opening dialog box getting something more robust. Popular packages to increase the entire desktop start around $19.99, but more "professional" ones can scale all the way up to $700!
Another problem is that, despite "anti-discriminatory practices", handicapped people simply aren't hired for too many computer-literate positions. Many IT managers don't want to foot the bill for high-end accessibility utilities. That's why something more robust than Gnome's project (and KDE's paltry magnifying utility) are so needed.
Perhaps we could take a page from the methods people use when they can't type because of wrist injuries. Check here for one man's experiences. Interesting to note that in the end, the author had to move to Windows for the accessibility options...
50 million handicapped people in the United States alone
There are about 275 million people total in the USA. I find it hard to believe that almost 1 out of 5 is handicap. Okay, maybe if we count all the lawyers it makes sense.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
I did some tutoring for blind students in college and UNIX systems were much easier to use than Windows for blind students just because you could do everything without a GUI. The braille displays or auditory displays work best with text and with UNIX type systems you can do pretty much anything at the command prompt and text only... even web browsing.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
There is a version of emacs that can be used by the blind. it is very good, i like it alot.
285,663,670 / 50,000,000 = 5.71.
So more than 1 in 6 people is handicapped. *Looks around the room.* I know of one person out of the 110 or so in my workplace that is "handicapped" to the point that they use accessibility options. Admittedly, there are reasons why my workplace would be lower than average on the number of handicapped people, but I was wondering just what the criteria used were.
Note that I'm _not_ saying that there aren't a lot of handicapped people around, or that accessibilty options aren't important (they're very important to that one individual, who is in turn very important to us). I'm just curious about how those statistics were arrived at, since it feels like an astoundingly high number to me.
After all, 95% of statistics are made up on the spot.
-Puk
p.s. If you're going to flame me about my use of the word handicapped or claiming I'm downplaying the importance of accessibility tools, please don't even bother.
Text!
Seriously, all of the blind people I know at school love linux because it is very friendly to doing real work with text. The importance of this cannot be understated.
Slashdot 's editors are dickheads
Dude,
I'm sure you could have just went and found some before i18N libraries somewhere. I'd bet they are all archived. Why reinvent the wheel??
If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide. -Ghandi
...there really doesn't seem to be that much (at least in the research I've done, I haven't found much)
There is, as others have pointed out, the GNOME Accessibility Project
However, I haven't seen anyone point out Linux AccessX, which was a project at the University of Illinois, and as should be obvious, is for Linux only. It however, hasn't been updated for 2 years, so I don't think there's much hope there...
Pity... accessibility is the topic of my honours thesis, and from the looks of it, it's probably going to concentrate on Windows... (Not that I really expected anything else though)
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
If you can live with the speed of Java client apps, then accessibility is built into the Java Accessibility Framework Classes
This a great option for all platforms.
My wife is getting a Masters in Human Factors and Information Design. Tonight she attended a session on Handicapped Accessibility in Technology
What a worthless major and worthless seminar.
CmdrTaco and Hemos are very careful to make their assholes easily accessible. The stench of the festering bloody mess makes it easy to use even for blind and deaf people. In addition, Cliff has had surgery to have "hooters" added to his chest to help guide unsuspecting disabled people into his mangina.
What kind of features would the deaf need? I have a computer at work with no sound card, not even the crappy little PC speaker. I haven't really found that it interferes with my computing experience at all. Oh wait, the visual bell setting on your terminal! That's about all a deaf person would need so, yep, got it covered ;^)
In this case, the solution would be hardware based. I worked with one person who had Parkinson's disease (which slowly debilitates motor functions) and they were using one of those great big logitech trackballs.
In more serious cases, there are still hardware options. I read in a paper-based magazine (sorry, no url available and I can't remember which magazine it was) about one kid who was using a device that he could control using his leg because his other appendages were unusable for fine control.
So in the domain on physical-motor-control disabilities, the hardware solutions are already there or are on their way. The *nix community needs to do what it has been doing already and expand driver support.
This is where commercial software (especially companies like Microsoft who spend countless millions each year on research alone) has a distinct advantage. People who write code for commercial applications or OSes are not writing it for their own benefit -- they're writing it because they were told to and because they get paid to.
That said, I'm very impressed with Windows XP's accessibility features, but I really don't think they would be too difficult to implement in Linux applications. The only major problem is that "Linux" is just a kernel, and accessibility features don't belong in the kernel. Thus, it will be left up to individual distributions (Red Hat, Debian, Mandrake...) or individual application developers. This makes for a very uneven and inconsistent level of accessibility support across different applications. :/
Sadly, this is one area where companies like Microsoft and Apple have much more of an advantage than open source OSes, due mainly to the structure of their OSes.
Accessability is very important, however I think this Swedish site took it a bit too far with its Information for deaf people. (follow the numbered links for quicktime movies)
What? Suddenly deaf people can't read?
Nice gesture, but oh so useless. Moral of the story: Accesability is good, but only when it's done in a way that really helps those that need it.
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
> According to the lecturer, there are over 50 million handicapped people in the United States alone
According to the United States Census for 2000, there is a total population of 281,421,906 people in the United States. For argument's sake, let's round that up to an even 300 million.
So... one in six persons is handicapped?
I suspect accidentally or purposefully inflated numbers, though I'm quite willing to be proven wrong. Does anyone have any hard data that would back up, or refute this particular claim?
According to the lecturer, there are over 50 million handicapped people in the United States alone.
278 people in the US, 50 million handicapped....18%. So almost 1 in 5 people in the United States is handicapped. Athletes foot must be considered a handicap now.
Does this even make sense?
Microsofts accessability tools are kind of useless(MouseKeys is good when I lose my mouse :)), and I don't think many disabled people would find them any better. Interfaces are going to have to change dramatically before the blind will be able to use a PC for surfing the internet or write E-mail. Translating a visual experience into a verbal one is difficult, and only someone who knew what they were doing already could use such a system.
It may not happen in my lifetime, but I think a connection directly into the mind will be the next big thing. I recall seeing experiments about creating a neurological UI a few years back, but I haven't heard about it since. Such an interface (if it was two way), could revolutionize computing, and perhaps even remove barriers in the world for disabled people.
It's been a long time.
"According to the lecturer, there are over 50 million handicapped people in the United States..."
The population of the United States was 285,663,707 earlier today. That is one out of 6. When you look around you, do you see one handicapped person for every 6 people?
Okay, maybe they don't use Linux, but they aren't handicapped.
--
Links to respected news sources show how U.S. government policy contributed to terrorism: What should be the Response to Violence?
Bush's education improvements were
The 2.6.x kernel will support direct neural connections.
There are two project I know of that deal with blind users.
One is blinux (Blind linux). Don't know the URL by hand but do a google search.
The other is GLS, a project to create a Linux for blind (Croatian) users sponsered by Croatian Ministry of Law.
Both projects user Emacs speak as their "desktop environment" and a set of new or old tools to bring network services line NNTP,MAIL,WWW closer to blind users.
Roko
and w3c already has a standard in place on how to present audio data so that deaf clients can use it (believe it or not, there are some websites that actually put useful information in sound files, such as companies copying over their phone-tree solutions.
This would mean you would need browsers, or specific derivations of them, that could read these standards, which is a software issue, and one that I don't think the open source community is going to push for very quickly. Indeed, the commercial demand for this seems pretty small, since for the most part, people can live without sound on the Net
Plays hell with my ability to play, however. Try swinging a bat at a baseball with one eye closed. Or hammering nails.
Best Slashdot Co
Newer versions of SuSE Linux claim they can be installed by the visually handicapped, by detecting braille reader equipment early during the installation phase.
Microsoft support for braille reader equipment has to be installed after the OS, by someone who can operate the computer without the reader.
Couldn't help but notice that when the SuSE installation booted, it looked for a Braille display. Something I never heard of in windows, so I'd imagine that, yes, we have some accessibility apps.
We dance to all the wrong songs.
--Refused.
Have you tried to use Windows 2000 without a mouse? It is near impossible. First of all, everything is in a GUI. It is a lot easier to deal with text rather then images when you are blind. Ok, you can finally do some things from the console like type "net start Windows \ 2000\ Service\ for\ making\ me\ type\ too\ much", assuming that what you want to do can be done that way.
:)
The keyboard macros and accelerators in newer versions of windows are hovering somewhere between terrible and non-existant. I'm not speaking of the programming running under 2000. Just the built-in stuff like configuration, server management, the shell, etc.. It wouldn't fair to judge microsoft on 3rd party software
As far as X windows applications go, they are usually worse then Windows applications... although Gtk and QT (and their respective desktop environments) are doing much better then most older applications.
Are things getting better? for unix yes, for windows no. But they both still suck.
It isn't really an issue with the platform, though.. but more of a problem with bad UI designers writing 3rd party software.
I praise the efforts of Microsoft and the Open Source community to address these folks needs, but I doubt that figure is even close to correct.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Ok, so this is technically from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, but it's rather interesting, it's called 'Falling Through the Net: Toward Digital Inclusion' and examines the statistics of internet and computer use among various groups (income, geography, education, and so on) which includes those with some sort of disability.
:) but as you can see, they aren't necessarily readilly apparent.
Anyways, this link (it's a large page, be patient) is the start of the section on people with disabilities. Scroll down a bit and you'll come to the section labeled 'Definitions' which states that an estimated 45 million (21.8% of the estimated population 16 and over) had some sort of disability.
