Slashdot Mirror
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?
Take a look at the GNOME accessibility project to see what is being done under GNOME.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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.
kit to enable speech and speech recognition in various Linux projects. See here.
-- The Sage does nothing, and nothing is left undone. --Lao Tzu
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.
Perhaps we could take a page from the methods people use when they can't type because of wrist injuries. Check here for one man's experiences. Interesting to note that in the end, the author had to move to Windows for the accessibility options...
50 million handicapped people in the United States alone
There are about 275 million people total in the USA. I find it hard to believe that almost 1 out of 5 is handicap. Okay, maybe if we count all the lawyers it makes sense.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
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.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
285,663,670 / 50,000,000 = 5.71.
So more than 1 in 6 people is handicapped. *Looks around the room.* I know of one person out of the 110 or so in my workplace that is "handicapped" to the point that they use accessibility options. Admittedly, there are reasons why my workplace would be lower than average on the number of handicapped people, but I was wondering just what the criteria used were.
Note that I'm _not_ saying that there aren't a lot of handicapped people around, or that accessibilty options aren't important (they're very important to that one individual, who is in turn very important to us). I'm just curious about how those statistics were arrived at, since it feels like an astoundingly high number to me.
After all, 95% of statistics are made up on the spot.
-Puk
p.s. If you're going to flame me about my use of the word handicapped or claiming I'm downplaying the importance of accessibility tools, please don't even bother.
Text!
Seriously, all of the blind people I know at school love linux because it is very friendly to doing real work with text. The importance of this cannot be understated.
Slashdot 's editors are dickheads
Dude,
I'm sure you could have just went and found some before i18N libraries somewhere. I'd bet they are all archived. Why reinvent the wheel??
If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide. -Ghandi
If you can live with the speed of Java client apps, then accessibility is built into the Java Accessibility Framework Classes
This a great option for all platforms.
What kind of features would the deaf need? I have a computer at work with no sound card, not even the crappy little PC speaker. I haven't really found that it interferes with my computing experience at all. Oh wait, the visual bell setting on your terminal! That's about all a deaf person would need so, yep, got it covered ;^)
This is where commercial software (especially companies like Microsoft who spend countless millions each year on research alone) has a distinct advantage. People who write code for commercial applications or OSes are not writing it for their own benefit -- they're writing it because they were told to and because they get paid to.
That said, I'm very impressed with Windows XP's accessibility features, but I really don't think they would be too difficult to implement in Linux applications. The only major problem is that "Linux" is just a kernel, and accessibility features don't belong in the kernel. Thus, it will be left up to individual distributions (Red Hat, Debian, Mandrake...) or individual application developers. This makes for a very uneven and inconsistent level of accessibility support across different applications. :/
Sadly, this is one area where companies like Microsoft and Apple have much more of an advantage than open source OSes, due mainly to the structure of their OSes.
"According to the lecturer, there are over 50 million handicapped people in the United States..."
The population of the United States was 285,663,707 earlier today. That is one out of 6. When you look around you, do you see one handicapped person for every 6 people?
Okay, maybe they don't use Linux, but they aren't handicapped.
--
Links to respected news sources show how U.S. government policy contributed to terrorism: What should be the Response to Violence?
Bush's education improvements were
Plays hell with my ability to play, however. Try swinging a bat at a baseball with one eye closed. Or hammering nails.
Best Slashdot Co
Have you tried to use Windows 2000 without a mouse? It is near impossible. First of all, everything is in a GUI. It is a lot easier to deal with text rather then images when you are blind. Ok, you can finally do some things from the console like type "net start Windows \ 2000\ Service\ for\ making\ me\ type\ too\ much", assuming that what you want to do can be done that way.
:)
The keyboard macros and accelerators in newer versions of windows are hovering somewhere between terrible and non-existant. I'm not speaking of the programming running under 2000. Just the built-in stuff like configuration, server management, the shell, etc.. It wouldn't fair to judge microsoft on 3rd party software
As far as X windows applications go, they are usually worse then Windows applications... although Gtk and QT (and their respective desktop environments) are doing much better then most older applications.
Are things getting better? for unix yes, for windows no. But they both still suck.
