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FOSS and Disabled Communities Out of Touch
Yinepuhotep writes "Newsforge has a thought-provoking article on the lack of communication between the FOSS community and disabled persons." From the article: "How can the FOSS community address the issues of the disabled? The most urgent task is to improve documentation. Perhaps you can make it a personal goal to be able to configure your favorite FOSS tool blindfolded while someone reads your improved instructions aloud. Your local LUG could organize ways to connect volunteers to assist disabled users with installations. Be sure to contact local disability rights groups to let them know what you're doing. They may also be able to provide more feedback about needs in your community."
an a blind person install and configure windows, iis, SQL server, exchange, and active directory?
I don't know about that, but MacOS X (starting with 10.4) is designed to be installable by a blind person.
Oh, and she's also a Gentoo dev. How could I forget?
There is BLinux.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
The thing is, if you make everything clean enough to be used by users with disabilities, the entire system ALSO becomes more usable for regular users, usually.
A good example is webpages. Having them be standards compliant is important for users with disabilities. The standards compliance also helps regular users on text-based browsers, and regular users in general.
- Even Slackware gives the option to install a speakup kernel.
- KDE has text-to-speech, though only the frontend in earlier versions.
- KDE also enables you to resize the screen easily, helping those with less severe vision problems.
- Check this out
Nothing in FOSS can be taken and presented as An Official Display of How Good It Is And Always Shall Be. Most things are work in progress.If there's a lack of communication, it's the fault of the disabled community. Or are FOSS developers to spend their time researching potential user groups' needs instead of coding? I imagine that disabled rights groups have already provided the necessary information, and are just waiting for the tools to appear, because from what little I've seen, they're very good at doing their part. If they haven't done that yet, tough luck. Unless they want some sighted programmer to just guess?
Another thing I didn't like about this article was its use of the phrase "disabled people". It's about THE BLIND, so just say THE BLIND. Deaf people don't have any fixable problems with computers unless some idiot decides to make their program depend on sound feedback. There's little we can do to enable a dumb person to use VOIP, short of recognising their speech and converting it to text. Reduced mobility users need to complain to their hardware vendors if there are no Linux drivers for their single-handed keyboards or whatever they may need. They are working on blind access. Work is slow because FOSS runs on itch scratching. People make software that they want. Companies work on software that they use.
I really want blind users to be able to have their needs catered for. I don't want them to need to send letters saying things like "Do you know that choosing Linux means excluding blind users?". But as in everything else, steps are being made. Unfortunately, it's quite a long journey:
She said that most popular Windows software is pretty well designed for people with handicaps (customizable menus, font sizes, color schemes, layout, etc). She hasn't worked with many linux programs, so she couldn't provide much of a comparison, but your comments are why disabled people might not choose linux over Windows. Just like most users, they just want software that works for them. If the software needs to be designed slightly better to work for them, then where's the harm in trying to improve it?
Interestingly, most of these items would benefit non-handicapped people just as much. Too many programs rely on a limited set of assumptions.
One example I've come across: the assumption that a monitor has 72 dpi resolution. In Windows, you can resize the standard UI elements to be usable on monitors with a higher resolution, but applications that use nonstandard UI widgets all too often ignore this setting. Winamp is an example of how it shouldn't be done: it's tiny on my 21" monitor running at 1600x1200. Photoshop palettes suffer from the same problem.
... I do have this eye condition where my eyes focus differently in different colors. Where normal vision would see a white dot on a black background, when that dot is made up of 3 narrow band colors, what I see are 3 separate dots. They aren't too far apart, although the blue one is out of focus and fuzzy. When reading white text on a black background, I get a mix of colors. I can read it, but it causes eyestrain. Reversing that to black text on white background makes it easier on my eyes. That's how I'm typing on Slashdot right now. Every character I type has fuzzy color edges to it ... red on the left and bottom, blue on the top, green on the right, and yellow below the red on the bottom.
I deal with this in a number of ways. Since I do most of my programming, system administration, and network administration via the text mode console in Linux, I just change the colors there to better suit my needs. By making the contrast between foreground color and background color limited to a single color, where the other 2 colors have the same intensity between foreground and background, I can read text easily with no eyestrain for hours. So in that sense I'm taking care of myself, and I'm lucky enough to not be disabled in a way that prevents me from managing to do that from the starting point that's designed specifically for normal vision people.
That said, there are still some troubling issues that people need to be aware of and sensitive to. There are a few programs that operate in a text environment (can run on console, or under xterm, etc) that intentionally alter the color environment, and screw up my color setup. It needs to be possible to disable that. In one program I was trying, which erased all my color maps and substituted the defaults, someone suggested the monochrome option it had. In that mode it still erased all my color maps, and then showed me only white text on black background. That didn't actually help at all. What I need is for programs to either leave my colors alone, or at least provide an option (documented in the man page ... yes, I read those) to turn that off. And by "off" I don't mean not to use different color text for highlighting, I mean just don't alter my color maps.
It's worse in X. Not all the colors can be changed in one place. Each application has its own separate configuration for colors. It would help if there was a standardized place for all applications to check for color preferences and at least use them by default. And web pages are a bit worse because each web site, if it can even be changed at all, has to be changed separately. It's getting a tad bit better with more widespread use of style sheets and such.
I also have to be sensitive to the fact that there is a wide range of possible disabilities or just difficulties (what I classify my condition as) and that program developers just can't easily envision, or certainly can't readily test, how their software deals with all the possible needs of different users. I'm sure stuff I've written might be difficult or impossible to use by some others depending on their disability. But the better we can communicate between developers and users, the more we can both improve usability.
This condition I have is only a problem when the light sources are made up of discrete narrowband colors. A broad continuous spectrum doesn't really cause the problem because it just makes things a tiny bit fuzzy in a smooth way that is easy to focus on. Sunlight is almost perfectly continuous. Incandescent light bulbs are also just as good. This condition doesn't affect my ability to actually see; it merely causes stress and eyestrain when the conditions are worse. One of the worst things for me are fluorescent lights. Then everything I look at under that lighting has the problem. White LEDs are no better. Ironically, those orange-peach colored high pressure sodium lamps often used on streets and parking lots don't cause me any problems at all (though they ca
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars