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Designing an OS for Blind/Deaf Users?
Sushant Bhatia asks: "I work for a team developing technology for individuals who are blind and I have had the opportunity to use some screen reading software and while there have been leaps of progress it is still quite tedious to use, and not at all user friendly. One of my managers recently posed an interesting question for me: 'How would you design an OS from scratch that would target individuals who are blind and/or deaf?' What about inputs such as keyboards or refreshable Braille devices?"
Well, at least for BlindOS you don't have to worry about writing video drivers...
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
maybe i'm being obtuse, but wouldn't the sole useful input method for the blind be verbal? as for the deaf: why would you not use a GUI? this seems too simple so what am i missing?
ed
about the OS, but for deaf/blind people, the hw platform should be a pinball machine.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Before closed captioning, sometimes on the news, they would have a guy at the bottom of the screen doing sign language during a section called "News for the Hearing Impaired". On Saturday Night Live, they made fun of this, with Garret Morris, in the role of the anchor for the "hearing impaited" would yell "OUR TOP STORY TONIGHT" when the anchor would say "Our Top Stoty Tonight"
I would start with the US government's recommendations for app development for people with disabilities. Most apps written for the Fed have to be section 508 compliant, which helps ensure that they'll work with screen readers. Keep in mind though that from my (limited) experience, 508 compliance is more than an art than a science - you know, you get something that's kinda sorta 508 compliant.
http://www.section508.gov/
Tristan Yates
While not part of an OS designed "from scratch" for vision-impaired individuals, Apple VoiceOver is the first such functionality of its kind to be included for free with a commercial operating system. It's a fully integrated screenreader and accessibility interface for Mac OS X, and is tightly integrated with both the operating system and its APIs, and is extensively supported in several common applications.
As for hearing-impaired individuals, the task is much easier, as the primary interface to a computer is already visual. However, visual alerts and features that would correspond with otherwise audio-only events have also been integrated by Apple in Universal Access.
In addition, Universal Access includes features that assist individuals with motor impairments as well.
While it may be an interesting and informative exercise to think about the types of things you'd do if you were going to "build it from scratch", it might be more productive to think about how these capabilities could be added to existing commodity operating systems, such that the technology can continue to be affordable and easily supported.
Blind:
1. Use a device that creates a topographical image on a pad based on the screen color values. This would allow the blind user to "feel" his way around the screen. More advanced versions could allow the user to use his hands as a mouse, by accepting a certain amount of pressure as a click.
2. Controls on the device should allow the user to "zoom in" on particular areas. This would help the user more easily find toolbar buttons and the like.
3. Replace the system fonts with braille fonts. (I'm uncertain as to how one might add bold or italics for emphasis, but I'm sure a system can be devised. Perhaps extra bumps outside the normal character area?)
4. No right clicks. Right clicking is more of functionality for advanced users anyway. Mac OS X can get along without it, so other OSes should be able to do so as well.
5. "Selected" items should actually invert in the control device. This would allow the person to easily understand what (s)he has selected at the moment.
6. Standard controls such as checkboxes, radio buttons, and the like should be skinned to be more "feel" friendly. i.e. Simple invertable boxes would work better for checkboxes and radio buttons than our current iconic forms.
7. One handed brail keyboard? It's just a thought, but if the blind could be taught to use a one hand keyboard, they could read and type at the same time.
Deaf: What are some of the actual challenges facing a deaf computer user? Computers are primarily visual, and tend to suffer little with the loss of sound. (Unless I'm listening to music, I usually keep my machines muted.) My only thought is that the standard issues of movie subtitles apply.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
blinux.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I don't see why deaf users can't just use Windows, etc. There are prompts for any errors.. heck, I almost always have my laptop muted.
That this guy is blind but can type/spell better than most people on this board. :)
Really if you are going to take only text as input and output is going to be serial text, speech (blind but not deaf), braille CLI is the way to go.
This does not prevent you from multi tasking BTW, it simply means that you need to work within a well defined context.
Nothing new to invent.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
Well, I certainly think this is smarter than putting braille on ATM machine buttons.
-gjr
Well which one is it? Blind or deaf? Not to sound cruel but what kind of interaction can a person have with a computer if they are both deaf and blind?
CmdrTaco, Timothy, Zonk, Pudge! Get a hint! At-least TRY to read the Slashdot frontpage!
One character was forgotten that is self-evident of the Slashdot editors: blind, deaf, and dumb.
That is all.
Multi-modal:
Deaf - Signing/GUI
Blind - Verbal/Acoustic
Multiple Challenge - Tactile/Special peripheral
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
There should be a mod for Rhetorical.
I can't SEE what the problem is.
Wondering why i am doing so strange posts? I am trying to get a "+5,Flamebait" or "-1,Insightful" rating.
According the link, the BEST braile converter, does 80 characters across, which it touts as ideal because it's the same number of letters across the screen.
WHOA--old school alert. Outputting modern day screens to these things must be a pain.
To use this with the internet, I think it would be ideal for the blind to use sites formatted for cell phones. The machine can use "extra" bumps to suggest where the cursor is, perhaps a bump can indicate if the cell is part of a link--then add a link clicker button for each cell.
I was peripherally involved in some good research in just that area years back.Can't tell you too much about it now, no secrets just the passing of time, but imagine one of those toys you get on Think Geek which is made of hundreds of rods. Like a giant old dot matrix printer head. Each rod is connected to a piezo ceramic transducer/actuator which can both move the rods and feel the pressure upon them. The guys only ever bult a 32 x 32 matrix but had some astounding results with braille readers. An gesture based input/output device like this could be mass produced rather cheaper these days than the prototype we had back in the 80s.
Just as in most day to day life experiences, the sense of smell could be used for navigation. For some of us, it already comes in handy with regards to sensing the presence of Windows.
If I were designing an OS for deaf individuals... I uh... wouldn't spend a lot of time on Music Players?
It seems to me like a lack of eyesight would be a bigger barrier to computer usage.
Web based applications are quick to set up and easy to make accessible if you follow w3 guidelines and test via Bobby AAA and the WAI. With proper use of XHTML and CSS any website / web application can be attractive to all prospective users. I've worked on a few recently, but none have yet been launched so unfortunately I can't post links.
How complex is your application? Can it be made a web-based application? The disabled can already use the internet, and many feel comfortable doing so (on accessible sites). If it can't be made web-based perhaps you need to re-think its complexity? Imagine you're using a curses interface or the lynx browser. Both are easily output to tty or audio interfaces.
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
I thought there's already enough support for them by windows itself and by other software firms.
The OS is going to be at least somewhat compatible with other OS's to be somewhat useful. I should also have specialized input devices for people with hearing or vision deficiencies, and probably be compatible with modern X86 hardware (unless you plan on starting everything from scratch).
Since visual input plays a huge part in interfacing with a modern OS and/or software, you're probably not going to need software compatability. You would need, however, to make the document formats compatible with say office, or a standard XML format, etc.
Still, an OS redesign is a big task. It might be better to go with an existing OS.
So basically, you're not going to need "video" drivers, but you will need an interface with specific hardware for the blind, various document formats, storage/printing devices, etc etc
this was in '97. one bit of advice i can give is to make it so blind AND sighted people can use it. this is important because often the blind user will need to be taught to use it, and another blind user isnt always available/ideal for teaching another blind user (depending).
Oralux is a Knoppix live-CD to facilitate access to GNU/Linux for the visually impaired. The Oralux user interface is based on Emacspeak or Yasr, and has FLITE and EFM (Festival/MBROLA version).
Some Links:
Linux Accessibility HOWTO
The Blind Linux Project with mailing list
brltty for your braille input needs
Or, get an all in one distro
What the hell does an OS have to do with who's using it?
An OS should be a standard toolset for applications to be built on. Memory management, driver management, and application management is what an OS should do... it should worry about dividing hardware resources up among it's processes, it should worry about managing drivers... it should not have anything to do with the user interface that runs on it. This question was obviously posed by someone who hasn't the first clue about what an OS actually is.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
IMO, specific flavors of interfaces (keyboard, mouse, voice, vision, smell, whatever) should be the realm of drivers, not the core parts of an OS that one would "right from scratch".
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
It must not be so obvious to other people, but this is quite obvious to me. Computers don't necessarily need screens, we don't need to be hand-eye-coordinating little pointers on screens anymore. FOr those of us that have (most of) our sense intact, doesn't it make sense to not shunt them into a little tiny box?
So I'm talking about UI.
Does it make sense to use a mouse to click the start button while you're in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and driving a manual transmission? I can't imagine why this is still the case. Hay you UI and interface designers -- take a lesson from those of us who can't hear, or can't see, and imagine how they'd get things done. Same concepts can and should apply to handhelds, phones, PDAs, remote controls, etc. There are far more attractive (women) things to look at than little blinkety gadgets. Also, lots of user-wishes can be infered from small sensors (photodiode, accelerometers, available Wi-Fi networks), and the laptop doesn't really have to be open all the time in order for us to be connected and informed.
Please take a lesson from the needs of our blind and deaf brothers -- and enlighten the UIs for everyone.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Attendee #1: How do you think he does it?
Attendee #2: I don't know!
Attendee #1: What makes him so good?
Attendee #2: Maybe it's the black turtleneck.
Attendee #1: Maybe there's something in that bottled water of his.
Ask VICUG-L, blindprogramming.com, and/or the magnifiers.org mailing lists, probably many other places that are better to ask. You expect to get useful info from /. regarding computer accessibility?
I have sound muted on nearly all my computers -- that I can't hear them makes little difference to the OS or OS design. At worst, audible alerts need only be replaced by a flash of the menu-bar. Being blind would be a whole other matter.
