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?"

Comments

Wrong Question.

[uberdave]

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.

Is this really an OS question?

[Macrobat]

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.