Ok... so big numbers... You truly don't know that many blind people or people in wheel chairs? Right? Well, scroll down a bit more to Box III-2 (or use this link as it's a GIF) and you'll see that disabilities isn't all that you think.
Ok, so some are going a bit far (I'd personally say the second last item about stress should apply to me
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
Thare is a Perl program called Sue Center if you can't push any buttons and can just move the mouse around. I'me not sure if it working in X yet but the source is avlible.
http://www.icogitate.com/~perl/sue/
Anyway Ive started looking at Voice Reccognition:
IBM have made there Via Voice SDK freely available, which is being made use of in the rather interesting looking XVoice, though its been passed between developers, the most current page is here ang the mailing list here. However training hasnt been implimented yet, but Via Voice Dictation for Linux compares rather favourably at ~ $50 compared to several hundred for the windows version.
Alternately, there is the Freespeach/Open Mind Speach project, gpl and makes use of the Overflow language/enviroment.
Not really aware of any active projects beyond such, hopefully this ask slashdot will prove to be interesting reading.
troodon.net
Actually a lot of deaf people can't read. While it is a bit harder for them to learn without a spoken language as a basis, the blame is mostly with a disinterested educational system.
Well, we're all about getting access to ebooks so that the blind can read them, aren't we? :)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
I don't know what the thing was called, but I met a blind user back at school who had a 70 character wide brail device that popped up pins to tell him what was on the current command line or line of code. What made him so hard-core was that he hd to memorize a whole program line by line without the quick reference that glancing up and down in a window affords most of us. Has anyone else seen this kind of device or know what it is called?
Blaze a trail to the New World
I've been working quite extensively within section508 guidelines which outlines electronic accesibility within government systems - from webpages, to software, to the photocopiers in the office. The statistics that are used in cases like this are misleading to those unfamilar with accesibility. You may not think that 1/6 people are 'handicap', but this term is fairly broad when used in this contex. The term also refers to the color blind, people with carpel tunnel syndrome, people with hearing-impairments (but not completely deaf), and the like - anyone who may require any assistance at all or may have difficulty navigating the web or a software product.
At the rate many of us are going, we're going to have weakened eyesight and carpel tunnel syndrome from so many hours on the computer. So we will be relying on many of these advances in accessibility options in the future.
I really recommend section508.gov which is a really great resource for accessibility.
I read something about a blind Linux hacker that uses a kernel patch that voice synthesizes his console using OSS or something.
I think I may have even gotten the link from Slashdot. Anyone remember?
Suse happens to be the only distro I know of that automaticaly looks for and configures Braile readers during the initial install.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
The syntax of sign language is vastly different from the spoken one, so reading/writing gets trickier. But I really fail to see how that websites implementation helps them. To me it sems to be an act of just putting something up so they can be called accessible, now, a ultralight version for the vision impaired would be a good idea. But strangely, that doesn't exist.
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
http://leb.net/blinux/
Complete with FAQ, docs and mailing lists.
http://www.melloworld.com/otm
This is probably where Microsoft's lobbyists did their money's worth. There's a law (don't remember which one) that requires the federal and probably state governments to only buy software that is handicapped-accessible. Microsoft has spent so much time and money on accessibility that they probably pushed for these types of requirements, knowing the Linux developers don't care enough about it to work on things like this. That means that pretty soon, Linux will be locked out from big government uses..... We better do something quick about this!!!
Look here:
http://www.supportwizard.com/1000Minds/
Liberty uber alles.
Linux Speakup is an organiztion of blind folks who 'like to mess around with linux'. This is one type of software to help the (visually) impaired. A gentlemen on one of the mailinglists I subscribe to uses this package, and claims it works well. It must work at least half way decent if he's able to be on a mailinglist, and offer all the knowledge that he has, which is quite extensive.
I bet this is not "First Post."
Information and discussions for blind SuSE Linux users (english)
Software for Blind Linux Users: Brass - Braille and speech server
That is fine when you want, say, an new video driver. But, you create a catch-22: you need a development environment to create accessability options, but if you have no accessability options, you can't use the development environment.
So, if you want to take the stance of "what's the point..if [almost] noone will get any useage from [it]," you simply prove the "must scratch someone's itch" point. And, you show a weakness of Open Source.
Further, you want Linux on the desktop? Some companies will require an accessability solution.
Did I mention is was, you know, the right thing to do?
TTY modems. The TTY protocol is different from anything else and requires its own modem.
Ay, that was a lame attempt at using 'liberal' in a clever way. I'm going to be thinking of a great comment on the way home in my car, I'm sure of it.
The "50 million" figure thrown around in the press is based on a broad extension of the original American's with Disabilities Act definition.
Traditionally the term "disabled " referred to a segment of the population, perhaps 4 or 5 percent, handicapped by blindness, deafness, problems with mobility or mental incapacity. Crafters of the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, expanded that definition dramatically to where it now takes in 50 million people, including the mentally or emotionally unstable.
No one seems to know exactly how the population to be covered by the ADA was, or is, measured, but that enormous estimate often is cited. Most of that number are mental cases. The psychiatric industry's 300 or so various diagnoses were used in structuring the ADA , meaning that symptoms such as bad moods or anxiety may be taken as indicators of an illness requiring accommodation by the employer. The ADA does rule out direct protection in cases of active users of illegal drugs, pedophiles, voyeurs, compulsive gamblers, kleptomaniacs, pyromaniacs and several other particularly antisocial sorts found in psychiatric diagnostic manuals.
The ADA is a civil-rights law; it's protections span the spectrum of American life because, like racial-discrimination laws, it attempts to level the playing field absolutely -- from the public water fountain to bus transportation to restaurant service to job equality and more.
---
You need to consider disabilties a bit broader than the guy in the wheelchair.
I, like many people, have red-green colorblindness. This doesn't mean that I can't tell those colors apart, but certain shades give me problems.
For example, those damn red LED screens that all the fast food restaurants are putting in their drive-throughs look completely blank to me during the daytime.
My own company's application, OpenView, uses green, red, and yellow icons to show status of managed nodes. I can't tell the default green and yellow apart, forcing me to modify the Xdefaults file.
Unix does need work. In Windows, I can easily make my mouse pointer larger, add trails, and change the color so I don't lose it on the screen. Under X11, I'm hosed and at the mercy of each application.
- Necron69
I'm a deaf/hard-of-hearing student, currently in high school and for the past four years I've devoted most of my time to teaching myself and others about computers and how they work. As far as accessibility goes for people with my handicap, I can say that I've not had much problems using FreeBSD or Linux. Most of it is text (except when it comes to running an mp3 server... btw, I can hear enough to listen to music, thank god), and therefore there really is no need for sound. The good thing about my handicap is that I don't have to listen to those damned Windows startup theme songs! Overall, when it comes to the needs of people with my condition(s), most are provided in a *nix experience with the added bonus of no stupid Windows sounds in the first place. Now, if there was a feature repelling the tech-illiterate from asking me inane Windows questions or bugging me about their sound drivers, I'd be even happier. ;)
---
I could've sworn I disabled
I think there are a number of things that this previous post truly brings to light (aside from the blatant ignorance of its author). One of the biggest distinctions is the difference between bind, and legally blind. As someone who is legally blind, I cannot hold a valid drivers license, and I have never tried to operate a 75hp chainsaw. I do however have fairly limited vision and can operate in a normal society without people knowing I have a handicap. I am also fortunate enough to have visual acuity that permits me to use a computer without the need of visual assistance.
The majority of visually impaired people that use a computer do so as a means to get information that would otherwise be unavailable to them, reducing the number of things we "just can't do". To think they should be restricted to a single OS (Windows no less) demonstrates more of a lack of vision than any blind person I have ever met.
Lastly, if you have the balls to make a statement like this, have the balls to put your name on it. Shithead.
"If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative." -- Woody Allen
I hear the GIMP has good support for handicapped people.
Windows was based on the Macintosh (which had speech synthesis in 1984, a screen magnifier in 1985, and sticky keys by 1986, by the way). The Macintosh was based on the Xerox Star/Alta/Lilith. This was based on a user interface design done 30 years ago by some very young people with fine eyesight and motor coordination. They built the entire user interface on their assumptions about the visual and motor systems of healthy young people.
So, now, on top of all that are some tools to degrade the experience enough to improve the system for specific disabilities. All of a sudden, Microsoft is a Disability Hero.
Yeah, right.
Consider UN*X and its command line interface. With any reasonably well designed command line program, it is possible to pipe standard input from any device and send output to any device. I have seen interactive Braille output devices hooked up to UN*X systems and working with essentially everything. In 1982. That's 19 years ago.
With the right physical devices and some code that takes a weekend to write, a person who could only operate a single switch and could only recieve information by means of Morse Code with wires on his tongue could use almost all of UN*X, up to and including rewriting the kernel.
Don't forget about that! The original Apple Interface guidelines made specific requirements that all widgets and UI elements work in grayscale. The use of color to convey information (ie. text editors) is ok, but you should really be thinking about it in terms of using _contrast_ to convery information.
And the vision impared? 1600x1280 displays with 8p non-AA fonts are tough for me to read, I can't imagine how impossible that would be for someone who virtually wears magnifying glasses on their face.
Not to suddenly turn troll here, but let's be honest with ourselves here: Unix has very serious shortcomings in the user-friendliness area for the non-disabled, much less the disabled. Not to downplay accessibility, but let's make the system more usable in the first place.