The point is that some "disabilities" have little impact on OS design, other have a huge impact and each disability affect OS deisgn in different ways.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The open-source mp3 player OS Rockbox includes a "Talking Menu" option that will read back commands, playlists, and song/file information. It's very useful for blind users, as well as sighted hands-free/driving use.
Da Blog
your in a room - do you;
1 go left
2 go right
3 go straight
4 reload
----------------------------
Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
Slashdot is so biased against blind people it's ridiculous. Even sighted people can't cope with m many of the captchas used to stop scripts.
I put a particularly egregious example in my sig, there was no way to figure that one out.
$
I have a blind programmer that works for me. He does a wonderful job considering the limitations.
Some people think that improved "input method" using "voice technology" is the answer. From what I have seen is just the opposite. He does not have a problem inputing data with a keyboard just like the rest of us. The problem is with the UI's and graphic rich society that we live in today -- the software to read from the screen using voice tecnology is the weakness.
He showed me some websites in Links that were some of his favorite sites that streamed into his headphones no problem. Then he showed me some sites that were impossible to make any sense out of in Links even with my eyesight -- and these were the same sights that were ugly and hard to manage even with a modern browser and full eyesight.
Not just with HTML, but as I watch him use various other programs and tools -- it is ironic how the same programs and UI designs he has problems with are the same ones that I find poorly designed and cludgy even with eyesight.
XML has been a Godsend to him, as we have been able to take RSS feeds and parse to into plain jayne text files or even his portal at bloglines.com and let him enjoy some of the stories and content without all of the multimedia and advertising timebombs that he had to deal with in the past....(As long as the sights XML feeds are full feeds and not just "teasers".)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
There already exists an OS for the dumb. It's called Windows.
*rimshot*
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
Okay, "haha" about the Deaf jokes. As a female (gasp!) Deaf computer user (abuser?) what I need is a captioning feed for videos. Popular news sites routinely feature video news clips but they are meaninless to me without knowing what is being said. How about some captioning? Too expensive? It sure seems so because I sure as hell never see it. As for Braille, not all blind people know Braille and legally blind people usually have *some* sight and prefer to utilize their sight as best they can along with screen readers.
you'd better make it look like a pinball machine?
I think this is one of those cases where it isn't mere pedantry to point out that the OS and the shell/interface are two very different things and that what you want is an interface designed from scratch for the blind.
You can use any already existing decent OS as the base.
You do not have to reinvent the wheel to invent the wheelchair.
If it were me I think I would start out by trying to scratch build a decent IRC client. What you learn by doing that will teach you things you will need to know about such interfaces before you start out at a lower level.
KFG
My opinion is that a microkernel is better for blind and deaf users than a monolithic kernel is. And it goes without saying that the filesystem should support journaling!
Um, shouldn't we be discussing USER INTERFACE for blind/deaf users, not the broad and mostly irrelevant topic of OPERATING SYSTEM?
how about braille on the keys themselves? blind people would be able to learn the keys more easily.
Obviously the deaf OS is pretty much covered and Apple has a passable blind OS, so I wouldn't waste any time on the cooky touch based devices that many people are suggesting. Rather, I'd go right to something that interacts with our brains directly. This would be great for everyone actually and would work just as well for blind and deaf people. The fact that we live in a world where monkeys are playing pong with their brains leads me to believe that we should just jump to the endgame. Of course, UPS protection would definitly be a must to avoid those dangerous power surges!
yeah kinda like the blind leading the blind?
The graphical version of an OS like Linux is just a runlevel starting the graphical set of services: X, gnome or kde, etc. runlevel 3 is text only. You could just build a small set of new I/O services and add a new runlevel to Linux (or BSD for that matter) instead of a brand new OS. That would allow it to boot to normal mode or the new mode as desired.
A set of services for the blind might include text-to-speech for output,for example.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
>
> Unless your tech support/any other user of the machine isn't blind.
Ah, this is about finding an OS for tech support folks in India. They could be blind, because all the work is done over the phone. Spending five minutes on the phone proves they're deaf. And the quality of the solutions proves that they're dumb.
Ever since I was a young boy,
I took the support call,
From Delhi down to Bangalore,
I must have played them all.
But I ain't seen nothin' like him
In any support-cube hall,
That deaf, dumb and blind tech
Always says "re-install!"
Sits there like a statue,
He's a voicemail machine,
Please to reading from scripts,
Keeps his call queue clean,
Bullshits by intuition,
Never seen him fall,
That deaf, dumb, and blind tech
Always says "re-install!"
Windows definitely has the head start with a huge number of speech synthesis and speech recognition apps availible, but no real "grabs my attention and makes me want to buy it" suite.
That being said, Linux might have the leg up when it comes to being open to wild experimentation.
One thing that has always annoyed me is that speaker independent recognition hasn't been married to the Internet age. If the well-trained recognition systems' data from thousands of different users was only shared over the net and a good synthesis constantly being refined using all that live data, we'd probably have it standard on every OS right now. "Mod that post down now!"
"Which post?"
One way to train a speech recognition system might be to create a better speech synthesis system and give it hours and hours of different scripts to speak, each one with a different voice, over and over. Instead of training it based on forty real people, feed it seven thousand virtual ones in one tenth of the time, electronically. If the tester designing the regression cases understands the speech to be conforming to the script, then tell the machine that this is what the script says and add that data to the database as permissible input and evolve the filters.
Instead, you open up Dragon or ViaVoice and have to read fairy tales and poetry to it until it understands that you said "hard drive" and not "hard on". I tried dictating a novel I was writing to both of these systems and after four hours of training both, I spent more time doing corrections than writing the book.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Back when I was studying at college I remember this guy with a small laptop attached on top of a black plastic device. The device was to the USB port of the computer. It was possible to pull out a sort of secondary keyboard out of this device that would have refreshable braile text.
I can also remember was that this guy was using Windows XP and headphones, so there ARE solutions out there that can be used as an example. I think the guy used headphones for voice feedback and the braile "keyboard" to read the last few lines he had written.
Not sure if this qualifies as an user friendly approach though. I think that it's always a really good idea to offer as many solutions as you can come up with to a group of possible end-users (in this case blind/deaf people) and see what they tell you. This way it should be easier for you to understand what their concept of user friendliness is.
diegoT
Graphically (i.e Windows, X) based OS for the blind, e.g. Jaws etc, are the stupidist piece of crap. Think about it:
The computer runs on text > then represents it with graphics > then the assistive technology attempts to represent the graphics with text > the text is spoken.
When you get a windows error message the user is stuffed.
Occam's Razor would suggest that for blind people a better solution would be:
Command Line > spoken aloud.
Links/elinks/links2 can be used for Internet
Other Bash apps can be used: Vi, Emacs, MP321 whatever you want.
My little Linux and tech blog
You don't need to design a whole new OS, any UNIX variant will do just fine. What you need to design is the USER INTERFACE.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
I guess I'm being a little nit-picky, but what difference to a blind person does the method of loading device drivers or allocating memory really make? That is, is this even a question that needs to be answered on the OS level? It seems more like an application level issue.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
Mac OS 9 was the most blind enabled ever, even for 'refreshable-braille"
... same thing... but the issue becomes a matter of two handed browsing on a screen. On hand moved on a tablet and the other hand received braille on fingertips
The reason... for the first 10 years maybe 15 years EVERY developer followed EVERY rule and used the official GUI and official controls (with text labels in them) and the compter gui was also mode-less, as well as very intuitive.
Sadly... apple hired cretinous morons who destroyed the gui in apples own idiotic tangential offerings ruining everything.
At one point in their own written standards manual 'HUMAN INTERFACE GUIDELINE" apple proposed that COMMAND-C which means "copy" (except under a few versions of dvorak keyboard mappings) was to not mean copy, but was to mean "CANCEL" if a cancel button was visible in a dialog!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAH
The Next was idiotic in version 0.9 of NeXTStep OS and Command-2 was duplicate but they eventually changed it to Command-D for all apps.
But OS9 was flawless, and every app worked well with blind software, and people rarely double bufferred pixels, and even if they did, it was easy to track the blits because the OS bitcopy commands were always used by all programmers so text strings could still be located without ever ever using "screen scrapers" to perform OCR crud.
Blind worked great on macs.
As for blind-AND-deaf
eventually i got a job at a company that sold such software (AT A FINANCIAL LOSS BUT FOR CHARITY) called Berkely systems. They even employed fulltime blind employees to test the windows-only version which was a poor substitute for perfect competing mac OS9 versions. Why? becuase no wintel idiots followed any standards ever for getting text onto a screen or following GUI guidlines for controls.
The Mac OS9 is still useful. might as well stick with it. Apple distributed LowVision screen zoomers (an optional control panel on the installer CD) for years standard free with all copies of mac OS for people with extrememly poor vision.
Why would you need a special OS for deaf users?
The OS doesn't matter. Memory mnagement, hardware management, etc doesn't care if the user is blind, deaf, or other. Whats needed is specialized hardware for IO. Whats needed depends on the problem.
Legally blind (bad vision but can see):
WM needs to apply magnification to GUIs, and needs to anti-alias the enlargements. Since this will reduce screen space, it needs to either make heavy use of virtual workspaces or allow the workspace itself to scroll.
Truely blind:
Keyboard with modified keys with the braille for the keys on them. Voice output. A tactile output displaying Braille is also available these days and is great for text. Using them with GUIs is more difficult- you could probably do menus via an escape button (switching from output mode to menu mode and displaying the menu). Images with text, pdfs, etc are probably impossible to do at the moment.
Deaf:
No real changes needed, except a small popup in an out of the way corner when audio alerts come up. Destroy the popup after n seconds.
Loss of limb:
The main problem is a mouse replacement. Trackball or touchpad on the keyboard works well. Alternatively, a foot based control could work, and may be better in some ways (you could type and mouse simultaneously.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
A rotary braille reader.
