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."

Comments

This is a tough place for developers to be in...

[im_thatoneguy]

This is definitely a challenge for all developers world wide. However, this is nothing new, or unique to FOSS, just an old problem approached from a new perspective.

As mentioned in the article, this leads back to an earlier Slashdot news post, on the Consistency/Efficiency debate.

I would be inclined to lean towards consistency myself, and side with the disabled folks, but how can you create new and exciting platforms while still being maintaining familiarity. If you ask me, the web is an excellent case study in creating exciting new products, while simultaneously establishing conventions.

Perhaps this article shouldn't be taken as a call to turn all of the FOSS software into retail clones, but to concentrate on bringing innovative features, while still maintaining a consistant and familiar interface.

Gimme, Gimme, Gimme

[killjoe]

Can a blind person install and configure windows, iis, SQL server, exchange, and active directory?

Once your favorite OSS tool is installed can a blind person use them?

How about other types of disabilities? How about if a person is blind and deaf? Or is missing both arms? Or is a quadrapeligic? How do we help them install and use linux?

It seems to me that you have to draw the line someplace. If somebody wants to put forth the effort then great but honestly why don't we concentrate on getting the documentation so that a reasonably intelligent non disabled person can use it first. Then we can worry about the blind.

In the mean time if a blind person wants to run linux please have them contact their local LUG, I am pretty sure somebody would step up to the plate. Another option might be to buy a pre-installed linux machine, lots of companies sell them.

Re:Gimme, Gimme, Gimme

[Eivind]

First: no. A blind person has significant problems doing all of those things.

I don't think that's a very good excuse though: "sure we suck, but the other guys do too."

Fact is, a blind person can still both hear and read. Linux has some base advantage here, because everything can be acomplished from a command-line, and face it, if you're blind it's a lot easier to do "cp a b" than it is to point at the tiny picture and drag it to the othe tiny picture, then let go.

It's usually not that hard to make a program more accessible. It's not an all or nothing thing. A little improvement is still a little improvement.

I agree with you that being able to *use* a system is more important than being able to install and configure a system, but that doesn't mean both aren't desireable.

Re:Gimme, Gimme, Gimme

[TheFlyingGoat]

Other than configuring Windows, all the other examples you give are server administration related. While there are people with certain disabilities that are system administrators, most have already solved many of the issues they'll face in that field. Many are only partially disabled or have the proper equipment to deal with the situations they'll come up against.

I believe more important is that the OSS community focus on making user software accessible to people with disabilities. Gnome focuses on this quite a bit. Firefox has done a decent job by including mouse gestures. There's still plenty of room for improvement, however.

My wife works as an occupational therapist and I spoke with her about this a few months ago. 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?

Just FOSS?

[odano]

How well does commercial software meet the needs of the disabled? I think all software needs to be updated, but surely it isn't just FOSS developers that are out of touch with the needs of the disabled.

Re:It's funny...

[shutdown -p now]

Coincidentially, I would imagine that good old command-line interface, which is well developed in Linux, compared to *cough cough* some OSes, would be the best for blind people in terms of accessibility.

larger problem

[a.d.trick]

It's not just FOSS. The computer world as a whole has largely ignored them. There have been several notible attempts to make them equals (the W3C for example), but the problem is that software interface people are 1) generally not disabled and do not understand what it is like to be disabled, and 2) generally aren't even experts at all, but tossed in from the software development or marketing department. As a result they're often clueless about accessability (hell even usability is a serious problems in many cases).

This isn't limited to FOSS. For a perfect example, see Netscape.

Every man for himself

[onesadcookie]

It strikes me that the open-source community is, by and large, an "every man for himself" environment. People create software that helps them solve the problems they have; they fix issues in that software that affect their usage of it. To a certain extent the highly organized, high-participation projects can alleviate that, but even there, if there's a dearth of volunteers for a particular task, what're the chances it'll actually get done?

That's not to say that all accessibility enhancements must be made by the disabled; there are of course a few charitable developers out there who'd be willing to take on these tasks for the greater good, and there are the friends and relatives of the disabled, who are in some sense "closer to the front line"... Realistically (or perhaps cynically) though, unless capable open-source developers are suffering without it, or unless someone sits down and pays for the development of it, the accessibility of open-source software is always going to be a low priority.

Don't like it? Do something about it yourself, or create a charitable foundation to pay for other people to. Such is capitalism, and such is human nature.

Wrong expectations

[iamacat]

Free software is written according to developer's personal needs and interests. If I have a blind friend, I might try to test my Internet radio recorder with his/her screen reader. If not, oh well, I barely have time to finish a graphics-only, English-only version anyway. Given that disabled people have limited potential to be developers or to be rich enough to justify commercial support in most software*, the best bet would be government grants or charitable contributions of development money/personal time. It's unlikely that most FOSS can be made accessible, only a few "key" projects like Firefox and Open Office.