It isn't really an issue with the platform, though.. but more of a problem with bad UI designers writing 3rd party software.
Thare is a Perl program called Sue Center if you can't push any buttons and can just move the mouse around. I'me not sure if it working in X yet but the source is avlible.
http://www.icogitate.com/~perl/sue/
Anyway Ive started looking at Voice Reccognition:
IBM have made there Via Voice SDK freely available, which is being made use of in the rather interesting looking XVoice, though its been passed between developers, the most current page is here ang the mailing list here. However training hasnt been implimented yet, but Via Voice Dictation for Linux compares rather favourably at ~ $50 compared to several hundred for the windows version.
Alternately, there is the Freespeach/Open Mind Speach project, gpl and makes use of the Overflow language/enviroment.
Not really aware of any active projects beyond such, hopefully this ask slashdot will prove to be interesting reading.
troodon.net
Actually a lot of deaf people can't read. While it is a bit harder for them to learn without a spoken language as a basis, the blame is mostly with a disinterested educational system.
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.
For the 2.6 series to support "direct neural interfaces", much of the work will have to be done now, as 2.6x will be a "stable" version of 2.5x (which has just started.) So start coding now.
http://leb.net/blinux/
Complete with FAQ, docs and mailing lists.
quite right. Why should we use "conservative" estimates?
Look here:
http://www.supportwizard.com/1000Minds/
Liberty uber alles.
Linux Speakup is an organiztion of blind folks who 'like to mess around with linux'. This is one type of software to help the (visually) impaired. A gentlemen on one of the mailinglists I subscribe to uses this package, and claims it works well. It must work at least half way decent if he's able to be on a mailinglist, and offer all the knowledge that he has, which is quite extensive.
I bet this is not "First Post."
Information and discussions for blind SuSE Linux users (english)
Software for Blind Linux Users: Brass - Braille and speech server
That is fine when you want, say, an new video driver. But, you create a catch-22: you need a development environment to create accessability options, but if you have no accessability options, you can't use the development environment.
So, if you want to take the stance of "what's the point..if [almost] noone will get any useage from [it]," you simply prove the "must scratch someone's itch" point. And, you show a weakness of Open Source.
Further, you want Linux on the desktop? Some companies will require an accessability solution.
Did I mention is was, you know, the right thing to do?
The "50 million" figure thrown around in the press is based on a broad extension of the original American's with Disabilities Act definition.
Traditionally the term "disabled " referred to a segment of the population, perhaps 4 or 5 percent, handicapped by blindness, deafness, problems with mobility or mental incapacity. Crafters of the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, expanded that definition dramatically to where it now takes in 50 million people, including the mentally or emotionally unstable.
No one seems to know exactly how the population to be covered by the ADA was, or is, measured, but that enormous estimate often is cited. Most of that number are mental cases. The psychiatric industry's 300 or so various diagnoses were used in structuring the ADA , meaning that symptoms such as bad moods or anxiety may be taken as indicators of an illness requiring accommodation by the employer. The ADA does rule out direct protection in cases of active users of illegal drugs, pedophiles, voyeurs, compulsive gamblers, kleptomaniacs, pyromaniacs and several other particularly antisocial sorts found in psychiatric diagnostic manuals.
The ADA is a civil-rights law; it's protections span the spectrum of American life because, like racial-discrimination laws, it attempts to level the playing field absolutely -- from the public water fountain to bus transportation to restaurant service to job equality and more.
---
You need to consider disabilties a bit broader than the guy in the wheelchair.
I, like many people, have red-green colorblindness. This doesn't mean that I can't tell those colors apart, but certain shades give me problems.
For example, those damn red LED screens that all the fast food restaurants are putting in their drive-throughs look completely blank to me during the daytime.
My own company's application, OpenView, uses green, red, and yellow icons to show status of managed nodes. I can't tell the default green and yellow apart, forcing me to modify the Xdefaults file.
Unix does need work. In Windows, I can easily make my mouse pointer larger, add trails, and change the color so I don't lose it on the screen. Under X11, I'm hosed and at the mercy of each application.