"So Blind and Deaf users are not ready for the desktop either?"
Sorry.
To actually answer your question:
I'd build a larger, fast and strong braile-type grid grouping each braile-type-patch within a elevated, push-button border to give at least as much input as a regular keyboard and as much output as a complex CLI. Add cording and you've got even more possibilities.
I'd build out- and input all around it. It would be something simular to the bash or zshell cli combined with Turbovision - but without overlapping windows.
The fast and strong grid would even make it possible to play action-like games. Given enough solid OOAD an interface like that could even join a party on World of Warcraft without much changing of the game. Maybe not as a standard character but as a sprite of fairy that flies around smaller obstacles by itself.
I'm quite shure this all could be achived with an open source unix variant with no sweat at all. You'd have to build the interface device and get going with some basics but from there on I'd actually leave it to blind developers to build their own system.
And that would be a box that doesn't need a new GFX card every odd month to stay up-to-date. Unbelievable.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I'd start by asking some blind/deaf folks what they need and want. I don't know what problems deaf people would have because I work all day on a computer with the sound turned off (not down, OFF).
As for blind people... I've worked with blind people who use computers. In both cases they each had a voice reader for the screen which was so distorted and set to speak so fast I couldn't understand it. One of the two also had an 80 char braille monitor made by Freedom Scientific.
What I can tell you is that in both cases, their online experience was slow and tedious. Essentially, it sucked.
I'd love to hear from a blind person their thoughts on computer usage. To me, almost all data is essentially visual.. especially that data which is stored/coded digitally. Be it text or graphics, most of the data we have on our computers and networks was created with the intent that the recipient would be able to see it with their eyes. How do you easily and efficiently provide that to someone who is blind?
I think the best solution(s) will come from people who are themselves blind and technically oriented - especially those who have always been blind.
At the risk of being a naysayer, I think using computers will always be a less-than-perfect (to say the least) experience for blind people.
Vortran out
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
Blue Scream Of Death for blind people.
Water, Helen... waaa-terrr....
and use bright colors for the warning/alert boxes.
[grin]
Actually, first make sure you have device drivers for all the devices that deaf and blind users tend to use - and rethink how you interact with them.
Consider that they may have different levels of use - they may use magnifying lenses to read their screens [common], they may have large input pads or special mouse devices, they may use throat/chin/head input devices.
Each person is different so you need to adjust to all the probable combinations. Some won't be able to hear a beep - or even see a pop up box not in their limited [if any] field of vision - so maybe a flash is better than a beep or a screen color shift or a vibration device.
And make it adaptable for the telepathic upgrade when it comes out.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The problem isn't that such OSes or application software don't exist. The problem is that most tasks people do with PCs, is not something that is suitable for blind people.
Case in point: most of todays office or "productivity" software is WYSIWYG. That is pretty silly for blind people. Having the perfect web-browser for blind people (lynx, links, or perhaps even better: w3m inside emacspeak) doesn't help much when web-sites use image-maps or javascript-menus for navigation, or drown the user in meaningless hyperlinks, taking hours to tab through.
So how do you design the perfect OS for blind people? You don't. It's already here, and it's called linux (or ***bsd). And if blind people still want to use PCs for the same things as most of the seeing people use them for, they will have to live with some compromises. And maybe even use windows, because that's where you will find the best commercial accessability software...
Sorry...
(But then again, you shouldn't ask slashdot how to design an OS for blind people, you should ask blind people...)
Blind - I think that a Braille keyboard, combined with audio output from the computer instead of imagery and a shell, would be enough. However, I don't think we should expect people to learn Bourne, or even Thompson for that matter. Most seeing people don't want to learn those. However, a more user-friendly shell might work. It wouldn't be that hard to implement; it could even run on top of Bourne. Some examples:
..
list instead of ls
open instead of cd
go back instead of cd
remove instead of rm
Etc. It'd be like Pascal is to C: just as powerful, but for meant for the masses.
Yes, the Deaf can use GUIs, but...those GUIs tend to have a bunch of audio signals to indicate errors and the like. Not all of them have corresponding visual signals, and a generic "flash screen" doesn't let one tell different situations apart as easily as the variety of sound effects available. Heck, I'm surprised that GNOME bothers to give the "flash screen" option in addition to "flash window"; surely one would want to know the particular window having the problem.
For that matter, written languages are second languages for many Deaf people. Suppose you were an English speaker, and given a computer that had all the menus, messages, and so forth in Finnish. How easy would that be to use? (If you're reading this, Mr. Torvalds, s/Finnish/Basque/, please.)
Probably for the Deaf it's more a question of applications:
Do TV viewing apps for those spiffy HDTV cards support EIA-708-B? (There's a LOT involved in full EIA-708-B support.) tvtime's captioning only supports drop-shadowed white characters; not very helpful with a light background.
I know TTYs, to put it mildly, suck; they're stuck in the days of Baudot code, abysmal displays and glacial bandwidth...but still, many people use them. Is it possible to use one's computer to communicate with someone using TTY? (That's more a hardware question than anything else, to be sure.)
There is, alas, no widely accepted way to record signed languages on a flat surface. (The 3D nature of signing makes it hard to do, but I wish someone would. IMHO the Deaf really need a Sequoyah.) The Deaf use webcams to communicate via sign where possible, where hearing people would use a text-based IM system. Are webcam apps convenient for deaf users? Do they provide features analogous to gaim/jabber/etc.?
It's not that simple.
OB-Slashdot-post:
In Soviet Russia, memory managers and filesystems knew they were being watched.
Only North Koreans need disability-accessible queueing systems.
All your photonic processors are belong to us.
Designing from scratch is probably one of the worst things you could do. Users are complaining there isn't any software out there for Mac all the time. An OS that's only for the deaf and blind would have even less market share and would be the last (if at all) OS to get software ported to it.
Your best bet would be to use the power of Linux and OSS to create some form of a tablet that will raise little nubs for the borders and text on screen. Anything else would be....time consuming, and wouldn't have enough of a market to actually sell the product at a decent price. High prices mean the blind/deaf will just continue doing what they are already doing.
So, yeah, get the source for KDE and start modifying it or atleast using it to make your own proprietary overlay to it. No licensing costs to jack up your bottom line, and it helps grow OSS.
The problem with writing an OS specificly for a purpose so small, is that you'll find there are less people who care enough to maintain it, or it'll cost a bunch for the OS to support a team of people to keep it up.
Pretty Pictures!
do blind/deaf people use computers for?
I don't have anything against disabled people. I think accessibility is necessary in many cases, such as sidewalks and building entrances.
It's because of that 0.5% (or whatever) disabled users that software developed under U.S. government contract must be compliant with 509 accessibility requirements. This has an enormously counter-productive effect on some projects.
Is it really worth the additional expense? Since the Internet is a smorgasbord of multi-media experiences, do media portals really generate content suitable, compatible or useful to accessible technologies?
Not trying to troll, just curious. Sorry if I offended anyone.
I'm happy this question got into Ask /. I recently was tapped to help find a solution for a dear grandma-in-law who has rapidly deteriorating vision, and has been using a 15" high-contrast monitor with the text set to like +30 for a while...but that solution is really not working for her. I've suggested Web..err..MSN TV 2, which a number of other low-vision people in her assisted living community use on their fairly large-screen TVs with much better success. She is hesitant to switch to it, because of having to balance a keyboard in her lap or bend over a TV tray to use it, which I guess makes sense.
Are there other PC/Windows based solutions (other than a 17 or 19" monitor set to high-contrast) for low-vision users? We've tried using some screen magnifyer software, but its too confusing for her.
Is that pretty much it?
One of my managers recently posed an interesting question for me...
Peter Gibbons: And here's another thing, I have eight different bosses right now.
Bob Porter: Eight?
Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.
I think the proper question is how would one design a GUI, I mean, a UI for the blind and/or deaf?
If you're going to spend the effort, you should try to support Helen Keller as well.
Perhaps some kind of device where mechanical pins pushed with electromagnetism pop up to form a physical equivalent of a monochromatic screen? The pins would form the braille letters and could form simple pictures as well. Then use a single-handed chording keyboard so that one hand is free to read the "screen." You could lightly "buzz" the location where the cursor is so that Helen knows where to "look." If you build it right, Helen would also be able to estimate the distance and vector from the current position to the buzz so that she could manuver the cursor to the current location, giving you the ability to "select" menu items on the screen, though it would probably be more convenient to type commands rather than select items.
Then use a verbose mainly textual operating system. I doubt windowing would make any sense at all.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
The implication of this is that streams would be informational in nature, rather than presentational. Presentation would be a function applied at the device level, rather than imposed by the OS or underlying application.
So, you have a core OS which runs the applications, and an I/O OS which handles the conversion of the informational streams into a presentation format that the user can, well, use.
The upshot of this is that your PC would become a server, in a client/server system, and the peripherals would need to be "smart" enough to run a very minimal OS that handled the I/O that device supported.
My guess is that you'd want to start off with Plan 9 or Inferno, as these are already geared towards a "shared resource" model, so should be easily extended to support this kind of concept.
The added benefit for non-Blind/non-Deaf users is that, because the I/O is then application-independent, it would be much more customizable and infinitely easier to upgrade.
The added benefit to ALL users is that because I/O would then be taken off the main processor entirely, I/O-intensive applications wouldn't kill background tasks, and vice versa. (To put it another way, you could compile the latest kernel AND play a DVD at the same time, as the CPU would no longer be a bottleneck.)
The added benefit to the industry is that it would kill off the integrate-the-kitchen-sink mentality of developers and certain OS companies.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Maybe we should file a "request for clarification" from the author as to why they meant OS instead of UI?
