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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?
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!
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.
I'd say that 6 out of 6 people could benefit from accessibility technology. You see, even though the disabled need accessibility, but we all benefit when it's included. If you make a program speech enabled, then it's possible to use that program over a telephone. If a program can be configured to use large fonts, it can be used on an LCD display. If a program has keyboard shortcuts for mousable operations, then we can use the program without taking our fingers off the keyboard.
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.