- Necron69
I'm a deaf/hard-of-hearing student, currently in high school and for the past four years I've devoted most of my time to teaching myself and others about computers and how they work. As far as accessibility goes for people with my handicap, I can say that I've not had much problems using FreeBSD or Linux. Most of it is text (except when it comes to running an mp3 server... btw, I can hear enough to listen to music, thank god), and therefore there really is no need for sound. The good thing about my handicap is that I don't have to listen to those damned Windows startup theme songs! Overall, when it comes to the needs of people with my condition(s), most are provided in a *nix experience with the added bonus of no stupid Windows sounds in the first place. Now, if there was a feature repelling the tech-illiterate from asking me inane Windows questions or bugging me about their sound drivers, I'd be even happier. ;)
---
I could've sworn I disabled
Windows was based on the Macintosh (which had speech synthesis in 1984, a screen magnifier in 1985, and sticky keys by 1986, by the way). The Macintosh was based on the Xerox Star/Alta/Lilith. This was based on a user interface design done 30 years ago by some very young people with fine eyesight and motor coordination. They built the entire user interface on their assumptions about the visual and motor systems of healthy young people.
So, now, on top of all that are some tools to degrade the experience enough to improve the system for specific disabilities. All of a sudden, Microsoft is a Disability Hero.
Yeah, right.
Consider UN*X and its command line interface. With any reasonably well designed command line program, it is possible to pipe standard input from any device and send output to any device. I have seen interactive Braille output devices hooked up to UN*X systems and working with essentially everything. In 1982. That's 19 years ago.
With the right physical devices and some code that takes a weekend to write, a person who could only operate a single switch and could only recieve information by means of Morse Code with wires on his tongue could use almost all of UN*X, up to and including rewriting the kernel.
For those of you who hope to get Linux into the government market, you should know about Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1977. This federal regulation mandated accessibility compliance for any government purchased IT systems. The government is also getting more picky about enforcing this law as of late. How do I know? The company where I work just went through a self-audit to make sure we complied...
That is all.
That is way high, there are what 300 million residents in the US? How many handicapped people do you know? If that was true every 1 in 6 people you know would be disabled... hmm I can't play sports as well as the jocks but that doesn't make me disabled in my eyes but they would have to count things that don't seem like disabilities to us to get a number that large.
Here is a link to an article about a Perl project to help the disabled. It contains a link to the project's website, as well.
But that discriminates against suits and marketroids, since they don't have brains!
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Curb cuts make it easier for wheelchair users, but harder for the blind to detect curbs. Wheelchair toliets are higher, making bowel movements more difficult, especially for the elderly. (These two examples taken from The Death of Common Sense by Philip Howard). Making things accessible drives up the cost.
Does this mean we in the computer industry shouldn't try to make our products accessible? Of course not. With software it is much easier than with physical devices to make something that can be all things to all people. But it is still not free. Increasing complexity makes things harder to debug--epecially when you have multiple UIs. Using accessibility layers makes it harder to reuse existing code.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Your xterm should have an option for a visual bell...
Think about the elderly. One day you are going to be 80. Are you going to be able to see the screen and use the keyboard as well as you do now? Most of us can't type for more then 2 hours on a standard keyboard as it is without having thingly, numb wrists and fingers. In the next few years, the number of elderly people are going to explode in number. They my not be "disabled," but they will be old. The research that is done in HCI now will be well worth it to them (and hence us).
From the: You-can't-have-everything-ya-know dept.
As far as I'm concerned, I'm more than willing to let M$ have the monopoly on producing accessibility software. The *NIX world, Linux especially, has other areas of GUI development and polishing that need attention before accessibility issues. Not having an office suite that is as-good-as-or-better-in-all-aspects as M$ Office yet is a larger deficit to overcome than, say, lacking Speech Recog. or something like that. The major things need to be worked on before the minor ones, folks. And face it: the handicapped are a minority, especially in the IT world. Not that this is a bash on them, don't get me wrong. I'm just looking at practicality issues here.
Cold truth is, it doesn't pay to develop server rooms that are wheelchair accessible (and if they're anything like mine, they have cords and all manners of things that make it hard for walking individuals to navigate!). In a similar manner, it doesn't pay (or benefit, for you free software folk) to develop accessibility software for *nix at this time. At least, not on a large, concentrated scale.