Probably because in practice the set of operating system distributions that come preinstalled on home and office PCs in the English-speaking world corresponds one-to-one with the set of distinct user environments.
For the people with hearing problems, I think a well designed GUI is the key. We take 70% of our input visually, so it should be easier to overcome the dificulties of a hearing impaired user than those of a user with vision problems.
For those with vision problems, I've found quite a few links on software that will definitely help out. I'd suggest going with Linux because you can write your own stuff or customize something that's already written much easier.
BLINUX
General
ORALUX
ZipSpeak
As far as making an OS from scratch for people with different needs, here's what I'd do: I'd make native support for ASP.net applications. The user would only get HTML output from any program they use, but with different interaction capabilities than the traditional web. HTML is already very sensitive to the needs of the visually and hearing impaired users, therefore, you'd be leveraging technology that already exists.
not to pick nits or anything, but how does a dumb tech ever say reinstall?
You don't need to create an OS from scratch. All you need to do is create a satisfactory tactile and/or auditory interface. Since I am not blind or deaf I'll leave it up to those who are to decide how such an interface should function.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Everyone needs options for input and output. I'd love to have a computer in my car that I wouldn't have to look at, or one that is quite useable in a small form factor (no keyboard or screen). Everyone has a variety of environments where traditional systems don't work very well. We have tried to force the current human interaces into things like palm pilots. It doesn't work too well.
You might design input/output devices for the blinds. You might design "bla user interface" instead of graphical user interface (GUI). But you don't need to design a new OS. Linux is just fine.
I realize that blind or (and?!) dead people want to use a computer, but it's very possible that computers are just not a medium well-suited for them. We don't look for ways for blind people to drive cars. Maybe it's technologically possible, but it's not practical. There is probably no practical way for a blind person to use a computer with any degree of effectiveness. Maybe this is a waste of time trying to work on?
Flame away, but at least admit I have a point worth considering.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
holy shit they're pricey. ($129, $149)
I'm glad I can see (and hear.)
Now if only I was coordinated enough not to wear out the backspace/delete key.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
With one of those robot-voice-soundey thingies, like Stephen Hawking!
---
LEEROY JENKINS!!!
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
HPFS = pinball
All Hail OS/2!
One line, 81 characters, 6 pins per character, that's 486 pins. Now 486 pins at $10,000 is over $20 a pin. Why are they so expensive to manufacture? Or is it to recoup engineering expenses on a device with a limited market? In that case, when do the patents run out?
The question really should have been "How would you design a UI from the ground up for Blind/Deaf users." The OS has little to do with presentation and interaction. I know that the definition has blurred in recent years, but an OS is responsible for talking to the hardware and exposing such in an API for applications. It's the UI that the OP is asking about.
I echo other sentiments on not really seeing the point in an OS for the deaf. My brother is (near) deaf and is a computer engineer. He gets around just fine. Additionally, he and many others would take offense at a OS for deaf people as he would want to be in an environment as normal as possible.
sig here
Many years ago I worked at an ISP in Arizona, and another tech support guy was blind. He took calls, used the internal billing system and even logged into our Cisco 7500's to check link status. I forget the screen reader software he used (it had a shark for an icon).. but it was damn amazing to see him at work. He was quick and i'm sure the people on the other end had no idea he was blind.
And for windows dial-up support, you really only need to know the names of what to click on anyway and you can walk anybody through it... especially the part where you tell them "Start...Shutdown...Reboot".
For a completely blind user-interface (which seems to be the much greater challenge), people seem too set on braille/tactile interfaces. Braille is certainly a nice way to output text, but as someone posted, not all blind people know braille. Additionally, almost no sighted people know braille, which means a blind person couldn't use the computer with their sighted friend, nor could a sighted person help the blind person use their computer. More elaborate tactile interfaces would have similar short-comings, and what's worse, they would rely on technology that doesn't really exist yet (or rather, is just starting to exist). Also, though a text based interface is an easy solution, it's not a good one. There's no reason why your average blind person would like a text interface anymore than a sighted person. The interface should mimic the way a blind peson interacts with the world. They should have the ability to navigate in a space (perhaps with a mouse or 3D pointing device) and recieve feedback. The feedback should be given both in a tactile fashion and through sound. Using a pointing device you could feel when you "hit" an icon, and then hear it's name. Sound spacialization also offers a wealth of possiblities. Blind people would be quite capable of naviagating through a virtual space in which sounds and words suggested where things were. Ear-bud headphones along with the proper software could potentially do an excellent job of simulating 3D sound (check out a "binaural recording" to hear for yourself). Properly placed speakers would also work. Obviously there is lots to consider, but a good 3D sound-based interface might be useful for sighted users as well, allowing for sophisticated control of devices without screens (I could imagine, for instance, an iPod shuffle that let you navigate through a much larger music collection by reading the names of bands)
How would you design an OS from scratch that would target individuals who are blind and/or deaf?
I think the best answer is that you don't. If you were to build such a thing, what applications would be available for your OS? Who would write applicatoins for your OS? How would your OS interact with the web. How would it open excel or word documents? It just doesn't seem like it would be possible to make something that could satisfy a fraction of the needs presently met by software designed for sighted people which can be accessed clumsily through JAWs.
Of course, this doesn't mean you couldn't make a suite of applications designed specifically for the blind: email, word processing, an attempt at general purpose web browsing, possibly an application to deliver web data from specific sites in a consumable format (movie listings, news rss feeds, xml feeds, etc).
Google is the biggest blind reader. Might they take some lessons from web standards in design of the OS.
Now if the user is blind and deaf, I'm reminded of the best Doctor Who episode ever, Curse of the Fatal Death . Jonathon Pryce played the best Master ever too. Rowan Atkinson starred as ninth The Doctor. They ended up on a planet where the inhabitants communicated through flatulence.
This got me to thinking that if you created a FartOS people really could say your OS stinks.
It's called Archy. This OS is a redesign of the command line with a focus on habit-forming, not navigational use.
The LEAP technique for quick positioning would make it better for blind users than a traditional CLI where users can't easily scan the output of a command. In Archy, users can touch-type the destination point and have it read in loud voice, instead of having to hear the whole text.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Seems to me that a standard unix text console would do the job. Make a braille display that's about 80x25, (or 80x1 and scrollable) and boot to a command prompt. The user can use Lynx to web browse, vim as an editor, etc. Much of the software is there already. Some enhanced task-switcher and screen reading software might be helpful too. It's not perfect but it does the job pretty well. It's just a matter of learning to use it. I'd prefer a GUI myself but it seems in this case a GUI would be more confusion than it's worth, unless they invent some sort of high resolution braille displays..
I'm using OS X and the visual alerts pretty much cover my needs. The only stuff that bugs me is games or training videos with no text layovers. I like how PBS online packages their movies in a QT format with a little checkbox sprite for "subtitles". Hopefully all online movie sales in the future will have this... otherwise I'm gunna hafta sue somebody. ;-)
:-)
But if you wanna make deaf people go WOW... include a built in voice recognition program that can handle anybody's voice without any training. That way laptops could be used in SOME situations instead of an interpreter... and someday in the future this could be used to auto transcribe TV shows and old movies that never had captions added. But now I'm just getting all Star Trek here.
There IS a system of writing specifically made for the deaf, so that the full range of hand gestures and facial expressions can be conveyed without pictures and videos. (SignWriting) I think it's never going to really catch on though, videophones will kill it.
For a non-English skilled deaf person I'd say a Mac with an iSight and QT Pro would be great, can keep all your personal notes in your own language quickly and easily now. No need to depend on a 2nd language.
P.S. Deaf people LOVE iChat AV... once more of us get G5's, we're finally gonna have a deaf party line! SWEET!
P.P.S. Bandwidth upload caps ruin our video performance... quit worrying about pirates and let us USE technology to make life better.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Most standard CLI tools are extremely cryptic. I think everyone would benefit from a redesign.
As I remember ME was written by blind and deaf programers. At least it seemed that way.
WTF? The OS should probably be GNU/Linux or some BSD. Your question is about the interface: GUI, CLI, or something else?
Try Ubuntu GNU/Linux, it's great!!!
Aside from that, you can also take a look at some pervasive-computing stuff. They're big into "multimodal technology" - XHTML+Voice provides a way to speak to the device or see your input on a screen (or, presumably, to view it in an accessibility-enabled web browser). Its key "secret" is that it can do much better voice recognition because you limit its vocabularies and grammars to the task at hand. See also the IBM multimodal web site, you can find these toys online, even!
Oblig. disclaimer: I work for IBM. Heck, I work just down the hall from the Accessibility Lab and the lab formerly known as "Pervasive Computing". But I'm just a little intern, and I'll be gone at the end of the summer. Just make sure none of this stuff is construed as official IBM sanctioned stuff, promises, announcements, anything-like-that, mmmk? You know the drill.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I am deaf and I use MEPIS, Mandriva, Knoppix and Fedora Core 3 without a single problem. The problem is not that I am deaf, rather the problem is that most hearing people automatically assume that because my ears do not function, my brain is also broken, which is not the case, and I need "assistance" - which is also not the case. I study computers, physics, law, electronics and mechanical engineering and have always felt that the lack of self-education is, on its own, the highest handicap.
I can see the need for an OS, or software, that will integrate braille devices. But for the deaf? Not really necessary because the only thing I was missing in a Linux distro was sound, which is not really important to the deaf anyway.
You want to help the deaf community? Don't pamper/hamper us.
I knew a pair of blind gentlemen who worked MSN Tech Support, and we set up a computer for the two of them to learn MSN Explorer with JAWS piped to speakers so they could both listen together.