* This is not to reflect on their intelligence or discount exceptional cases, but you know it's just harder for these folks to do things.

Community a natural market for FOSS

[CarpetShark]

This is definitely a challenge for all developers world wide. However, this is nothing new, or unique to FOSS, just an old problem approached from a new perspective.

Yes. However, what surprises me is that the Free Software community doesn't have stronger ties with community-centric organisations such as voluntary groups, human rights groups, etc. They're really natural allies, considering the ethical concerns that both groups take seriously etc.

Re:Community a natural market for FOSS

[moonbender]

That's true, but it's fairly natural and probably all right. Most people, that is those few that chose to work on any such issues focus on just one and take it "too serious", that is concentrate on it to the detriment of other issues. Take the animal rights guys for example. Or even the so-called anti globalisation people.

The cool thing is that when lots of people concentrate on things that are important to them, most things get covered and most things get covered fairly deeply. Sure I don't want to contemplate a world where everyone is an RMS, but a few of them are a very good thing.

Re:Community a natural market for FOSS

[linuxfanatic1024]

Hey, at least Linux is friendly to deaf people. My girlfriend is deaf, and she can do everything on it. We have closed captioning in Xine and MPlayer (and players based on those two engines), flashing bells, and everything else can be visual. She enjoys using it and says Linux is more accomodating to her than Windows ever was. She's glad she can watch DVD's with closed captioning in Kaffeine (and not subtitles--REAL closed captioning).

Then again, I know that there are many deaf programmers out there who we don't know about.

That said, now that we know deaf people can use Linux without a problem, we need to focus on blind people. I don't know exactly how we should do that, though; that's why we need blind programmers.

huh?

[Simon Garlick]

The most urgent task is to improve documentation.

Not for me it isn't. "Open Source" does not mean "good works for charity".

Standardization helps assistive technologies...

[StandardsSchmandards]

It seems to me that you have to draw the line someplace.

A common mistake is to treat disabled users as a separate group. In fact, disability is something that affects most people at some time in their life and disabled users (with varying disability) will exist in all target groups you can come up with for your OSS project. Instead, focus on standardization. In this way you will enable assistive technologies such as screen readers, magnifiers and braille displays to make the most out of your application. A few hints: If your OSS project is as web app, use the W3C specifications for HTML, test your app with the W3C validator and learn about basic semantic markup. This goes for all you Wordpress template creators out there as well. If you project is a Windows app, make sure it is compatible with Microsoft Active Accessibility Api. In general, follow the GUI guidelines or the environment your application is supposed to be used in.

Re:Slashdot Editor's Being Un-PC

[Decaff]

The thing that annoys me is this use of the word 'community'. This implies that FOSS people are one coherent group, or disabled people are one coherent groups. We are all individuals.

Re:Crock o' Shit

[jalefkowit]

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.

Tell that to somebody with perfect eyesight and impaired motor skills. There are a lot of dimensions to accessibility.

Set up a team of softare developers!

[danimrich]

I think the organizations that represent disabled people haven't realized that they should not deal with the FOSS community the way they do with Microsoft. FOSS development has mostly depended on someone needing/wanting/linking a certain functionality and then trying to code it. Whereas Microsoft will likely think about markets, good press and money.
I would suggest that the representative organizations set up a mixed team of blind and seeing software developers who could contribute to the FOSS community.

Two words:

[UncleRage]

Stephen Hawking

Idiot.

Re:So true.

[k8to]

You keep claiming that there's this exclusionary principle in making the software better for acceessability versus making the software better for other people. Or further that somehow an encouragement to make software more accessible should be rejected because there are more important things that have to come first.

The truth is that software, especially open source software, doesn't work like this. Resources are flexible with interest areas, some improvements in design reap efficiency rewards in development, while others cost.

Most accessability improvements in user faceing software tend to benefit all users by regularizing and streamlining interfaces. To some extent this work will also be undertaken by people who would not be undertaking the work (whatever it is) that you think is more essential.

But also there is the matter that accsessibility is something that permeates interface-oriented software. It is to some extent like security. Starting with a good set of accesibility design principles makes it easy. Trying to make an interface accessible long after it has been built into complexity is likely to be more work than caring about it from the start. Thus, advocating "putting this work off" will likely make it more costly (in resources) in the long run. Seperately, because of crossover benefits I believe it will make the software less good in the short run.

Of course, luckily, these decisions won't be made because of anything you or I advocate in these silly comments.