For those of you who hope to get Linux into the government market, you should know about Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1977. This federal regulation mandated accessibility compliance for any government purchased IT systems. The government is also getting more picky about enforcing this law as of late. How do I know? The company where I work just went through a self-audit to make sure we complied...
That is all.
Well, it is always said that most linux apps are developed to scratch an itch, and well, if you can't scratch...
Sorry.
Statistics are statistics, and are made specifically to represent what the proponent wishes, but:
50 Million disabled Americans? Assume (generously) that there are 300 million people in the U.S. - does this mean that one in six people could benefit from accessibility technology?
No, it means that almost everyone will find some benefit from Assistive Technology, whether they realize it or not. One of the most common misconceptions of AT is that it will only benefit the disabled. The point of AT is to provide a STANDARD BASELINE, as well as EQUAL ACCESS. It's not meant to be necessarily the lowest commmon denominator, but it can be.
Think about lowered curbs at corners. Initially, they were created for people in wheel chairs in mind. Alas, everyone found them handy - people with stroller, bikers, pedestrians, everyone. In the end, it ended up benefitting everyone.
Assistive Technology will benefit everyone.
Currently, the only advanced and (semi) well-supported AT is for the Windows platform.
Screen readers,
screen magnifiers,
Braille boards,
haptic mice,
headset mice,
Braille boards,
Voice recognition,
and so forth. None of these are real options for Linux currently. Since alot of these products are pricey, I would urge open-source h4X0rZ w/big hearts to contact the hardware manufacturers if they can obtain some development-type hardware/software, so that they may be able to port some of these to Linux. GNOME is working hard, and have contacted them personally about contributing to the project. If you were lucky enough to have been blessed with good sight/mobility, and have the l33t skills, I urge you to contribute.
Because in the end, it's not about which OS you prefer, but which OS can you *use*.
bob alvarez
assistive technologies consultant
www.bobalvarez.net
You sir, are an idiot and a troll. And not a very good one at that either.
According to the numbers, yes, about one in six people *has some degree* of disability. This does not necessarily mean someone has an overt disability; many are not. Here're some figures:
e nc e=D9B84D509D045B5DBFB69454&_function=searchCon&url =REP7TD
http://www.dsc.ucsf.edu/UCSF/tab.taf?_UserRefer
No wonder I cant get no health insurance.
There is a whole distribution (a version of Slackware) that is designed for speech synthesis. I wonder how it has not been mentioned. Ah, and it works through UMSDOS, so it's for the tech imparied as well.
Oh, the only problem is that it requires one of several specific model of speech synthesis cards.
You can find it at www.slacware.com
Here is a link to an article about a Perl project to help the disabled. It contains a link to the project's website, as well.
if you're a deaf blind person there are some things in life you just can't do, like drive a car
My father is completely deaf. He's been driving for 55 years. He's never been in an accident nor had a moving violation.
Screen, the full screen window manager has built-in support for several common braille displays. Many distributions ship with screen and so are very accessible from a terminal. If you want to know more about screen's accessibility features, see this page .
I think many people misunderstand what a disabled person is. They do not have ot be in a wheelchair, walk around with a cane and a seeing eye dog or wear a hearing aid to be handicapped. Some can have partially impaired vision and the magnification utility in Windows aids their use of the OS. People with arthritis, not just those who have lost their arms, can benefit from speech recognition built into the OS and other applications.
These are just a couple of examples. Just because someone does not LOOK disabled does not necessarily mean they are. That's how there can be 50 million disabled people in America.
SuSE will detect if you are using a braile monitor, at install, so even a blind person can install and run it, without anyone elses help.
Even winblows cant pull this one off.
Good work SuSE is all i can say. Just a shame there is no X-Braile, but i suppose quake3 on a braile monitor wouldnt quite be as fun. There is always ascii art i suppose, but then again that wouldnt look right on braile would it.
The topic Libre software for the blind and visually impaired of LSM last summer has some useful links. Jan Buchal was the chairman of that topic and the coordinator of the free-b-software project.
Anybody else find it ironic that the government site about disabilities should present text as a GIF , effectively insuring that it can't be indexed or read by the visually impaired?
A customer service representative will be with me shortly.
I'd like to meet one of those. (=
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Curb cuts make it easier for wheelchair users, but harder for the blind to detect curbs. Wheelchair toliets are higher, making bowel movements more difficult, especially for the elderly. (These two examples taken from The Death of Common Sense by Philip Howard). Making things accessible drives up the cost.
Does this mean we in the computer industry shouldn't try to make our products accessible? Of course not. With software it is much easier than with physical devices to make something that can be all things to all people. But it is still not free. Increasing complexity makes things harder to debug--epecially when you have multiple UIs. Using accessibility layers makes it harder to reuse existing code.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As usual there is HOWTO that addresses this "ask slashdot" question. It is the Linux Accessability HOWTO sheesh
The scratch-an-itch argument you present is somewhat accurate, but only when shallowly examined.
The point is that anyone can develop to scratch any itch. If Windows didn't develop to your tastes, you have to convince them that it's something you need and that they should develop it. If you can't convince them, you have no recourse, since you have no source code.
You seem to be forgetting that Open Source/Free Software is, at its core, simply laying your source code open to the public for review and enhancement. There is absolutely zip preventing a business with handicapped persons (or a collection of them, or a collection of Concerned Citizens, or whatever) from taking the source code, adding the desired functionality, and submitting patches for it. Whereas in the proprietary model, you have to convince a business that it's in their interest to implement feature X. In Open Source / Free Software, you always have the option of maintaining just patches or a completely separate tree.
Bottom line--Open Source / Software Libre does not fail here. Anyone can fix problems in the software and make the fixes available to the public. The problem thus far has been a lack of awareness in the active community, and the lack of wider acceptance of many Software Libre / Open Source projects. The more widely distributed OSS/FS projects, the larger the pool of developers.
If you wish, grab a copy of KDE source and go to town. Or write documentation. Or help the developers see what direction to develop if you don't want to write any code or documentation.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Well.. I've always suspected that avid Windows users were mentally handicapped. That's an accessibility option that's hard coded. (-:
http://cmos-eng.rehab.uiuc.edu/accessx/
She should following that up with doctorate in The Human Interaction of Sybian Technology
I met a programmer (He is blind) this past summer who was working for Sun Microsystemms in Broomfield, CO. More specifically, his job involves working on a handicapped-accessable GNOME interface to Linux running on Sun boxes for the 2.0 release (of GNOME). I haven't heard anything of it for awhile, however, it seemed from talking to him that they were really tackling the issue.
As has been mentioned MANY times already, disability is not just people in wheelchairs and crutches. Disability includes mental illness, HIV, diabetes, brain injury, etc. I think many people would be surprised by the number of people they know who have invisible disabilities. I'm still surprised by the number of people who can't grasp this concept.
As for accessibility, I use Windows 9x with a nifty headset called a Headmaster and an on-screen keyboard called WiViK. Don't think Unix has on-screen keyboards, but I could be wrong.
One thing I've had in mind for some time now is a kind of gimp plugin that simulates various kind of color blindness, so the user can get an idea of how colorblind people would perceive the images. Ideally this would enable designers to make their work more accessible to those people. Alas, I haven't yet found the time to learn enough about color science to build this.
Having this functionality in a web browser would to cool too and might encourage web designers to build accessible sites.
I know two blind people. One uses Linux and hates Windows, the other uses Windows and hates Windows. JAWS is the most popular screenreading utility for the blind. Do you know how hard it is to use Windows if you're blind? It's damn near impossible, and nowhere near as efficient as using a text based system. My blind friend that uses Linux gets around great with it. Hell, I used Linux in console mode for over a year becuase I only had 4 megs of ram, and I frankly missed very little about the Windows GUI I switched away from to do it. The only really useful graphical utils are web browsers and *MAYBE* word processors anyway. Unix systems have endless awesome console utils -- irc, news, mail, instant messaging, web browsing, word processing, anything you could need. Except no pretty images in web pages. Well guess what, blind people can't see the pretty images anyway.
The only thing that JAWS is going to be able to do for you in windows is tell you what the text is inside of the neat little windows. In other words, the pretty graphics only hinder a blind user, they offer ZERO benefit whatsoever. Microsoft, are you listening? Your little accessability patches make your system USEABLE for a blind user, but in no way powerful or really useful day-to-day.
With the world population getting older statistically, and the fastest growing internet population being over 50, it makes sense that we as the computing community are going to need to do more to address useability issues for persons with handicaps, whether those disabilities are the "traditional" sorts of handicaps we think of, versus those brought on by age.
There is some project called Carnival out there that is a text to speech system that runs on linux,I had it running on my RH box, think they even had rpm's. Think it was more than just text to speech conversion though, like a whole system for inlcuding text to speech in your programs. Sorry no links, too much work. It was cool thought, I download a couple of public domain books and had my linux box read them to me. But the style of English I think was so old it was hard to understand, on top of the already hard to understand voice. Huckleberry Finn and things like that I used it for.
I've been somewhat in disagreement with the "google trolls" in the past, but this askslashdot is rediculous, you could even use a lame search engine. There's support for a talking linux console for blind, and let's face it, a GUI isn't the best way to go for blind people.
What Is Speakup?