Blog,Twitter
In our rapidly aging country, there are more than one in six who are over the age of sixty, and suffering the infirmities of old age. A major segment of that age group have enough loss of visual or auditory acuity to require assistive devices. Then there are those with age-related mobility problems, especially arthritis, that makes keyboarding a literal pain. The numbers grow rapidly if you look beyond wheelchairs and white canes to define disabilities.
The Disabled American Veterans has a million members all by itself. My state issued more than 200,000 handicapped parking permits last year. So why should I not believe those numbers?
Huh? 5 million maybe. If there are 50 million, that means that one in every six, or about 17% of the population is handicapped. If that's true, we need a LOT more handicap parking EVERYWHERE. 5 million seems more likely - that would put it at about 2%. Still significant, but not nearly so.
Unless, of course, the lecturer is counting MCSE's in that tally...
While Windows has largely caught up, OS X still has a number of disabled-friendly options to it, and since OS X is (all together now) based on UNIX, that means [the completion of this sentence is left as an exercise to all Slashdot readers with an IQ over that of an electric can opener, which probably excludes some...]
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
For information on accessibility support being developed for Mozilla, see the Mozilla accessibility project and the netscape.public.mozilla.accessibility newsgroup.
I was born with Nager's syndrome and have multiple physical disabilities. I am currently unemployed (laid off from a dotcom company about eight months ago). I noticed a lot of employers are afraid of people with disabilities like me. This is true when I go for job interviews (already had about ten of them and applied over 650 jobs within eight months).
My field is in the Information Technology (IT) area and I have a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. My strongest areas are in Web Development/Design and Software Quality Assurance (SQA).
The thing I have is that I don't need heavy accomodations. I don't need special computers, tools, access, etc. The only thing I need is people's patience to understand that I am like people without disabilities. I tell them that I have speech impairment (can't talk clearly), but this shouldn't stop them from hiring me because I can type, e-mail, ICQ, AIM, write my sayings on papers, etc. I can still handle any IT jobs like programming, testing, etc.
When I was working for the last company, everyone was impressed with my skills and knowledge. I always worked hard and done a lot overtime. I was serious about my job.
With the downturn of the economy, it makes my job search situation even more difficult and frustrating. Having disabilities make my chances very slim.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I have a congenital birth defect that rendered my left ear all but useless and my right ear severely impaired. This means that (1) I do not have stereo hearing; (2) I have a difficult time in situation where there is a lot of background noise; (3) computer software and/or games that depend on audible alerts to signal the user are nearly useless to me.
... but it'd be nice to enjoy them. Diablo II has none, though the Collector's Edition DVD fortunately had subtitles on its versions of the cutscenes.
First off, let me say that I'm glad that there are some provisions for the deaf in Windows; I recently installed XP and used 98SE before that. (At this point, the applications I use basically require Windows, though I have several Linux boxes in the house for applications where free software exists; I also use MacOS X). I will concentrate on Windows because that's (unfortunately) what most people use.
The accessibility options for the deaf are relatively scant. Yes, it's true that those who are hard of hearing don't need a lot in the way of assistance because we can see just fine (aside from sometimes wearing glasses, like me). But there are two major issues with the built-in accessibility tools: (1) They aren't installed by default (I don't think they are; I had to check the box for them when custom installing XP and I believe I did for 98SE as well), so if you don't know that they exist, you won't get them. (2) They don't do a heck of a lot. I've checked the boxes for having applications flash a visual alert, but I've yet to see one do this outside built-in (for that app) options. (I use SecureCRT for telnet; it too has a "visual bell" setting.)
Now, I do a lot of chatting over the Net (you don't know how empowering it is to sit in a group of two dozen people and not miss a word and be part of the conversation until that is denied you in the real world) and I use MUSHClient and mIRC to do it. Both of those applications have built into them options to flash the taskbar button if new text arrives while the program is not the foremost window. All well and good. However, again there is the problem of obscurity: while the options are of course installed with the software, they are not turned on by default and are usually somewhat hard to notice. MUSHclient's is buried deep within the preferences for a specific connection and isn't program-wide, so I can't check "Flash visual alert on activity" in global preferences -- I have to do it one at a time. mIRC is much the same: I have to right-click on a channel's mIRC-Taskbar button and select "Flashing" (not too descriptive an option name; Flash on Activity would be better) and it seems to be rather sporadic at times regarding whether or not it does it in query windows.
