What Accessibility Options Exist for Unix?

Posted by Cliff on Tuesday December 4, 2001 @07:26AM from the computing-for-the-handicapped dept.

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?

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hnjmfrvde by Anonymous Coward · 2001-12-04 07:27 · Score: 0, Offtopic

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Hmm... It's pretty hard typing with your forehead!
Bogus statistics by MaxwellStreet · 2001-12-04 07:33 · Score: 3, Offtopic

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.