As mentioned previously, Speakup is a screen reader for the Linux operating system. One of the things which makes Speakup different from more traditional screen readers is that it is patched into the kernel. To explain what this means, Speakup is an integral part of the operating system. This means that when you turn on your computer and Linux starts, Speakup also starts, meaning you can hear all boot-up messages, and resolve any problems related to the computer not reaching the login prompt. In addition, when you shutdown your system you will receive speech feedback right until the message "Power down" is given, indicating you should turn off your computer.
The official Speakup home page is at linux-speakup.org
Deaf people? give me a break, scince when did computers need hearing? Sound is cool, but not at all nessesary.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
From the: You-can't-have-everything-ya-know dept.
As far as I'm concerned, I'm more than willing to let M$ have the monopoly on producing accessibility software. The *NIX world, Linux especially, has other areas of GUI development and polishing that need attention before accessibility issues. Not having an office suite that is as-good-as-or-better-in-all-aspects as M$ Office yet is a larger deficit to overcome than, say, lacking Speech Recog. or something like that. The major things need to be worked on before the minor ones, folks. And face it: the handicapped are a minority, especially in the IT world. Not that this is a bash on them, don't get me wrong. I'm just looking at practicality issues here.
Cold truth is, it doesn't pay to develop server rooms that are wheelchair accessible (and if they're anything like mine, they have cords and all manners of things that make it hard for walking individuals to navigate!). In a similar manner, it doesn't pay (or benefit, for you free software folk) to develop accessibility software for *nix at this time. At least, not on a large, concentrated scale.
Blog,Twitter
Since when do deaf people need accessibility features to use a computer? They may need some special help to get anything out of multimedia presentations, but they are certainly not inhibited from being productive. I operate my computer with the speakers muted about 99% of the time. The biggest thing this could even affect is some games (it would be hard to play Thief without the sound), which is hardly an important business function. Input devices that deal with mechanical inhibitions seem to be more hardware related (the only important software is the driver). So it would seem that the blind have a near monopoly on not being able to use standard software, which would defeat Cliff's implication that solutions for blind users aren't enough.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
Make the default fonts bigger. If the fonts are too big, I can find the settings to make them smaller, but if they are too small, I can't find anything. Then make sure all the screens have scroll bars.
The lecturer who quoted this figure was either a liar or mentally handicapped.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house.
--Lazarus Long, Time Enough for Love (Robert A. Heinlein)
In our rapidly aging country, there are more than one in six who are over the age of sixty, and suffering the infirmities of old age. A major segment of that age group have enough loss of visual or auditory acuity to require assistive devices. Then there are those with age-related mobility problems, especially arthritis, that makes keyboarding a literal pain. The numbers grow rapidly if you look beyond wheelchairs and white canes to define disabilities.
The Disabled American Veterans has a million members all by itself. My state issued more than 200,000 handicapped parking permits last year. So why should I not believe those numbers?
I realize this is going to come off like a troll, but I can't let the supposition in the lead article go unchallenged: "the Free/Open software communities pay an awful lot of attention to i18n, but...."
This is certainly not true. The current version of Windows is fully Unicode-based as is the current version of MacOS.
The "open source" OSes aren't even close, and the reason is the same as the reason for the lack of accessibility support: the patchwork nature of the platform and its ragtag gang of personal itch scratching developers.
Very few open source developers make it a priority that their software be usable by all possible users, regardless of locale or physical challenges. The mantra of open source isn't "I'll build a global system," but rather "I'll build a highly customized system, then I'll give you my source and you can customize it for yourself if you're different from me.
This makes open source platforms extremely useful for some things and some users, but it's not a solid, consistent multilingual client platform.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
USB HID, (Human Interface Devices) is in linux and if any of these h/w devices you talk about uses it then they would work. most usb keyboards, joysticks, etc talk through. although these two examples do have further drivers for more functionality.
also as far GUIs X is probably better then Windows, purely because you can sit your own WM (Window Manager) or run something e16 with a theme that has the disabled in mind. i dont know a WM or e-themes which are for this purpose, but your a head then with windows, just cause you can truely customize them.
any way i played windows accessability options and all they seem to provide is a magnifier, realy large fonts for widgets, and 'high contrast' colours.
you can do all this easy with [ctrl]+[alt]+[+]
and kcontrol (for kde, but other WM have similar app)
there are other stuff in windows access control panel, but i beleive that nearly all of can be achieved with the normal linux (or *nix) apps
why? because although nix/linux dev peeps may not have the disabled in mind, they do love to implement features fun and/or useful. because thats the way we all like it, lots of buttons to push and things to tweak and play with.
-Trevelyan
In the context of "Gnome Accessibility" a lot of work is being done for linux and *nix generally. At the moment it requires bits of the Gnome 2 software stack but for best success one would want to interoperate with all major toolkits and desktops.
A couple of people have said linux is a bad forum for this since it's about people scratching thei own itches... but in fact that's probably all the more reason why linux can become the premier platform for accessibility. The disabled community, even if it is 50 million strong :-), has historically been seen as a niche market without the pull to get bugfixes prioritized, and assistive technologies have had difficulty getting proprietary information needed to retrofit accessibility onto closed apps and OS's.
There are lots of disabled programmers out there, and lots of hackers with friends and loved ones who can benefit from accessibility. With an open OS, and even open source assistive technologies (there are two in development under the Gnome umbrella now), the power to improve accessibility really is being delivered to those who most benefit from doing it.
Bill Haneman, Gnome Accessibility ArchitectHuh? 5 million maybe. If there are 50 million, that means that one in every six, or about 17% of the population is handicapped. If that's true, we need a LOT more handicap parking EVERYWHERE. 5 million seems more likely - that would put it at about 2%. Still significant, but not nearly so.
Unless, of course, the lecturer is counting MCSE's in that tally...
That study produced even a freely available software (not really open source, but the project coordinator is open minded enough to discuss that subject, I think) the software may be compiled on *nix, with the needed tweaks.
The commercial version - used in some Italian and German school - other than enabling the hearing impaired children to learn effectively makes the lecture a truly multimedial and entertaining experience for the entire classroom
I spent 13 years as a research scientist working on usable scientific visualization. I presented on user interfaces at ACM SIGGRAPH, the DOE Computer Graphics Forum, Fermilab, the American Meteorological Society, the American Chemical Society, and other places I can't remember. I collaborated with a scientist with a severe neuromuscular disorder giving him the tools he could use to produce visualizations for the Human Genome Project. Even my package for nominally normal people had color-blindness resistance built into the palettes. Before that career, I used to tutor CS students with disabilities.
I'm not in the league of Donald Norman, and I didn't take the position at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, but I ain't chopped liver, either.
As for the other guy (to save posting), I have put my money where my mouth is. As a research scientist, at my highest paid, I made 2/5 what I can easily make in industry now. I did it because I thought it mattered. I gave it up when I realized that people were going to bow down and worship Bill Gates' panty no matter what Microsoft does.
I know that Microsoft employs some great people. I can't remember if Raskin works there these days, but Blinn and Kajiya are great guys. The trouble is, their presentations dropped to zero when they started working there.
Finally, if Microsoft is such calorific fertilizer, then why do they produce products that make even supposedly normal people want to put their fists through the screen? If they have such a sodding clue about usability, why are there still way too many menu options, all of which work in different ways, under menus that are organized according to no functional logic I can detect? Why are there oodles of squinny, indecipherable buttons that I have to hold a mouse over for a half a second before I can see what they do? Why does Visio make me go through a list of a dozen groups of templates when I just want to draw some circles?
The answer, of course, is that people will take just about anything from Microsoft and think it's fabulous innovation. The Stockholm Syndrome was misnamed. It should be called the Redmond Syndrome.
I worked for three years as the Computer Resource Specialist at the Disabled Students' Program at UC Berkeley. My job was to support the computing needs of students (and, to a lesser extent, staff and faculty) with a very wide variety of disabilities. This was back in the early-mid 1990's, just when Windows 3.1 was starting to hit big and Macs still ruled the academic market.
The problem isn't simply that there aren't screen magnifiers or sticky-keys or the like. The problem is the inability of many software designers to even think about the implications of their code for people with disabilities. Alert messages that rely upon color codes to show degree are pretty useless for people with color blindness; instant message or email apps that assume that you can hear the "you've got mail" equivalent message are frustrating to the deaf. GUIs without sticky-keys and keyboard equivalents aren't just hell for blind people with screen readers, they're a barrier for people with severe motor impairment.
The answer isn't just "use the terminal." People with disabilities have to work in the same interconnected world everyone else does. Which terminal app will display a Word document? How many websites give you configuration options letting you turn off multiple-columns and frames (just try using a screen-reader on a multi-column web page like unadjusted Slashdot)?
As has been posted elsewhere in this discussion, accessibility isn't just for the handicapped, it's a sign of good design. Accessibility as a conscious feature typically results in greater clarity, efficiency, and overall usability. Everyone can benefit from accessible design.
The problem for Linux regarding accessibility is that there isn't a single master UI that all Linux users must use, as with Windows or the MacOS, so it's up to individual UI hackers and app programmers to add it in. This often results in a lack of consistency and predictability, two features that people with disabilities usually need in accessible interfaces. Maybe there needs to be an open standard for accessible interfaces that the various UI developers can come together on.
There are a number of projects in the open source community that address different accessibility issues. The Gnome accessibility project (http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/ ) is probably the most widely known and most publicized. However, most of the Linux accessibility projects are, by necessity, focused on the command line interface instead of the graphical desktops.
