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?

Comments

*NIX is more accessible than windows

[EccentricAnomaly]

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.