The experience left me both in awe of their ability to hear all sorts of detail and in disgust at the lack of accessibility. The the custom interface was made out of poorly named images. One particularly useless one (Image 14, IIRC) was the minimize, maximize, and close buttons, all together. This brought me to my thoughts on a vector-based UI. Imagine the convenience of smooth scalability across different resolution displays...
Anyway, concerns that I can think of are as follows:
1. API
A series of abstracted interface methods should be made available. The categories are pretty simple... User Interface (menus, buttons, inputs), Text (static & editable text), Media (audio, video, pictures)... this is all off the top of my head, so feel free to improve on it. Each category simply defines a type of data, and then you can build ways to retrieve or interact with it.
2. Registration
I don't care if everyone puts their close button in the same place with the same icon. Visual users can typically locate these things. What they should do is then register that component with the UI Manager. Components could fall into multiple categories, i.e. a graphic on a web page with URLs mapped on it is both a picture and a series of links. Add a "group" indicator or hierarchy to properly collect controls and data together, and I think you have the basic needs covered.
Using these two parts, we should be able to build simple command interfaces. The ability to define the set of controls, displays, and texts for a given interface means you can see them all at once, or hear or feel them in sequence. Your interface can choose to discard or delay extra media (no sudden advert noises on audio interfaces or no need to waste processing time on decoding the video portion of a media file) through a variety of user-adjustable settings.
For visually-impaired individuals, I think the vector-based interface could make huge strides. Right now, you can buy a 21-inch monitor and set it to 800x600, or use a projector, but new laptops are still 1024x768 or higher. I listened in on a Dell Customer Service call from an older gentleman who loved the laptop he purchased, but couldn't read the high-res screen. If a vector-based interface was available that allowed his to change the point size - similar to Mozilla's Ctrl-Scroll size changes - he would have been fine.
I think the key, and the hard part, is getting buy-in on this kind of pervasive detailing of interfaces. HTML/XHTML is a great start for this, because this kind of extension is very easy based on the nesting and pre-defined components on a page.
Interfaces for the disabled or impaired could come in handy for everyone. These same advances are where the "technologies of the future" come from. Until we push the mouse away, we're stuck to the desktop metaphor.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Its just the user interface you need to deal with, so why go and design 'yet another OS'?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That is, asking about the blind on Slashdot. Since they're no longer allowed to post, why even post topics about them? According to Taco, they shouldn't even be allowed to live. Taco, if I ever see you in person again, you will get punched right in the face for saying something like that about my little sister.
That eventually we would move to a audio interface...
.txt files which I could listen to at my leasure and speed preference while taking the bus home.
Most of the information we have conveyed to us comes through as text except for images and movie files.
Images can be described for an audio interface.
Plus it would be far easier to carry around, ubiqutous and not offensive to others, just the ability to record everything that is said around me as searchable text which I can somehow highlight would be increadibly valuable, my lectures... suddenly they could be
All e-mail etc could be read to you.
Plus for mobile computing it would have the simplest interchangeable link and be secure at the same time (through voice recognition).
Just 2c
One area in which all OSs are really lacking is speech and voice recognition software. The only real viable piece of software out there right now is Dragon Naturally Speaking, and from personal experience, it is extremely poor for a child who cannot talk properly and can't type due to tremors.
Until there is software that can pick out an individual's unique brand of talking, such as stuttering, slurring, etc., people who cannot type and talk well are going to be in the dark.
"Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so." - Ford Prefect
If you haven't already, disconnect all your computer displays, and spend at least a week using the existing technology and software for the blind. Until you've had that first hand experience, you can't begin to consider the problem.
Some ideas about an audio multitasking environment: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~parente/clique/
Linked article is full of pedantic old information
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 is an old web browser (from 2001), yet it is still shipped on 90 percent of new desktop computers.
Have you read and understood the article BTW? Or do you just post it randomly when you see someone mention XHTML.
I post it whenever anybody seems to advocate XHTML over HTML 4.01, which does work in IE. I guess I misread your intent.
No web application requires javascript or AJAX or any latest greatest browser technology. Since when did serving information or feedback / interaction require anything above basic HTML syntax?
Since the uptake of high-speed Internet access fell short of early predictions. The page model of the web implies requesting an entire top level page for each user operation. This tends to use a lot of bandwidth, especially if a user operation changes the state of only one item in a long list. Example: deleting one or more e-mail messages in a web gateway to IMAP; updating the view of the message list in a classical web application would require re-sending the list of messages, but doing so in an application using script, DOM, and XMLHttpRequest would require only deleting the TR element that corresponds to the messages that were deleted.
requires lots of accessibility orientated tag attributes (alt, title, summary, scope, headers, label, etc.).
So does HTML 4. In fact, XHTML 1.0 is just HTML 4.01 retooled to run within XML.
Designing interfaces for visually impaired users was a topic of my own research for a couple of years at ISEF and affiliated fairs while I was in high school. As far as interfaces go, I experimented with a braile keyboard (tried and true) and voice recognition (ammount of success varies depending on possible input vocabulary). One tool I found particularly useful for designing interactive voice interfaces using both speech synthesis and recognition was VoiceXML, which defines a markup language with basic scripting logic for quickly building voice interfaces. During my junior year of High School, I implemented a perl module for automagically generating voice interfaces (my ultimate goal was to create a replacement for the integrated cgi modules for live internet-aware voice apps), and showed it off by designing a basic newsreader app that pulled data from NewsBlaster (this was back in the day before Google News).
My research experiences taught me several things. Firstly, it is important to offer auditory feedback for blind users. With voice recognition on a limited vocabulary, this isn't really a problem, as the user always knows what they said. With a broader range of input vocabulary, or with keyboard input, it's important to verify what has been entered at least every sentence or so, as there is naturally no way to provide visual feedback. Secondly, you must realize that all data being transmitted to the user is necessarily in a totally linear format. That means that, in any interface you are designing fresh, you should keep the interface as slim as possible. When you are reading out information that was originally intended for sighted users, some sort of adaptive content filtering is a must. If a blind user goes to slashdot, chances are "image, image, image, image, image, image, username, preferences, subscribe, journal, etc..." is not the first thing they want to hear.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
operating systems pretty much know nothing about the interface capabilities of their users...this is more of a user interface issue...
that being said:
a) profoundly deaf people who are not blind are not really an issue at this point since the primary output of computers these days is essentially visual (not being insensitive, just pointing out the obvious)
b) profoundly blind people who are not deaf have relied on screen readers for some time...while they can appear crude to sighted people, I've seen some folks do amazing things with them...no doubt they can be improved...
c) Profoundly deaf+blind is a large problem in many dimensions although touch interfaces (e.g. Braille and others) can help (also useful as an adjunct to screen readers)
d) as pointed out else there are various degrees of these afflictions...sometimes something as simple as a magnifying glass is sufficient...and much depends on the individual as well...
I have worked with people in all these categories except for "c"...various versions of Windows, MacOS, and *nix all have useful tools...
_k
1. Actuators aren't cheap. You need one per pin.
How not cheap? How much of the $20 per pin is actuators and controllers and how much is margin? I wonder...
2. Margins have to be high because of the limited market.
It's possible to find uses for tactile displays other than for blind people. This expanded market could lead to economies of scale that increase supply across the board.
3. Development costs are high
Which is why I asked when the patents will run out, so that other companies could compete for the dollars that governments are willing to pay to give these devices to blind veterans.
4. Because they can sell the devices for that much. I believe that the government has support programs that will pay for devices like these, so the prices tend to be somewhat inflated.
As comedian Chris Rock put it, "I wish you a merry welfare and a happy food stamp." It's the same argument about prescription drugs. I can point you to a lot of people on the political right who would disagree with your "But not too much" assessment.
but even the deaf and the blind know better than to waste their time with it.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
People are getting better at considering accessibility on web pages but blind people still miss out on the joy of web comics. My recent web comic is dynamically created and with a little tweaking I've been able to make it work sensibly with a screen reader.
check it out at http://www.invisiblespiders.com/fymd/
If you've got speech software setup, try having it read (and narrate) the comic.
Unfortunately while VoiceOver looks neat it dosen't actually work in practice. Try it some time. Turn off your monitor and try to do something simple like read and send an email. Bonus points for using the address book.
There are two problems with VoiceOver and Magnifier. These tools were designed by people who have good vision. The bigger problem is that computers are visually very intensive. Not just gui apps, but most programs since the one line at a time teletype make heavy use of a display.
What visually impaired (both blind and nearly blind) people need are applications designed specifically for them. It is much harder then it sounds.
Lynx is a text oriented web browser that comes with most flavors of LINUX. I'm running Fedora Core 4 and under Desktop>Preferences>Accessibility there is a screen reader option. Not sure how to launch the screen reader from the command line (only because I haven't checked). Basically Linux provides a FREE solution (it could be made better though... just need a subnet of developers with time to roll something together). JAWS is a great program though, it's been around a long time. I delt with people that used it in the past and they were well pleased with the system and the support they got. Good uck!
With a deaf wife who loves video games (hot too, aren't you all jealous!), I am acutely aware of how many modern video games do not have subtitles for the cutscenes and/or audio instructions. It just irks me to no end, since I know that at some point in the development cycle, the voiceovers were not completed and in their stead was text. So since approximately 5% of the US population suffers some form of significant hearing loss, the IT community can best reach out to the largest disabled community by ensuring a subtitle option for ALL video games. Not some video games (as it is now), not most, but ALL.
--why?
I don't know about blind and deaf users, but sometimes I wonder if some Windows programmers are blind and deaf...