Games. I'm a gamer. And a lot of games these days have options for subtitles (Wing Commander III-V stand out here, having options for French and German as well as English subtitles) and a lot don't (why is Starlancer, also made by Chris Roberts, missing them?!). I can't play Thief because it doesn't put up any visual cues. Return to Castle Wolfenstein has none in its cutscenes but since it's a first person shooter game, I can get by without the cutscenes
It is not that hard to add subtitles; fan petitions got some added to at least one of the Zork games. Movie theaters don't have them yet because people claim they're intrusive, but as long as they can be toggled (with a control in a plain, obvious place!), that's not an issue.
So what does Unix need, then?
It needs built-in alert options, which are part of the default install, as part of window managers. KDE, GNOME, Enlightenment, whatever. A standard needs to exist for how applications will address it. Apps need to use it.
The controls to turn these on need to be in an obvious place and marked with clear symbology (the white-on-blue wheelchair symbol is a good start.)
Applications need to be marked as captioned for the hearing impaired on their web sites and on packaging. Develop a standardized symbol for this.
If I sound rather platform-independent, then that's a good thing. If I use all sorts of OSes, then other people out there like me do, too.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Mac OS X 10.1 has a lot of accessibility features, which are all installed by default. The user just has to configure them to taste in System Preferences. It's not entirely free, but the core OS is free and open source, and UNIX compatibility is built-in. You can still install and use all the same software as on any UNIX system, while also having access to Mac software that has a long history of accessibility features. I have a good friend who doesn't have the use of his hands and uses a Mac OS X Mac every day all day.
... if you work with this for a short while, you can get very fast in Mac OS X without taking your hands off the keyboard.
... applications know about them and developers have adapted their software to work with them. Text-to-speech has been around even longer, and it's common for Mac applications to read stuff to people.
The Universal Access System Preference offers enhancements to keyboard and mouse input. Sticky Keys makes modifier keys stick so that a person can type with one finger or with a mouthstick. It has great on-screen feedback, with translucent icons that float over a corner of the desktop showing what modifiers are currently active without blocking your work. Mouse Keys makes the numeric keypad into a mouse substitute. Mac OS has long had standard key shortcuts that work everywhere (Command+F is always Find if Find is available, Command+G is Find Again, Command+Q always quits an app, etc) so a person who is using the keyboard can count on those things working in every application. Macs also have keys on the keyboard for volume up/down, mute audio, brightness up/down, and the eject key for removable media is also on the keyboard, which helps a lot of users. You can also eject disks from the GUI by dragging and dropping or using a menu or key command.
In the Keyboard System Preference, you can enable Full Keyboard Access, which enables you to navigate the entire Aqua GUI with the keyboard. Key shortcuts highlight the menus or Dock so you can move through them from the keyboard, and you can move through dialog boxes and similar things of course. This is an option that many people use outside of whether they have a special need
Speech recognition is and text-to-speech are also built into Mac OS X. It's trivial to open applications and run scripts using your voice. It's easy to have text read back to you in a variety of voices, from almost any application. If the built-in speech recognition isn't enough, then IBM's ViaVoice is available, and enables you to navigate the GUI and dictate into almost any application.
In Finder, you can set icons to be displayed at 128x128, which is large enough that even on a 1600x1024 display, a person with vision difficulties can still have honking great icons. Icon labels are large and bold as well. You can also navigate and perform all kinds of file management tasks using only the keyboard. There is an Undo feature in Finder so that if you make a mistake while you're learning these features, you can easily go back a step, even if you Trashed a file. Those kinds of safeguards benefit every user, of course.