In general, there are several areas that accessibility focuses on: visual, hearing, mobility, and cognitive or learning impairments. Currently, visual impairment is getting a lot of attention, as many visually impaired users require a screen reader and speech synthesizer (either hardware or software) for output. There are a number of screen readers (Emacspeak, Speakup, and Jupiter, to name a few) available which use either hardware or software synthesizers, but currently all of them work only in console mode (except Emacspeak, which works from within the Emacs environment). The Gnome accessibility project is working on a screen reader for Gnome, called Gnopernicus ( http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/AT/Gnopern icus/index.html). Linux figureheads like Alan Cox are helping to write requirements for an adapter-ready kernel ( http://www.speechinfo.org/fdawg/). SuSE Linux automatically detects braille devices during installation, making it possible for visually impaired users to install Linux without sighted assistance. For users who do not require audio output, screen magnifiers, larger fonts, icons, and mouse pointers are available in both KDE and Gnome, in addition to other accessibility features.
For hearing impaired users, the ability to have visual cues, such a visual bell, is crucial. For those with mobility impairments, features like Sticky Keys, Toggle Keys, and Bounce Keys, as well as on-screen keyboards, can make it easier to type. It is also possible to configure a standard keyboard to take one-handed input. Voice recognition systems, such as Open Mind Speech or ViaVoice Dictation may be a more viable option for some. Users with epilepsy, which might be triggered by on-screen animations, must be able to turn off features like window opening/closing animation. For more information on these options, as well as those mentioned for visual impairments above, refer to the Linux Accessibility HOWTO ( http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Accessibility-HOWTO/ index.html).
In June 2001, the US government enacted Section 508 ( http://www.section508.gov/), which requires that all government IT tools and services be accessible. This means that the government won't buy and IT tool or service unless it is compliant with the criteria outlined in Section 508. Thus, from a purely business perspective, it makes sense for the Linux community to address the accessibility issue. From the user's point of view, it makes even more sense. For example, a visually impaired Windows user might choose JAWS for Windows (a commonly-used Windows screenreader), which is $795 US. Alternative Windows screen reading applications are less expensive, but some require a hardware synthesizer, which can cost in excess of $1600 US. Users must also purchase the Windows OS. However, a Linux user can get the Emacspeak screenreader and ViaVoice software synthesizer (not to mention Linux), for FREE. This is one of the reasons that many visually impaired users, at least, are making the move to Linux.
Also consider those of us who wear glasses and use lower resolution and/or larger fonts/icons so that we can see the screen better - these are accessibility features. Someone with a broken arm could take advantage of dictation apps or a one-handed keyboard - also accessibility features. What about the next time you're in a noisy airport working on your laptop, and you can't hear the audio bell that alerts you to a new email? You'd turn on the viusal bell instead - again, an accessibility feature. Making Linux doesn't just benefit those who are "handicapped," it benefits everyone.
Hate to be brutal but the truth of the matter is that the Internet is a visual tool; not an audio tool. This whole ADA thing gets stretched a bit in trying to make everything accessible to "disabled" people. I think it's nice and all but it shouldn't be a law.
Also, there are plenty of things I'd like to do but can't (not tall enough to play professional basketball, not smart enough to become a scientist, etc). Am I disabled? Want to browse the web but you're blind? I say tough luck.
That there are 50 million handicapped people in a society of 275 million. That is a pretty high percentage. 18%???
As a deaf guy I personally wish I had...
;-) (There, I've finished my ranting with some raveing it's all balanced now =)
Video-confrencing software that allows decent frame-rates over a dial-up so we could finally have our vid-phones... I'm not sure how fast it would have to be as far as fps go... but certainly better than say... Netmeeting does. (Sign Language is no good using Netmeeting on a dialup, I'm sure you've all seen the "I cooked your dog for you" commercial)
We've got some basic Winmodem drivers... how about someone making a TTY/TDD program? Simple tones, wouldn't be much more complicated than playing DTMF signals back and forth.
Voice-recognition would be nice... and text-to speech... forget using a relay service and having to share our secrets with a stranger in the middle... how about converting our typed speech to voice... play it over the winmodem... get the speech back, and type it for us? Or voice-recognition libraries which would plug into things like video-players and audio-players? You don't know HOW annoying it is to miss out on webcasts and online discussions because nobody includes captions or transcripts on their websites.
You all want your video-phones? Start by selling them to the deaf... hook up colleges with large groups of deaf in them to each other so they can collaberate, as it spreads it'll gain momentum and then the hearing will want them too... from campus networks to the home... once the infrastructure is there and they have people to call they'll want one at home. Nobody wants to be the first to buy one. =) Of course this is a perfect use of IP6, each phone having it's own permanent address... so we'd need a universal addressbook format to beam our vidnums to each other... I hereby select the Palm Platform as the standard PDA!
CODiNE
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Taking a look at GNU gettext, you realize that performance penalty is NOT necessary. That's how you do:
- You extract translatable string from your source code.
- You translate those strings into every language you want.
- You "compile" these translated strings.
- You load the ONE set of translated strings you want... based on a ENV var or the like.
Simple, and efficient... that's GNU... that's Unix...
While Windows has largely caught up, OS X still has a number of disabled-friendly options to it, and since OS X is (all together now) based on UNIX, that means [the completion of this sentence is left as an exercise to all Slashdot readers with an IQ over that of an electric can opener, which probably excludes some...]
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
In case motor skills handcaps make using a mouse too difficult:
Here's the location of the client software and documentation:
http://cmos-eng.rehab.uiuc.edu/accessx/
this gnome accessibility bullshit is largely marketing
hype , like most of gnome. show some motherfucking
results you fucking moron unix bastard fuckheads.
ASSHOLES>
For information on accessibility support being developed for Mozilla, see the Mozilla accessibility project and the netscape.public.mozilla.accessibility newsgroup.
I was born with Nager's syndrome and have multiple physical disabilities. I am currently unemployed (laid off from a dotcom company about eight months ago). I noticed a lot of employers are afraid of people with disabilities like me. This is true when I go for job interviews (already had about ten of them and applied over 650 jobs within eight months).
My field is in the Information Technology (IT) area and I have a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. My strongest areas are in Web Development/Design and Software Quality Assurance (SQA).
The thing I have is that I don't need heavy accomodations. I don't need special computers, tools, access, etc. The only thing I need is people's patience to understand that I am like people without disabilities. I tell them that I have speech impairment (can't talk clearly), but this shouldn't stop them from hiring me because I can type, e-mail, ICQ, AIM, write my sayings on papers, etc. I can still handle any IT jobs like programming, testing, etc.
When I was working for the last company, everyone was impressed with my skills and knowledge. I always worked hard and done a lot overtime. I was serious about my job.
With the downturn of the economy, it makes my job search situation even more difficult and frustrating. Having disabilities make my chances very slim.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I have a congenital birth defect that rendered my left ear all but useless and my right ear severely impaired. This means that (1) I do not have stereo hearing; (2) I have a difficult time in situation where there is a lot of background noise; (3) computer software and/or games that depend on audible alerts to signal the user are nearly useless to me.
... but it'd be nice to enjoy them. Diablo II has none, though the Collector's Edition DVD fortunately had subtitles on its versions of the cutscenes.
First off, let me say that I'm glad that there are some provisions for the deaf in Windows; I recently installed XP and used 98SE before that. (At this point, the applications I use basically require Windows, though I have several Linux boxes in the house for applications where free software exists; I also use MacOS X). I will concentrate on Windows because that's (unfortunately) what most people use.
The accessibility options for the deaf are relatively scant. Yes, it's true that those who are hard of hearing don't need a lot in the way of assistance because we can see just fine (aside from sometimes wearing glasses, like me). But there are two major issues with the built-in accessibility tools: (1) They aren't installed by default (I don't think they are; I had to check the box for them when custom installing XP and I believe I did for 98SE as well), so if you don't know that they exist, you won't get them. (2) They don't do a heck of a lot. I've checked the boxes for having applications flash a visual alert, but I've yet to see one do this outside built-in (for that app) options. (I use SecureCRT for telnet; it too has a "visual bell" setting.)
Now, I do a lot of chatting over the Net (you don't know how empowering it is to sit in a group of two dozen people and not miss a word and be part of the conversation until that is denied you in the real world) and I use MUSHClient and mIRC to do it. Both of those applications have built into them options to flash the taskbar button if new text arrives while the program is not the foremost window. All well and good. However, again there is the problem of obscurity: while the options are of course installed with the software, they are not turned on by default and are usually somewhat hard to notice. MUSHclient's is buried deep within the preferences for a specific connection and isn't program-wide, so I can't check "Flash visual alert on activity" in global preferences -- I have to do it one at a time. mIRC is much the same: I have to right-click on a channel's mIRC-Taskbar button and select "Flashing" (not too descriptive an option name; Flash on Activity would be better) and it seems to be rather sporadic at times regarding whether or not it does it in query windows.
Games. I'm a gamer. And a lot of games these days have options for subtitles (Wing Commander III-V stand out here, having options for French and German as well as English subtitles) and a lot don't (why is Starlancer, also made by Chris Roberts, missing them?!). I can't play Thief because it doesn't put up any visual cues. Return to Castle Wolfenstein has none in its cutscenes but since it's a first person shooter game, I can get by without the cutscenes
It is not that hard to add subtitles; fan petitions got some added to at least one of the Zork games. Movie theaters don't have them yet because people claim they're intrusive, but as long as they can be toggled (with a control in a plain, obvious place!), that's not an issue.