I donno about designing a whole new OS. For me, its more in the interface. I'm using stuff from www.phidgets.com (I'm not affiliated in any way other than being a satisfied customer) to build a simple interface for playing music on a PC. That is, physical buttons to control the app. Few other tweaks and hacks allows for navigation/selection of the tunes. Certainly, a whole new OS would be great, but is it really needed?
rewriting history since 2109
Hi --
For blind users, I would use a joystick providing accelerating sound pitch and changing sound pitch as I approached certain "zones". These zones could correlate spatially to screen regions where one would have basic functionalities: a zone for applications, a zone for documents.
The sound pitch would change correspondingly. It could indicate closer/farther. A voice synth would report applications as joystick cursor flies over it.
Otherwise, semantic data would be extracted from semantic-web-enabled browser. This data would be voice synthesized.
My gues on deaf users is that they can basically use what we use. However, I know from a lady psychologist that there are some cognitive differences between hearing and signing people. Metaphors, for example, she tells me is a hard-won acquisition. These cognitive differences would have to be taken into account. Perhaps, a very clear visual metaphor would be in order (like the "file" metaphor that's very hidden nowadays).
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
On the other hand, if you are looking to make a blind-friendly general OS, then look to the "3rd generation approach" to accessibility in GNOME, Mac OS X v10.4, and Longhorn. All of these are doing API-based accessibility, where every object on the screen implements a rich accessibility API which is taken together and then re-presented to the blind (or others with other disabilities). In GNOME this is with the open source Gnopernicus screen reader (see http://www.baum.ro/gnopernicus.html). In Mac OS X v10.4 this is VoiceOver. Longhorn hasn't declared itself fully on this topic yet.
A final thing to look at is the work my co-worker Willie Walker and the University of Toronto Adaptive Technology Resource Centre did with the a speech Look and Feel for Swing.
My wife uses some of these devices (BrailleNote QT) and the biggest problem is using the wrong underlying operating system. DOS and Linux work just fine when translated to the command line; the WinCE that underlies her machine sucks. Hard. Sure, it gives a bare modicum of device and software (read: Outlook) compatibility, but at the cost of needless hardware overhead, and a special version of the three finger salute.
/. response is "did they contribute for their market research?" To which I say "sod off". The market is fairly small, and should be one with a tighter feedback loop between vendors and users. My email address is non-obfuscated should you need some ideas or contact info for some groups.
Asking 'what about blind and/or deaf' shows a bit of lack of understanding. The best replacement for the blind is speech. The only option for DB is refreshable braille. I suggest you and/or your employer make some contact with DB groups. At a DB camp a couple of weeks ago, some devs and sales reps from some tech outfit (forget which one) displayed their wares. The kneejerk
Finally, expose the API and make some generic libraries available to use to people who like to program. PulseData/HumanWare wants, I belive a dev kit fee. Umm, screw that. Entry level prices on the BrailleNote are ca. $3000, IIRC, so there's plenty of money out there. Not sure about you, but Franklin Scientific, Blazie, PD, etc. are Hardware companies. Let a little bit of "Open Source"ism do some development for you. There is tremendous word of mouth, and if some third party makes some brilliant add on, it will get around the community. Depending on how you license it, you may be able to ship later. (Personally, I would go BSD or LGPL.)
In summation:
1. Don't confuse blind and deaf and deaf-blind. Each is unique with unique needs. An attempt to be all things to all people will either have stratospheric costs or poor quality or both.
2. Ask your customers instead of some random slashbots. They are out there.
3. Build it from the ground up, since you'll likely have bizarro hardware anyway.
4. Make it possible to program for it. It (the DB group) is a tight community, with lots of people looking out for others, so it's not like you'll be helping a competitor. Think of third parties as value added.
5. (Not mentioned above, but kinda goes with 2) Update your freaking website with real, up to date, and complete information. Have a company policy of a real, human reply to all correspondence within x hours, where x72. Even "I got your note and am investigating your concerns" is better than some of what I get from PD from time to time.
And a freebie. My wife never uses the voice prompts on her BN, but I activate them if I have to do tech support (needing an onsite geek is a bad thing, BTW). Try to get a speech synth chip that sounds better than the WOPR or Speak and Spell I had as a kid. Seriously. It's 2005, and every time I hear the voice, I expect to hear "Would you like to play a game?"
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I can't seem to find any screenshots. Has anyone seen the screenshots?
When it comes to deaf members of our community, I can't see them suffering a real "handicap" in regards to using any available OS. As stated over and over in many threads.... OS's are more visual and less audio. Sound cards wouldn't matter to a member of the deaf community since in reality, they serve no purpose. With that said...
An OS of the blind is not in need of a monitor since there is nothing to see per se. However there are certain things they can do that would allow them to be as efficient as one who has vision.
The paradigm of a blind person comes down to the extreme use of two senses, hearing and touch.
These two senses are what you have to build your whole OS around. The ability for them to hear and touch.
Input - Is one of the most important features to a computer. You have to be able to input information so the computer can put it all together. The first attribute I will concentrate on is touch.
1. I link you to this site as it has many one handed solutions to typing. I am most impressed with the Chording Keyboards for what I have in mind. As I am using the standard OS model we use today.
2. The second step as I see it is to have a rather nice size active braile board that can constantly change at a rapid rate for navigation through said OS. This board will display a desktop so to speak. In braile it will be written through out the board what they are "feeling" or what we would be looking at.
So if we were gonna use windows as a model the board would display like in the top left hand corner the My Computer Icon. At this stage it would be printed in braile on the board as to where they were touching. With a simple push on that location the board would change appropriately to what is available in that location for navigation.
However you wanna keep it simple. You can't get all elaborate on the user. It has to be straight forward and to the point of what they are engaged in touching.
In doing this you can actually (with some imagination) simulate many programs for touch purposes. Excel can be laid out through the pins and they can data entry these areas through touching.
Audio - is an equally important feature that can be used with the board or as an alternative to the board. Voice navigation that is near flawless. I refer to it being right on and not nearly right on. Voice navigation similar to what OS/2 Warp 4 displayed to where a user can open anything that has an audio tag on it. So if I need to get to a folder deep in the hard drive directory without the senseless pushing of the braile pad, I can just say that folders name and it opens.
Voice navigation allows for faster movement throughout the OS.
The real key to an OS of this nature is to allow a member of the blind community to be apart of its entire design. Not just one member but many members. Allow them to help build it and test how it will come out. Whlie us that can see think some things would be good. (Like everything I mentioned, the might suck for someone who can't see). We have to allow them to be in full, 100% participation with the design of these computers as it is what they would use.
In closing, Microsofts handicap features suck. All of them. If that is their idea of helping the handicap then they failed worse than anyone could possibly imagine. You need a fluid voice playback when reading text, not the gimp voice that is all staggery throughout any reading.
An OS for the blind should be command-driven. It might be argued that menus were designed precisely so users would not have to memorize cryptic commands. But for a blind user, it would be terribly inefficient (read, time-consuming) to be forced to listen to menu choices being read back. A command-driven OS would require an initially steeper learning curve in terms of memorizing keyboard short-cuts, but the effort is rewarded as soon as the user types "rf" for refresh, rather than wait for the text-to-speech (TTS) software to recite (1) Go to Site (2) Save Page (3) Reload Page, etc.
An OS for the blind should be linear rather than spatial. A blind user should not be forced to grope for icons or other clickable hotspots in an invisible desktop. Reducing the number of choices a blind user must make to get a task done makes the OS more rather than user-friendly.
Pasting a screen-reader atop a fancy desktop environment like Gnome or Mac OSX is not the solution. The solution is to get rid of the desktop manager and concentrate on making a better command language interpreter or shell.
Bash, or the B(ourne) A(gain) SH(ell) is already way friendlier to the blind user than Windows XP, Bash has file-name and command completion, which should make it easier to "remember" commands. Just remember the first few letters of a long command and press tab.
There are also a number of FOSS efforts to create the audio equivalent of a desktop. One is emacspeak, which is a lisp program that interfaces with the venerable emacs text editor and kitchen sink.
There are also GNU/Linux distributions geared toward blind users, such as Oralux.
I'm a sci-fi vegan: I don't want the aliens to think we have as much right to live as the fried chickens we eat.
By way of background, he uses his computer (a Windows box on a university network) for e-mail and writing scholarly articles. His screen reading program is JAWS. He would like to use the internet more, but he's frustrated by a combination of factors, some JAWS-related and some related to inaccessible design. The boss is highly intelligent and has been blind from birth. He's very used to other adaptive technologies like Braille or Open Book (a program that uses a scanner to translate print to speech), but he's a complete computing novice.
It's worth noting that the computing problems he has are completely different from those that I would face if I were blinded tomorrow. A lot of his trouble is just related to a poor grasp of fundamentals. It's very difficult to explain the difference between opening a folder on the desktop and browsing the contents of a folder through an application's Open dialog box. Compounding the problem is that the boss is ten years late to the party, and most of his sighted assistants take things like right clicking on objects for granted.
On the other hand, he has some advantages that a recently blinded person would not. The boss is used to taking in huge volumes of information through his ears, and can absorb synthesized speech at a dizzying rate. He also reads and types Braille grade 2, and gets a lot of use from his Braille Lite, which is like a PDA for Braille users, with a special Braille keyboard and a refreshable display of dots. It's great for him, but the chord- and abbreviation-based systems of Grade 2 Braille, take a long time to learn, and wouldn't be useful to your grandmother, who's losing her vision to diabetes.
So here are some of the problems I've encountered in my time with the boss:
John Hancock wuz here.
It's no secret that many of the Americans calling Indian support centers know more than the supposed "support" personal they are calling.
That's why it's perfect that these Americans have lost their Job, now they finally have the time to talk the Indians through their old job!
the FDA regulations virtually guarantee that any product produced will cost 10x what it should and take 3-5 years to develop.
It's not a food, and it's not a drug. The other uses for a tactile display don't even have to be medical; they could be for video games. Where does the FDA have jurisdiction?