Another aspect to consider is that the Mac UI itself is considered to be much simpler to learn (a bonus when you also have to learn the accessibility features on top of what everyone else has to do), and these kinds of accessibility features have been around since System 6 on the Mac
The downside is that there is currently a transition going on between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, so for now and for about six more months, most users have an extra layer of complexity as they work with a mix of native and Classic apps. I don't know how that affects accessibility, but it makes sense that the slight differences between how native and Classic apps react to certain things are going to have to be managed a bit by the user. Window controls are slightly different on new and old -style windows, for example. This is temporary, though. There's a new native "marquee" app coming out about every week. The most recent were Microsoft Office, IBM ViaVoice, and Adobe Illustrator. Also, most Mac freeware and shareware is already native, and there are UNIX and Java2 apps up the ying yang.
AppleScript is another technology that can really help out a person with special needs. You can encapsulate an entire workflow in AppleScript, essentially turning a user task into a script task. So you can make a script such that you drop a file on it, and the file is opened in five or six applications and modified in certain ways and passed onto the next application and then finally uploaded and made live on the Web. This benefits all users, but if I were using a mouthstick, I'd probably have twice the AppleScript collection that I have now, because extra keystrokes are even more precious. Also, it's trivial to add languages so that you can script the Aqua GUI with JavaScript if you want. The component for that is free.
Upshot: OpenView or whatever should have clearly different icons for status, and the color should only be provided as a backup indicator.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
I have a blind friend who has told me many times that she found the web completely unusable until she tried Emacspeak. With the ever-increasing reliance on graphics this is only getting worse. And usability by the blind rarely ever makes it into the discussion when web sites are designed, much less making it onto the feature list.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
This is an interesting link, The Command-Line Interface - Ideal For Blind Users. It is a detailed discussion of what makes a computer more user friendly for blind users.
Here's a quote: "Linux applications rarely employ graphics, and most of them are already linear, just like the mode (speech or braille) that is our Karma. All other things being equal, Linux is the best operating system for a blind user."
The author makes several interesting points like 'ed' is better than 'vi' or 'emacs' and mentions some interesting tweaks to basic utilities such as 'ls' to make it more usable for the blind.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Jouke Vissier's pVoice is an outstanding example of creative itch scratching. pVoice allows people who cannot speak to synthesize speech by means of a grapical interface. It's written in Perl, free for personal use, and runs on both Windows and Unix systems.
And, interestingly, it's entirely the work of one dedicated hacker, written primarily for the benefit of his own daughter.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
Hi,
1 out of 6 is including minor disabillities of course. I find it remarkable however, how few people with a handicap reacted.
If you're a bit spastic like me, but you still can type a bit, get an old IBM keyboard. They're solid and have membranes, so you know for sure when you hit a key (handy with passwords). It's also fairly easy to write a mouse driver which translates the mouse movements. You could make a very slow acceleration curve with a cutoff so your jerks get filetered out. As a windowmanager, I recommend ion. It's designed to be used with the keyboard and you can even beat a normal person with a mouse when it comes to window handling...
Marijn
50 million handicapped
... First of all, if you assume genereously that there are 300m people int he US, your saying that one out of every 6 people is handicaped... excuse my frankness, that statistic is bullshit.
:).
... I have a herniated disc, that dosen't affect my ability to use a computer :)
:)
"Handicapped" is a pretty large term here
Second of all, only 2 kinds of handicappedness effect your ability to use the computer -- blindness or no arms to move a mouse (and no, deaf dosen't count,.. no sound is meerely an annoyance, none of the computers at my work have speakers, and we all get along
All the other kinds of handicapped don't count
My cousin can't eat strawberies, he still gets in 6 hours of the sims a day
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
If I may pester you further, what kind of hardware would you recommend for using with voice recognition software? Ive not been very impressed with the clarity of computer microphone headsets, while messing about with voice over ip stuff, would it be worth investing in a low end muscians mike with a preamp?
And thankyou for the work on Xvoice, as soon as I can figure out a way to download it from the imb server with wget (isp connection cuts every two hours) I want to play with it.
troodon.net
Making Linux more accessible to non-disabled people would be the logical first step, no? Then we'll have available 80% of the people to work on making it more accessible to the disabled.
