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

GNOME accessibility

[JanneM]

Take a look at the GNOME accessibility project to see what is being done under GNOME.

/Janne

Re:Bogus statistics

[gorilla]

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.

Voice Recognition

[Troodon]

Personally this is rather opportune, after years of cramping my hands taking notes in lectures and hammering on keys, recently the arthritis I suffered as a child has reoccured. Though not crippling at the moment, I can only type for a little while before discomfort sets in, not very portentous for begining a CS degree. Thus Im looking for ways to mitigate things.

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.