My point is that it really isn't patents. The [exorbitant] costs in developing this stuff means that they need high margins to stay in business.
If patents aren't involved (or if they're expired), what stops a competitor from copying the design into that of its own device?
I work part time actually for disability resources at my college, and part of my job is looking at OCR output scans and correcting them for mistakes which are later printed with braille embossers or read with text to speech tools for our blind students. I have to say, after a few days on the job I realized how insufficient resources are for the students, often our assignments aren't given to us until a day or two after the blind student is supposed to get the material, so by the time they get them back from us they're often already a few days behind in class. While there isn't really a good way of fixing this, i'm sure that there are many who would really appreciate more tools. Any little process that can be made a bit faster for them would help make up for the delays that are unavoidable. Then diagrams and pictures we end up simply describing or captioning for the student. While picture to braille conversions exist, they generally don't do a good job as there are only so many discernable "textures" and braille heights that can be physically felt.
Caveat /. is maybe not the best place to ask, and I'm not experienced in this area either..
Windowing systems, in that they simulate objects moving spatially (in front/behind, and in 2 dimensions across screen) and require hand-eye coordination to click on widgets, are basically not a great idea. You will always be fighting to translate these difficult things into a different realm, not that it can't be done.
If you instead think about what work needs to be done, possibly it could be handled using mainly audio clues and novel tactile interfaces. For example do users even type well? Aside from the hardware and UI nitty-gritty, something like emacs or ratpoison
might be more useful. I could see how a new frame being created would speak its name at a different pitch for example, so by hitting one key on your custom keyboarding device you can get all the visible frames to say their names in order from low pitch to high pitch, maybe you can scroll through them audibly with a scroll wheel type mechanism. Anyway I know lots of people are not fully blind and can use computers well so presumably you want two systems, one close to the current system and one that is a radical departure for non-sighted people. I am not even sure what the jobs are that they would want to do but I imagine the most important things will be to visualize one's surroundings and danger (for example a rangefinding and sonar type device) and interacting with at least part of the web in some way (just because it is so inexpensive to develop for it).
Of course I doubt any partially blind people are going to be reading slashdot with its tons of text but maybe?
The WIMP paradigm is fundamentally broken when it comes to the disabled. The problem is best approached by repeatedly and recursively asking, "what am I trying to communicate" based upon what can be recieved, and transmitted by the user?
Take a look at this conference, on auditory display: ICAD2005 and this cool paper from about 1996.
What would the Blue Screen of Death work like? A 3-Stooges like poke-in-the-eye? Explodes? Skunk juice? I vote skunk.
Table-ized A.I.
I work for a team developing technology for individuals who are blind
So you're the one with a vision!
If you can read English, I bet you can figure it out in about 10 minutes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braile
My other first post is car post.
* Most deaf-blind people are not born deaf and blind. Most deaf-blind people are born either deaf or blind and then lose the other sense as they get older. I don't have any numbers to back this up, but the overwhelming majority of deaf-blind people we met suffered from Usher Syndrome. Most people who have this genetic disorder are born deaf and then start going blind around 30. From my experience, most of these people only start to learn braille when they start to experience vision loss. It can be difficult for adults to learn braille. As a result, it's very useful to have a display suitable for people with reduced vision in addition to a braille display to ease the transition as these people are learning braille.
* Deaf-blind people communicate by using sign language and feeling the speaker's hand as things are signed. However, deaf-blind people often need to communicate with people who do not know sign langage (a repairman, neighbor, paramedics, etc). To do this, they often rely on a computer, text telephone, or similar device that allows them to type messages back and forth to the person they need to communicate with. It's important to keep secondary uses like this in mind when designing a product.
* For the severely vision impaired, we found that LCD and CRT based displays were not easy to read. The displays that were easiest to read had about 2-inch letters and emitted a bright light in the blue-green area of the color spectrum. Scrolling text is very difficult to read for people with severe vision impairments. Many of the people we worked with had severe tunnel vision that made multi-line displays confusing. These people would keep their head a couple of inches from the screen and move their head to scan across the line. We ended up using a large vacuum-flourescent display that would advance a line at a time at the user's control. We also found that having interchangeable color filters for the display made it useful for more people since everyone's vision loss is different.
* We found that multi-line braille displays were confusing for a lot of people and didn't serve much purpose since you can only read one line at a time. The design we used that people seemed to like the best was a 20 character braille display with a button on the left-hand side for scrolling up one line and a button on the right hand side for scrolling down one line.
* Some people we met were good typists, but most people tended to one-finger it. That's bad enough if you can see, but it's even worse for blind people. We had braille lettering on our keys, and we found that a lot of people would scan the keys with their fingers to locate the letter they wanted to type. However, they often ended up inadvertantly pressing these keys as they were scanning the braille. Using very stiff key switches greatly reduced this problem.
* Placement of keys, power switches, etc is very important. Things need to be easy to locate but difficult to inadvertantly hit. This is harder than it sounds and you probably won't know the mistakes in the layout until you ask a blind person to use it.
* Before I worked on this project, I had no idea that there are two different kinds of braille: 6-dot and 8-dot. Far more people are familiar with 6-dot since it's what's used for most books, but 6-dot has a lot of limitations. The only symbols you get are period and comma. Numbers are letters that are prefixed by the number symbol. As you can see, there can be some information l
EMACS+TTS (festival, emacspeak, who knows?). Emacs is incredibly scriptable, has a shell, multiple buffers, etc. No need for new full-blown app :)
Try Corewar @ www.koth.org - rec.games.corewar
AWE-FUCKING-SOME! that was really nice. cheers!
... a operating system we were trying to create that was language/independant (no, really!) but not coding language, but actually User Language independant, after a little though we decided that it could be usefull even to people that doesn't know how to read nor write, which prove like a very hard task, as you had to show all errors with images or sounds.
Well, if we could get some "tactil screens" so we can actually feel what is on the screen and some responses to it.. then we could think about building terminals for the blind. Braille terminals are not good enough (is like using a text interfaces only, can you imagine doind that with windows? i know i can't, however linux would be really nice)
Sound is just a pain, i usually try stuff like, being blind for a week, beeing deef for 3 days, to see if i could do the things i do, and i usually find out that it is more than a pain in the a$$, we actually went around in wheelchairs just to see if buildings/malls/cinemas are up to it or not... how hard it is to move around, etc.
If we want to do something about that, the fact is, more people would need to be blind for a week!! is a reviving experience, to be dependant, to feel the darkness.
How about a larger version of one of those pin screen executive toys linked to some sort of compressor system that would allow the pins to be raised individually to produce pages of braile that could be changed depending on the screen view. The pins could be made variable pressure sensative to allow reading of the text but then certain areas (such as hyperlinks) could be made slightly more raised to show they are links. All that would be need then would be slightly more pressure than normal by the user on this area to activate the link. There are probably lots of problems with this idea that I've not considered so feel free to shoot me down in flames :)
SO they can still get the pr0n. Be careful son, you might go...
I must say, without being able to see the website in question, it can be tough trusting sites, and the usability on the web, with image navigation etc, it hard enough for a seeing/hearing person.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=ora
Burn it to Live CD.
As for the rest of you people, how about just answering the question before you flame and ridicule it? Creating software for the handicapped isn't something to hoot down...it is a fascinating, rewarding challenge. One met sometimes by the handicapped themselves...let's see YOU be so clever when you have Cerebral Palsy, can't talk, and can only type with your feet!
err... read grandparent- he mentioned "4 year old daughter" not "*real hacker*" (hmmm....). I don't imagine he's expecting his 4 yr old daughter to "work on a vt220 with screen, slrn, bitchx, mutt, dozens of consoles, vim, ssh". I imagine his daughter's hoped for experience is more like the typical four year old, wobbling a mouse around to click on the nice big pictures, having fun with some edutainment and maybe do a little tentative typing of their name etc, so when they go to school it will be a skill they have in common with their better sighted friends.
I don't understand why do you need a completely new OS, It would split blind/deaf people a bit more. They would not share their programs/documents with the rest of the world, just between blind/deaf people and a few more that have access to that OS.
You should keep triyng to modify the known OS's instead of creating a new one
I see connected people! - The seventh sense
I'd like to point out that only about 10 percent of people who are blind, read braille.
This is due to the association between "natural" visual impairment (being born visually impaired) and diabetes (which reduces sensation in the bodies extremities, for example finger tips).
very inSIGHTful
I think that there are two fundamental mistakes lots of people make when designing interfaces for completely blind people.
The first is the idea that we should just slap a screen reader on top of a regular GUI, so that the blind user hears a description of everything that a sighted user would see on the screen - and that will be just great, and make the GUI accessible. I think that's a silly approach. I'm not saying that screen readers are useless - I imagine that they are a helpful tool for partially sighted people and blind people who can't read braille, and they are a quick and dirty solution for blind people who are given no other options - but they are hardly the best we can do (and obviously totally useless to those who are both blind and deaf).
Instead of interpreting an interface which was designed and optimised for sighted people so that it is not utterly useless to blind people, we should construct an interface specially optimised for blind people, which takes full advantage of the senses that they are skilled in using. It should have both audio and tactile input and output methods.
There is a good reason why sight is the most important sense to sighted people. Sight provides us with a vastly larger amount of information than any of our other senses. We can see further and more accurately than we can hear. Sight allows us to scan rapidly over a two-dimensional or three-dimensional object, pick out an area of interest and access it directly.
When blind people access text, whether it's through a screen reader or a one-line braille display, it's one-dimensional, sequential access, which by nature is slower and less efficient. That's why we should make every effort to optimise such interfaces, rather than using them as half-assed interpreters of existing interfaces.