:)
Microsoft has done a good job in this area. You know, I even like switching to large fonts or icons sometimes, or using the magnifier... even though I don't consider myself to be disabled. It seems helpful to relax or just goof off.
Make no mistake - Microsoft has spent a boatload of money making their OS usable by as many people as possible with the lowest learning curve. Don't take that to mean it's superior by any means. But the more people who can use it, the more people Microsoft can sell to. Wouldn't you agree?
That brings me to my point - some people say "just because Microsoft did it that way, doesn't mean it's the right way to do it." (often referring to changing display resolution from within Xwindows). Hey, it makes total sense to do it that way, it's intuitive to most people, and they did usability research on it. Why don't we leverage some of that research; let them spend the money on it. This is the way Microsoft used to be anyway (say, Win95 days) - XP just blows my mind thinking about what they were thinking when they created it.
Of course, an alternative would be to listen to the "blathering idiots" and "newbies" on the newsgroups who are also giving the open source community feedback - for free - which can be used to improve open source software.
And you did a good job of pointing out the problem with "disability"...it has grown beyond what most folks with common sense understand as a disability into absolute nitwittery. The ADA started out as a reasonable idea, and spiraled into something circling the drain...
As an example: first we had handicap spaces and this made sense...then many, many more handicap spaces (with folks who know someone who can get them a plate or sticker) than are ever legitimately used - I mean, Sam's, Costco, WalMart have something like at least 10 such spaces - not great, but okay, I can live with that. And now we have the "pregnant women" parking spaces. Who's to say they are or are not pregnant? And since when is being pregnant a "disability"? It's an insult to those that are truly disabled, but all this crap comes in under the radar and you don't notice things like this until it's out of hand - the cloaking device, BTW, is called "political correctness".
I don't know if these new type of spaces are a result of the ADA (or the original ones for that matter), but all I can ask is, what's next? Spaces for PMS'ers, and spaces for men who were just downsized? How about spaces for someone with a leg that fell asleep? I know (and have known) several people who legitimately have need for such things, and I have absolutely no beef with that. I do, however, have a problem with so many whiners calling themselves disabled just because they feel like it. Good grief, common sense seems to go downhill daily in this country. I wonder if something similar happened during the last days of Rome...
If so, then 50 million is way to low.
Well, considering that the deaf people I've known have a better time communicating with the outside world using a computer than without one, I would say that there aren't many software features that a deaf person can't use, with the exception of winamp.
To me saying that we need operating system features for the deaf is like saying we need features for people without legs, or lower back spinal cord injuries. These just aren't disabilities that impede the use of a computer.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
I have had some experience working with and helping blind users and, in my opinion, Linux use would greatly help them for one reason (and one reason only): character/terminal-based applications.
While the focus of most developers today is the pretty GUI/multimedia/gizmo-of-the-day, there are literally tons of useful applications that work perfectly well in text mode -- and that can be used with a Braille output and keyboard configured as a serial terminal.
Applications such as Lynx, links, mutt, vi, Emacs, nano, TeX, ispell, ps2ascii, etc... provide blind users with a level of service and capabilities they would hard-pressed to find under Windows. As a matter of fact, Linux and *BSDs are the only operating systems I know to maintain such a huge number of terminal-based applications.
Whenever you are tempted to program something only for a GUI, remember the UNIX philosophy and program a command-line utility, as well as graphical (X) shell -- you'll probably help a blind user somewhere!
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Not at the high levels of abstraction - the raster images are buried in the low levels and, as such, could be replaced with smarter "magnify-friendly" code without disrupting the high levels. In this case "low level" means Gtk+ and Xlib, and you may need some support from theme authors.
Certain things are raster even at the high levels - icon bitmaps are the notable example. But even icons can be vector-based - SGI did it years ago. For icons, though, it's probably easier to use the CDE solution of providing multiple sizes (an icon "file" in CDE is actually up to 4 distinct XPM files 48, 32, 24 and 16 pixels high) and optionally scale these as needed.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
Ummm, I believe Linux already supports every direct neural interface on the market today. Of course, so do all the other OSes. (:
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
It's caused by a scar on the retina which leaves me with no central vision in that eye.
Best Slashdot Co