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

How many handicapped?

[AgTiger]

> 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?

1/6 of the population?

[mclearn]

Does this even make sense?

Re:GNOME accessibility

[Lunastorm]

The moderators tend to be morons. Post a link that's in the article, get modded up +5. Post an informative link the same time as someone else, get hit -1 Redundant.