I also think that we should be searching for new ways to allow blind people to absorb more information more accurately using the senses of sound and touch. This is more of a hardware problem, and this is where I think lots of people get bogged down by the second fundamental mistake: the idea that a computer interface should be a metaphor for an existing real-world interface.
This assumption is by no means restricted to this narrow category of interface design. I've often seen designers of conventional GUIs argue that a suggested feature is "bad" because it "breaks the metaphor".There's a whole rant in here which I won't get into now. Broadly, my opinion is that I don't want my computer to be a newspaper, a filing cabinet or a typewriter - I want it to be a computer, and let me do all the useful things that simply cannot be done without a computer.
Back to my original point - computers can potentially allow us to build interfaces which we could never have imagined constructing without computers. Hopefully, in the future, we will be able to interface with optic nerves, or the parts of the brain which interpret signals from the optic nerves, and allow blind people to "see" in some sense. At the moment this is still a pipe dream, as far as I know, but we can try passing data to blind people in other ways, and see if we find something that works well enough to be widely adopted.
I remember hearing about a study in which spatial data was translated into pressure applied to the backs of the test subjects (anybody remember this? Got a link?). They learned to interpret the sensations as information about three-dimensional terrain in front of them. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. I don't know if it can efficiently be made into something accurate enough to read text, but we won't know unless we try.
Recently, reports of the Utah Hand show examples where the nerves of the missing arm are re-routed, subcutaneously to the chest, where they can both exert and receive electrical signals, allowing for both command and feedback impulses to be transmitted to/from the brain.
If we look the example of a person blinded in later life, they have a rich history of visual experience in which to draw upon, which can be accessed through both tactile and auditory senses if present. Imagine a tactile display, about the size of a display screen, in which there are tiny, air inflatable or piezoelectric cells which can be mapped above membrane switches. The tactile surface could express braille and represent the controls available on the normal display via a driver and mapping software. The locations of the items on the display would represent the windows of the open applications. A window could also represent a tactile keyboard. Now that we have an input, output device, we can enrich the environment further, by adding voices to relay the bulk of the information. I say voices, because the applications should speak in different voices so that the user has an audio metaphor to represent different applications and tell them apart. By using 3-d surround sound acoustical technology, an applications voice could appear to be spatially located. A window with a message in the background may be quieter. And the voices should have different intonations depending on what is being done, perhaps a slightly more stern or flat voicing for a dialog box, and something more friendly for informational messages.
The operating system differs here, because it displays the only the controls on the tactile pad, and displays the application content via the sound system and a synthesizer.
By modularizing the various application flows and dialogs, the system should be configurable for a variety of differently challenged individuals. Similarly, the same PC should be able to inter operate over the net with other similar and dissimilar devices. So a deaf poet could work with a blind musician to create a song, and their producer could listen and make suggestions in real time.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
My wife used to do outsourced Level 1 ISP tech support (possibly the worst job in the world) in Durham, NC, in 1998 or so. Among other things, you were required to follow the script, even if you knew what the problem was - it didn't matter if you were knowledgeable.
1) Natural language processing. It's got to be integral to the system, and able to control any application.
2)file storage - It would take an incredible memory to know where all your data files were, so something like the hypothetical WinFS DBMS file system would be ideal. Indexing of unstructured text and metadata are going to be critical. It should know what's in your email, calendar, documents, etc and get you the info you need.
3)Output - Natural text-to-speech is the way to go. Braille is an option, but it's slower than listening. You need to develop outputs that don't require remembering specific details like filenames, but concepts that convey meaning.
My father was recently blinded as a result of injuries in a motorcycle accident. Not only is he legally blind, he is completely blind; the optic nerves were both severed and detached. He also only has feeling in his pinkie-finger on his right hand, thus making a Braille reader useless. He is attempting to learn how to type with a right-handed Dvorak keyboard and his typing is relayed to him by an application known as Read & Write. We just purchased JAWS from freedomscientific.com and are awaiting its delivery.
Although I have not used JAWS and I am not aware of all its capabilities, I do believe there should be better accessibility applications in any standard desktop OS. JAWS will set you back around $800-$1100, and that's quite a price to pay--especially since the person who injured my father didn't have insurance and we're forced to cover the cost of all these items. (Keep in mind: this is one of those very rare situations.)
I, for one, would be interested in seeing a graphical user interface capable of succinctly displaying information and reading it back to any user without bombarding them with data. With all the bells and whistles in any office productivity software suite and every new web site these days, it's very difficult to understand what you are listening to when you have an application play back the text on screen. Some people do not label the ALT tag in image placeholders, so no text can be read for those items. FLASH animations are useless unless there is actually real plain-text on the web page. In addition, opening items and getting the PC setup is very difficult. My father is quickly learning where things are located and can easily get himself setup in front of the computer as long as you put him in front of the right applications. However, I still have to verify that all the system settings are correct every time I turn on the computer.
It is very difficult and extremely disorienting to go from having sight to not having it when using computers (even though you have used them for years prior). This is especially difficult when nothing gives very good verbal clues and you have poor use of your fingers. Everything needs to be done with the keyboard; a mouse is totally useless to my father. I have to place special markers (pieces of felt or rubber buttons) on certain keys.
What I have been trying to do is modify not only the way Windows XP Pro works, but also how the other applications function. Keyboard shortcuts (and Sticky Keys) are a definite must, but you can only have so many before you need to memorize an entire keyboard of commands. Voice Recognition is terrific (my father's cellular phone is entirely voice activated and he is just amazed that he only needs to flip the phone open to do anything), although it does need to be trained to function well. To train voice recognition, my father would at least have to read what is on the screen (i.e., see the screen) for it to be effectively trained. My workaround is to just do all the training exercises myself, record them to a CD, and then play them back to him on a set of headphones so he could repeat aloud what he hears.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I really don't have many ideas for how to build an OS or GUI for visually impaired users so much as I have suggestions. I guess one of my biggest concerns is that you have to pay for an operating system that comes with poor and limited accessibility functions and then pay another $1000 for something that will effectively give verbal output for the operating system. What I am really looking for in any accessibility application, though, is the ability to simplify the most common pitfalls with a combination of keyboard shortcuts and voice activation. I see this as an opportunity to push a specially designed USB keyboard--something visually switchable from QWERTY to Dvorak (standard, right-handed, or left-handed) that contains special keys for shortcuts, possibly an integrated microphone. Even creating a keyboard with its own interna
Just a few ideas in no particular order:
1) Specialized keyboards. A buddy of mine once had a job working at a school for developmentally or otherwize impaired children (back in Apple IIe days) his primary task devolved to setting up support for the specialized keyboards (large-format touch-sensitive pads that could support overlays). You could do worse than making support for Braille Terminals and other additions a basic device.
2) Never forget the command line. What little "accessability software" I have seen has seemed (to me) to be flawed because it seeks to take the GUI which is designed for visual users and render it into something else. This is a hard and probably unnecessary task. I would think that you would have an easier time rendering a command-line environment accessable (audio or braille output, special key input) than a gui which is, after all designed around visual buttons, mice, etc.
3) Don't think that you have to do it all. On MacOS and, to an extent Windows the visual environment is a big part of the system but on neither one, (certainly not on *nix or BSD) is the gui the same as the OS.
4) Customizability. The point has been made that user's needs are higly individual so a setup that supports easy and efficient customization (based perhaps on user profiles for a shared system) would be, I think, key.
If I were given this task right now I would look at taking an existing OS (probably a *nix as they have good command-line features although MacOS might do) and consider it from the shell or command-line perspective. There exist ways of multi-tasking even in these environment (virtual terms, screen, etc). I would then consider the input issues, and the output issues. Input is a matter of supporting special keyboards, as necessary or other changes. Output is a matter of determining how best to render the screen (braille, audio, etc) and then writing libraries/tools that support such output. Sitting in a command-line environment I would consider the use of text-editors like emacs or vi, text-based mail tools, and so on. The issue seems to me to be less about the OS than about other software, (mail tools editors, etc.) A standard *nix distro could be built that would include support libraries for the alternative inputs and text-to-speech, etc out of the box. The issue is getting versions of the requisite software tools that support that feature. If the shell does then that will go a long way because a great deal of work can be done in the command-line (compiling etc depending upon their needs) but other tools will proobably be needed.
A long time ago we had an accessible OS it was the command line. Now in Linux, and Unix we still have it, but the advent of the GUI has changed the way we look at OSes as graphical, however behind the scenes the GUI just issues the same commands you would enter on the command line.
Now low vision users would be at an advantage using the older systems as well, since the black backgrounds with white text creates an extremely nice contrast, with screen magnification applications those that have very low vision had the ability to fine tune the magnification and sharpen the fonts, sometimes magnification would be 32 times the actual amounts, Now with color monitors Black is not really black it is a really dark gray, and Contrast is slightly lost.
No one these days makes an affordable Black and White Monitor, or video card.
Deaf users do not have an issue with a gui interface other than the content of video files that do not have text alternatives for spoken words.
Deaf and Blind users can use refreshable braille displays that interact as a keyboard, we had these, and still do.
So what am I saying? Well in basic terms I am saying we had everything accessible until we focused on the visual person, who didn't like the command line. No I am not an adovacte of the command line, but I would like to have a fully operating system that can run from the command line. Like we had with Windows 3.1 where the gui was an optional command or application.
TTY telephone devices also work and if needed have brallle displays for them too, so blind and deaf person can talk on the phone. These devices have been around for a long long time.
I have 12 years experience with assisitve devices and software. I work as a consultant to many Colleges, and Private businesses with a need to make assisitve technology part of their day to day environment.
Mick
I paid the going retail price for a Windows screen reader and got a free Unix computer!
I paid the going retail price for a Windows screen reader and got a free Unix computer!