So what does Unix need, then?
It needs built-in alert options, which are part of the default install, as part of window managers. KDE, GNOME, Enlightenment, whatever. A standard needs to exist for how applications will address it. Apps need to use it.
The controls to turn these on need to be in an obvious place and marked with clear symbology (the white-on-blue wheelchair symbol is a good start.)
Applications need to be marked as captioned for the hearing impaired on their web sites and on packaging. Develop a standardized symbol for this.
If I sound rather platform-independent, then that's a good thing. If I use all sorts of OSes, then other people out there like me do, too.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Anytime you say that, be it for accessability components, security patches, etc, you are basically saying that the company has to make an investment in resouces (staff, contractors, etc.) who are capable of building/investigating/etc. the required components. That's easy if you are, say, McDonalds. But, if you are the small business down the street, it is a huge investment.
In contrast, the cost of accessability is spread among all of a propritary developer's customers. So, "niche" featues are more readily integtrated.
Just because you have the source doesn't mean it is practical for just anything to be added.
I just remembered this article on www.perl.com about a guy, Jon Bjornstad, who has been doing some custom perl/Tk programming for his disabled friend, Sue.
:)
Maybe it is too specialized in this context, but it is a very nice story, and a good example on how You can help, with your skills, with relatively small measures.
This is also the perfect example of "an itch to scratch" leading to something useful, and in this case it was even someone else's itch.
Back in the day, I worked for a major network's enhanced television group. I suggested the idea of enhancing close captioning for the deaf. My idea was to make close captioning customizable for people with partial blindness. It's entirely possible that with a WebTV+ box on top of your TV, you can change the color and font of close captioning, even move it around the screen so that it doesn't interfere with sports scores while watching the game. The idea was shot down right away due to "lack of ROI". I wish I had those stats back when I pushed the project. Oh well...
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
Mac OS X 10.1 has a lot of accessibility features, which are all installed by default. The user just has to configure them to taste in System Preferences. It's not entirely free, but the core OS is free and open source, and UNIX compatibility is built-in. You can still install and use all the same software as on any UNIX system, while also having access to Mac software that has a long history of accessibility features. I have a good friend who doesn't have the use of his hands and uses a Mac OS X Mac every day all day.
... if you work with this for a short while, you can get very fast in Mac OS X without taking your hands off the keyboard.
... applications know about them and developers have adapted their software to work with them. Text-to-speech has been around even longer, and it's common for Mac applications to read stuff to people.
The Universal Access System Preference offers enhancements to keyboard and mouse input. Sticky Keys makes modifier keys stick so that a person can type with one finger or with a mouthstick. It has great on-screen feedback, with translucent icons that float over a corner of the desktop showing what modifiers are currently active without blocking your work. Mouse Keys makes the numeric keypad into a mouse substitute. Mac OS has long had standard key shortcuts that work everywhere (Command+F is always Find if Find is available, Command+G is Find Again, Command+Q always quits an app, etc) so a person who is using the keyboard can count on those things working in every application. Macs also have keys on the keyboard for volume up/down, mute audio, brightness up/down, and the eject key for removable media is also on the keyboard, which helps a lot of users. You can also eject disks from the GUI by dragging and dropping or using a menu or key command.
In the Keyboard System Preference, you can enable Full Keyboard Access, which enables you to navigate the entire Aqua GUI with the keyboard. Key shortcuts highlight the menus or Dock so you can move through them from the keyboard, and you can move through dialog boxes and similar things of course. This is an option that many people use outside of whether they have a special need
Speech recognition is and text-to-speech are also built into Mac OS X. It's trivial to open applications and run scripts using your voice. It's easy to have text read back to you in a variety of voices, from almost any application. If the built-in speech recognition isn't enough, then IBM's ViaVoice is available, and enables you to navigate the GUI and dictate into almost any application.
In Finder, you can set icons to be displayed at 128x128, which is large enough that even on a 1600x1024 display, a person with vision difficulties can still have honking great icons. Icon labels are large and bold as well. You can also navigate and perform all kinds of file management tasks using only the keyboard. There is an Undo feature in Finder so that if you make a mistake while you're learning these features, you can easily go back a step, even if you Trashed a file. Those kinds of safeguards benefit every user, of course.
Another aspect to consider is that the Mac UI itself is considered to be much simpler to learn (a bonus when you also have to learn the accessibility features on top of what everyone else has to do), and these kinds of accessibility features have been around since System 6 on the Mac
The downside is that there is currently a transition going on between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, so for now and for about six more months, most users have an extra layer of complexity as they work with a mix of native and Classic apps. I don't know how that affects accessibility, but it makes sense that the slight differences between how native and Classic apps react to certain things are going to have to be managed a bit by the user. Window controls are slightly different on new and old -style windows, for example. This is temporary, though. There's a new native "marquee" app coming out about every week. The most recent were Microsoft Office, IBM ViaVoice, and Adobe Illustrator. Also, most Mac freeware and shareware is already native, and there are UNIX and Java2 apps up the ying yang.
AppleScript is another technology that can really help out a person with special needs. You can encapsulate an entire workflow in AppleScript, essentially turning a user task into a script task. So you can make a script such that you drop a file on it, and the file is opened in five or six applications and modified in certain ways and passed onto the next application and then finally uploaded and made live on the Web. This benefits all users, but if I were using a mouthstick, I'd probably have twice the AppleScript collection that I have now, because extra keystrokes are even more precious. Also, it's trivial to add languages so that you can script the Aqua GUI with JavaScript if you want. The component for that is free.
If they throw out the Windows GUI (in the name of common sense), what _else_ do they have when using Windows?
Well, DOS, which is itself vaguely like an inferior copy of UN*X. At least it's available in older versions of MS OS's. Ever see film of Stephen Hawking using his voice synthesizer? There aren't any close boxes on the screen.
Of course, with a DOS program, all the functionality pretty much has to be built into the program. In UN*X, there's some measure of synchronicity involved. It's too bad that Paul Haeberli's project in the early 1990's to extend the UN*X synchronicity into graphical environments never got into a product. But then again, it was done at SGI, not MS, and therefore must have been kaka or something.
It really alarms me that even on slashdot, a lot of people seem to think that taking a paradigm that is inherently hostile toward people who have a hard time seeing or moving a mouse and throwing some kludges at it to make it somewhat less hostile is not only a viable solution but is so clearly the best possible solution that any other suggestion is ridiculous.
Do you really think the average handicapped person is going to have the same aversion to learning as the average American sod?
There was a totally blind student who graduated about the same time I did, and I was in one of his classes. Back then, the passwords were 11-digit strings. (This was CDC NOS, not UN*X.) He memorized his instantly. When people expressed amazement, he shrugged his shoulders and said, "I have to."
Sure. Try "make menuconfig" with the Linux kernel, for example.
The dvorak keyboard layout can help individuals who are only able to type one handed. The keys are in an optimized layout. I use the two handed version which is much easier to type in then QWERTY but I had quite a bit of difficulty configuring it. Apparently, the SuSE distro I was using didn't have it configured correctly, so none of the arrow keys, page up/down, keypad etc worked. I was able to fix it by editing the keyboard file manually, but I wonder why they would overlook something like this?
Section 508, regulations guiding federal government purchases of IT products and services mandate accessibility.
Watching Cowboy Bebop in my jammies, eating a bowl of Shreddies.
A few years ago, I did some work on this. The trouble is that there is an alarmingly large variation in color blindness, both in degree and kind. (Some color-blind people can see well into the ultraviolet, and color-blind people were used as spotters during WWII because camouflage didn't fool them.) If you go to an optometrist and look at the real color blindness tests, there are hundreds of plates to diagnose various conditions.
My wife was color-blind in a certain way (she reported that greens looked like dull gray). Her sons were color-blind in a different way (they were insensitive to red, which was lucky because I had a TV that had weak blue and green guns.
So, accurately simulating color-blindness is nontrivial. Probably the best short of that is to look at the colors in HSV and HSL color systems. If colors are distinguishable to you on every individual channel of these color systems, they're probably distinguishable to a color-blind person. Another thing that helps is to try to read the text on a crappy TV with noise on the video signal. The NTSC standard is quite closely matched to human perception; it was a brilliant achievement in 1953. Degrading it in various ways produces artifacts which are usually at the edge of visual perception.
over 50 million? wouldn't that make it like every 6th person or something? i don't think the number is quite that high although i haven't done any research
Hm ...
.... that means that urm....
... 5 million seems reasonable.
/. is suddenly mentioning benefits of MS in human wellfare.
.... um ... 20 years?
IIRC US has about 270 million inhabitants.
50 million of them are handicapt?
And by having about 20 million households with a PC
Well, I only see here a misscalculation
Something totaly different:
Its nice that
However: Apple is useable for handicapt peoples, as far as the tech level allowed it at the certain points, for
Tech level only means: speach input/output was not available for 20 years.
But speach output at least for 15 years.
Using modifier keys to "morse" input was available from start of.
True accessibility, coverd via the frame works(e.g. SWING), is provided by SUN and JAVA.
It seems utterly odd to hear that MS played a major role in this area.
