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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?
Lets face it, I think we can give windows the retard and handicap market without too much worry. I mean, those are always going to be specialized markets anyways and a large company is the best way to meet their needs. If, they can be met. Let's be real here, if you're a deaf blind person there are some things in life you just can't do, like drive a car or operate a 75 hp gas powered chainsaw. A computer is visual by nature so maybe you're just shucks out of luck if you're blind. At least for now. Although some sort of a brail pad that was tied to your display would be kind of a cool idea, but way beyond the scope of the OSS camp.
So, to summarize my insightful post, I propose that the open source and Unix communities pay no attention whatsoever to the handicapped people of the world. Let them eat cake.