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Perl for the Disabled

Posted by michael on from the tmtowtdi dept.

joukev writes "Perl.com is running an article on pVoice. pVoice is an Open Source communication system for severely disabled children written in Perl. I started this for my daughter in 2001. She's still using it and hopefully the medical world will see that there are Open Source alternatives for these kinds of applications. More information on pVoice can be found on the pVoice website (general information) or on the pVoice Developers website."

1 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. Section 508 Compliance by globalar · · Score: 3, Interesting
    You may remember that Congress passed the Rehabilitation Act in 1998, which applied to the all Federal Agencies and their workforces:

    "Section 508 requires that Federal agencies' electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities.


    from section508.gov

    After this the Federal Government created the Accessibility Forum to bring industry and government into some agreement and cooperation on standards, as well as highlight existing technology and its weaknesses.

    I spoke with the original Accessibility Forum director and my first question was,"What about open source?"

    He said that the major distributions of Linux would not have anything to do with it. It was a commerical field dominated by proprietary business-models. I explained to him that if the government took an initiative for open source software in this area, not just openly approved standards, the results could have global impact for the disabled community. If he really wanted to do something that would help people, I insisted, he should focus on making the technology open and free to use.

    Interesting, he also said that the lady representing Microsoft was "a bitch."

    I know this is a niche market, certainly much smaller in the open source world, but this is an area where open source software can really help humanity. Want good publicity for the cause? Want to get people to notice OSS and its decidely non-commerical interests? Want people who have never heard of Linux to try a live-linux distribution? Software such as pVoice is one way.

    Computers are starting to affect everyone