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
If you lose a limb, or are deaf or blind you deserver disability. But, if you have AIDS, 9 out of 10 AIDS cases are from people who are Homosexual and practisig unsafe sex or are intravenous drug users. How does someone who caught AIDS thru those methods eligible for disablity? They ASKED for it! A perosn who is blind did not ask for blindness. Or a person who has cancer didnt ask for cancer. A person who engages in an activity which has a 95% chance of causing AIDS shoould NOT get disability!!! I know people who deserve disablity but who have been denied after years or suffering but people with AIDS get it immediately.....why is that????
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
At last years perl conference, a guy presented some perl/tk software he wrote (albeit on windows, with a microsoft voice sdk) at the lightning talks. It was excellent software, which I'm sure could be ported if somebody would take the time. Wish I could find the link
Being a big freak about Dvorak keyboard(yes! it's better!!), I happen to know that linux supports the Dvorak one-handed keyboard layouts that are required by law in educational institutes for one-handed students. Such an easy keyboard layout to learn, that they often reach 60wpm with just one hand. Some can type up to 80wpm with one hand. That made me feal better that if I ever lost a hand somehow, I could still program effectively :)
Karma Clown
Upshot: OpenView or whatever should have clearly different icons for status, and the color should only be provided as a backup indicator.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
I've tried low screen res w/large virtual desktop. I ended up spending too much time mousing around to keep the focus where I was working. A decent magnifier also tracks keyboard focus, so that text carets or other types of focus like active buttons are always within view.
I have a blind friend who has told me many times that she found the web completely unusable until she tried Emacspeak. With the ever-increasing reliance on graphics this is only getting worse. And usability by the blind rarely ever makes it into the discussion when web sites are designed, much less making it onto the feature list.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
I have a close relative who is blind and who struggles with Windows at home and work every day. Microsoft's accessibility packages break constantly, and MS never provides help beyond "Fixed in the next upgrade." Of course, each upgrade has most of the old problems and some new ones. I try to help him out when I can, but there's only so much one can do. The best accessibility feature in Windows isn't the special packages, its the keyboard shortcuts IMHO. Those, at least, work. When the focus is in just the right place. Just getting focus to the desktop from Word is amazingly difficult.
BTW, he's asked my several times about Linux (he hasn't switched because of his work). He says some of his friends use it and its much better for them than Windows (in part because of all the text mode apps).
it's green.
There is AccessX, a set of accessibility features in X Windows. See the links in the bottom of my page:
http://www2.neweb.ne.jp/wd/fbm/kbd/kbd-e.html
"...Horizontal double line, horizontal double line, elbow from left horizontal double line to single vertical line down, line break, vertical single line..."
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Having a visual disability myself and having worked for a short time at a company that creates and distributes adaptive products, I can say from experience that Windows does have an edge over the *NIXes in this area.
Windows already has an entire accessibility framework in place (Microsoft Active Accessibility - an SDK is available from the Microsoft Research website). With active accessibility, application developers can provide additional information to the operating system which an accessibility program can use.
For example, Internet Explorer works in conjunction with many screen-reading programs to provide tailored information about the webpage a user currently has loaded. The screen-reader can, for example, retrieve all the links present on a page and speak them to the user in a list. Another example is frames - screen readers (eg- WindowEyes) can distinguish one frame from another and read them in separate groups, rather than just going from left-to-right across the page. Many webpages that would confuse programs like Lynx are therefore readable under MSIE. Microsoft also has a well-established set of standards for creating accessible applications. Many different areas of accessibility are covered.
Unix/X Windows really needs something like this. For example, under Windows I can use a very capable screen magnifier program called ZoomText. Unlike something like xmag, the area around my mouse cursor is magnified in real time. I can set magnification hot-keys (for example, I can magnify the region showing all my taskbar icons and use a keyboard shortcut to turn this magnification on and off) and the magnified area will automatically track the text-entry cursor in Microsoft Word and other programs.
I have contemplated starting a good screen-reader program based on xmag, which would be fully open-source (I'd have to sink my teeth into X-windows programming first though). I think there would be alot of interest from people in the open-source community.
This is an interesting link, The Command-Line Interface - Ideal For Blind Users. It is a detailed discussion of what makes a computer more user friendly for blind users.
Here's a quote: "Linux applications rarely employ graphics, and most of them are already linear, just like the mode (speech or braille) that is our Karma. All other things being equal, Linux is the best operating system for a blind user."
The author makes several interesting points like 'ed' is better than 'vi' or 'emacs' and mentions some interesting tweaks to basic utilities such as 'ls' to make it more usable for the blind.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Jouke Vissier's pVoice is an outstanding example of creative itch scratching. pVoice allows people who cannot speak to synthesize speech by means of a grapical interface. It's written in Perl, free for personal use, and runs on both Windows and Unix systems.
And, interestingly, it's entirely the work of one dedicated hacker, written primarily for the benefit of his own daughter.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
Hi,
1 out of 6 is including minor disabillities of course. I find it remarkable however, how few people with a handicap reacted.
If you're a bit spastic like me, but you still can type a bit, get an old IBM keyboard. They're solid and have membranes, so you know for sure when you hit a key (handy with passwords). It's also fairly easy to write a mouse driver which translates the mouse movements. You could make a very slow acceleration curve with a cutoff so your jerks get filetered out. As a windowmanager, I recommend ion. It's designed to be used with the keyboard and you can even beat a normal person with a mouse when it comes to window handling...
Marijn
As one of the currently zctive xvoice developers, I wanted to weigh in here. The most current xvoice web page is actually xvoice.sourceforge.net. I just updated it a week or so ago. Tom Doris' page, mentioned by Troodon, is out of date. Also, the voice-uers mailing list to which Troodon refers is the mailing list for people who use any form of speech recognition to interact with computers -- not necessarily xvoice. The xvoice mailing list is xvoice@yahoogroups.com. There is subscription information at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xvoice. Note that indeed xvoice does not yet support training. However, you can purchase ViaVoice Dictation for Linux (IBM's GUI offering, as opposed to the SDK which xvoice uses), train using that, and then use xvoice; xvoice will use the training entered throughViaVoice Dictation.
50 million handicapped
... First of all, if you assume genereously that there are 300m people int he US, your saying that one out of every 6 people is handicaped... excuse my frankness, that statistic is bullshit.
:).
... I have a herniated disc, that dosen't affect my ability to use a computer :)
:)
"Handicapped" is a pretty large term here
Second of all, only 2 kinds of handicappedness effect your ability to use the computer -- blindness or no arms to move a mouse (and no, deaf dosen't count,.. no sound is meerely an annoyance, none of the computers at my work have speakers, and we all get along
All the other kinds of handicapped don't count
My cousin can't eat strawberies, he still gets in 6 hours of the sims a day
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
I know there are many probly saying flaming things about the fact this story runs every few weeks/months.end_disclaimer
5 5p hillips.html
r ai lle.html
This is the only story I like to see repeated for the sheer fact that I have loved ones of other abilities. (note not disabilities)
I believe an emphasis on usability should be emphisized. end_blaintant_austin_powers_pun
Shame on any flamer that would 'dis this topic.
for no hands:
http://www.cms.dmu.ac.uk/Research/IDRG/ET/
http://www.csun.edu/cod/conf2001/proceedings/00
http://isg.cs.tcd.ie/iwet/Abstract8.htm
for no eyes:
http://www.utoronto.ca/atrc/reference/tech/refb
I guess if you dont have feet and genitailia thats your own problem.
p.s.This is anonymous because i am at school. end_request_not_to_be moderated_down
Considering that I am close to being legally blind (but have a correctable stigmatism) my 2 cents on this is that Xfree has a MUCH more useful option that windows doesn't come with.
The 'virtual' option This would allow a person to take a standard 20" monitor run it in 640x480 (or even a 320x240 resolution) But still have a full 1600x1200 desktop.
I understand that not everyone can stand 'virtual' but considering that I can switch resolutions on the fly it offers me the chance to 'read' the monitor without my glasses.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Making Linux more accessible to non-disabled people would be the logical first step, no? Then we'll have available 80% of the people to work on making it more accessible to the disabled.
:)
Microsoft has done a good job in this area. You know, I even like switching to large fonts or icons sometimes, or using the magnifier... even though I don't consider myself to be disabled. It seems helpful to relax or just goof off.
Make no mistake - Microsoft has spent a boatload of money making their OS usable by as many people as possible with the lowest learning curve. Don't take that to mean it's superior by any means. But the more people who can use it, the more people Microsoft can sell to. Wouldn't you agree?
That brings me to my point - some people say "just because Microsoft did it that way, doesn't mean it's the right way to do it." (often referring to changing display resolution from within Xwindows). Hey, it makes total sense to do it that way, it's intuitive to most people, and they did usability research on it. Why don't we leverage some of that research; let them spend the money on it. This is the way Microsoft used to be anyway (say, Win95 days) - XP just blows my mind thinking about what they were thinking when they created it.
Of course, an alternative would be to listen to the "blathering idiots" and "newbies" on the newsgroups who are also giving the open source community feedback - for free - which can be used to improve open source software.
Largening fonts in browsers is where Microsoft loses. Their browser, at least for Windodws, cannot enlarge font size that is specified by Cascading Style Sheets.
Also, I haven't seen anything that is really groundbreaking that MS did for handicapped users. The little tricks they have for them are most likely easily replicable (save speech recognition, but I think that was more of a hype that MS had, and now they don't care about it as much).
you go to a fucking center where handicapped people
are trying to use the computer, and you fucking
give them xmag you stupid fucking cockhead.
GO FUCKING TRY IT. god people like you are such fucking computer masturbation
dipshits, you are so fucking stupid it is incomprehensible.
what fucking planet did you grow up on that you think this is acceptable?
GROW INTO A FUCKING HUMAN BEING, TWIT.
that 'x resolution', well thats FUCKING GREAt.
TOO BAD IT WONT FUCKING WORK ASSHOLE>
GOI FUCKING TRY IT, REPORT BACK YOUR rEsults.
go
fucking
try
it
before
you
offer
it
as
a
'solution'
you
cock
gobbling
gutter
trash
dip
shit
asshole.
YOU DONT HAVE A FUCKING SOLUTION
YOU HAVE A LITTLE BLABBERING MOUTH THAT SAYS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
the Linux Accessibility Resource Site (LARS)
is at http://trace.wisc.edu/linux/
Now, if enforcement teeth can be put into the law, all kinds of compteting OSes can be banned. I.e. any of the freeware ones. Oh, but not immediately. The Freeware OSes can get their legal staff on the issue
Especially because all the interesting speech recognition and synthesis technologies are patented in major markets (US, Germany, Japan) with prohibitive license terms.
Or am I missing something? (URL?)
Will I retire or break 10K?
Let's break Miguel's legs!!!!!
Or just take them off.
Will I retire or break 10K?
A better idea might be using XFree with a low resolution and a large virtual desktop. Then things will look big without reducing the workspace size. Jumping between a bunch of different modes (with Ctl-Alt-Numpad+/-) would give differing levels of magnification.
The lowest I could go (Red Hat 6.2 base install on a laptop with NeoMagic internal video) was 640x480. I know people who would need to go down as low as 320x200 (that is, PC mode 13h) with view-follows-keyboard. How do I set that up?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Most GUIs are already vector based, as far as I know. A window is simply a vector object with colour attributes etc., and it contains other vector objects such as buttons etc.
However, GUIs with $$$-driven appearances such as Apple's Aqua, Microsoft's Luna, Netscape's Mozilla Modern, and many X11 WM themes use bitmaps to store the rounded corners and shiny things that make the system not look butt-Motif ugly.
Will I retire or break 10K?
now with jaws , this is no longer true. blind users love windows.
A license for the version of Jaws that works with most PCs sold today (i.e. PCs running Windows operating systems that use an NT-style kernel) costs $1,200 US per seat. That's more than the cost of the PC itself. The ADA makes exceptions in cases where accommodation of a sufficiently disabled employee would place an undue burden on an employer.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Horizontal double line, horizontal double line
A good screen reader program will know to skip the graphical characters, or better yet, intercept the curses calls that draw boxes and menus to build a rough model of the document.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Unicode is a method of storing string data using 16 bit rather than 8 bit indexes
No it's not. Unicode is a system for representing all of the world's languages via a single character set and three alternative encodings of those characters: utf-8, utf-16, and utf-32. You're probably referring to UCS-2, the predecessor of UTF-16, but that is one of Unicode's (old) encodings, not "Unicode" itself.
I am not aware of any system capable of outputing it
You should become more aware. Almost everytime you output text using a truetype font, you are using a Unicode-indexed font.
If you've ever seen Internet Explorer, you've seen Unicode output. In order to make it the "universal browser", MS made IE's rendering engine 100% Unicode-based, even on non-Unicode platforms like Win95. As long as you have installed the fonts, you can display almost any combination of languages with IE -- and send the page to most modern printers.
If you've ever printed a Word2000 document, you've seen Unicode output.
I routinely work with mixtures of Asian languages, output on screen and on paper, courtesy of the Unicode-based (NT-based) Win32. I use both Linux and Solaris for other things, and I'm extremely fond of them, but not for multilingual client-side work, for which they are ill suited.
Unicode has always appeared to me as being more about marketing than real life
You clearly haven't had to create any global solutions lately. If you want to create a *global* solution, you almost have to use Unicode. The alternative is to create multiple national solutions, each with their own local maintainers, integration headaches (or no integration), and so on. Very poor engineering practice these days, now that we have Unicode, and Unicode-based tools and platforms.
[Java identifier example]
It appears you never noticed that the compiler has an encoding switch. You write your source in any encoding you want, tell the compiler what encoding you used, and the compiler will take it from there.
The only way to achieve good i18n is for a lot of people to sit down and write a lot of strings in a lot of different languages...
This whole paragraph is mistaking localization for internationalization. What you describe is localization. Internationalization is an architectural approach that, among other things, allows for easy localization by being language neutral and locale parameterized by design. Unicode is fundamental to real internationalization, though it's not required for simple, old-fashioned localization.
[the burden is with app developers, not the underlying system]
First half is true, second half is false. What a burden it is if the underlying API gives you no help. The API is the app developer's toolbox. If it provides a solid global foundation, it's dramatically easier to build globalized apps than if you have to reinvent the wheel with every app. Unfortunately, that's what open source developers are mostly required to do: reinvent the internationalization support already in the toolbox of any Win2K or WinXP developer.
The old Win9x platform was almost as bad as the average Linux disti because MS backed out of Unicode on the eve of shipping Win95. (It was already the foundation of NT.) That foolish choice caused them and their developers years of code page pain -- forcing MS to build Unicode support into all of their major apps app by app, since it was lacking in the OS.
That has now changed. The current versions of Windows, Macintosh, and Java are all based on Unicode, but the open source OSes are still back in the Stone Age **in this respect** (certainly not in every respect). That's not because its creators are stupid, it's because of the extreme fragmentation of the platform -- the focus on customization instead of generalization.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
If so, then 50 million is way to low.
Well, considering that the deaf people I've known have a better time communicating with the outside world using a computer than without one, I would say that there aren't many software features that a deaf person can't use, with the exception of winamp.
To me saying that we need operating system features for the deaf is like saying we need features for people without legs, or lower back spinal cord injuries. These just aren't disabilities that impede the use of a computer.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
A quick look around the W3's site reveals that there are a pant load of patents regarding Aural Web Browser stuff. It's a "let's see who moves first"
Personaly I would like the ability for my web pages to speak. It would replace those god-aweful MIDI's and Crap Wav files everyone has to use to make their pages "speak" as it were.
Sadly, only Windows 2000/XP comes with MS Agent and Speech Components that can be used directly in the Web pages.
I want to see this feature on other OS's dammit.
"or features for the deaf"
Ah, yes, let us create a mp3 player for the deaf!
Sorry, but I just don't see what problems the deaf have with using a computer..
I have had some experience working with and helping blind users and, in my opinion, Linux use would greatly help them for one reason (and one reason only): character/terminal-based applications.
While the focus of most developers today is the pretty GUI/multimedia/gizmo-of-the-day, there are literally tons of useful applications that work perfectly well in text mode -- and that can be used with a Braille output and keyboard configured as a serial terminal.
Applications such as Lynx, links, mutt, vi, Emacs, nano, TeX, ispell, ps2ascii, etc... provide blind users with a level of service and capabilities they would hard-pressed to find under Windows. As a matter of fact, Linux and *BSDs are the only operating systems I know to maintain such a huge number of terminal-based applications.
Whenever you are tempted to program something only for a GUI, remember the UNIX philosophy and program a command-line utility, as well as graphical (X) shell -- you'll probably help a blind user somewhere!
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
It's caused by a scar on the retina which leaves me with no central vision in that eye.
Best Slashdot Co
Another poster said it quite well how 6 out of 6 would benefit.
I can add that a site I used to work on used to get fan mail several times a week from people glad to find a site they could use without graphics or fancy plugins. Specifically, visitors could tweak their display to their taste or needs. Most of this mail was from blind users.
Unix's main strength so far is flexibility in the interface.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
My funny bone gets just plain tickled by the children flinging names like Liberals and Conservatives around like spitballs when faced with a problem they can't understand or face.
Being handicaped is something all of us will face eventually unless we exit this earth before our normal schedule of age related death.
Accessability is somthing you will deride because by it's very nature youth is ignorance personified.
Ignorance has little to do with being an Idiot, average or genius. The way out of ignorance is observance and experience. To ignore either of these requirements dooms one to perpetual ignorance.
If you're talking the cost of adding desired functionality to an existing project, then you're still wrong. It might be prohibitively expensive for one small business to add a specific bit of functionality, but they still have options. They can petition the community to build it for them, possibly making a contest out of it with some (relative to the business) cheap prize. They can group together with other like-minded businesses to work on the problem, or, which is also likely, staff experiencing the difficulties could work on it in their spare time, at no cost to the company. Finally, they can contribute a small amount to the community, and wait for others to contribute their small bits, until the feature is added (you seem to be foregetting that, for any one idea, there are lots of others in 6 billion people who will also find it a good idea).
Contrast this with the proprietary model where you can:
or
The beauty of OSS/FS is that the cost of the development is shared amongst the community, with nobody taking a share as profit!.
Furthermore, your third-from-final statement is incomplete. It should read, "In contrast, the cost of accessibility is spread among all of a proprietary developer's customers, as long as someone convinces that developer that the feature needs to be implemented." So "niche" features are not more easily integrated, because they're niche features, and the very much finite developers must choose which features they're going to work for, given the very limited number of hours each of them can work. Say you work for a software company. You know your developers' time is limited, so which are you going to work on developing: features that 95% of the population will want, or features that 5% of the population will want?
Just because you want a feature and it's an OSS/FS project doesn't mean that you have to do all the work yourself. There are lots of developers out there who will aide you.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Hopefully this will spark something in the community that will help get something going.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.