Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
evil is as evil does
... poke an OSS developer in the eyes today!
http://outcampaign.org/
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.
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.
dmwaters, a really cool blind lady, is an IRCop on Freenode. I wonder what she'd have to say about the article.
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.
The FOSS community has enough trouble getting things working for the able bodied let alone the disabled...
rimshot
thanks, I am here all week... tip your waitress...
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.
I'm what the state calls "Visually Disabled". Some people would rather just say I'm retarded, or even "useless". All are terms I often hear, despite the fact that I was born normal with better then 20/20 eyesight.
Like it or not there is a large rift between the needs of the disabled and the people willing to take the extra time to address it. Disabled people, no matter the affliction, all have the same problem today: Only the people who need the extra interface flexibility are the ones interested in doing anything about it. And 99% of the time, they still cant because what they need is required to be able to build that very same system. Its a recursive dependency.
We need a better focus on software based voice systems. Speech recognition, and yes better generation, it all needs to be there and sound good and be fast doing it. And yes, sounding good matters. I always laugh when I hear (google for festival, flite, blind linux) people talk about "eye candy" or "improved frame rates". They dont matter, and its just useless junk to me and others who lack the visual functions to care about how crisp the screen looks; What I and every other visually disabled person wants is "Ear Candy", the type of synthed voice that sounds like she or he really exists, so we dont get fed up with listening to that horrible robot voice all day and go crazy.
One thing that most people dont understand as well is that most of us who are disabled in any way at all are dirt poor. It could be from medical bills, the lack of the ability to even work because of our disability, the fact that to most we are seen as less then human so people dont want to hire us for work we can do, or any number of other reasons. The fact is, most of us do not have much money and have a lot of free time on our hands. We could be open sources greatest contributors if the OOS community cared enough to do the things we cant to help us make the tools we need. Once our hungry minds have the option, you have no idea how much we will use it.
I'm very lucky. I worked as a independent consulted for 5 years, taught myself as much as I could while I still had better eye sight then I do now in my "good" eye, and make sure to keep lights dim or off when I dont have to worry about a sightie needing more light to function so I dont get eye strain or migraines that could keep me from working due to my photo sensitivity. I made a living with Linux offering support, administration services, and my skills as a code monkey against all odds for 5 years, before my current job, because I did not give up. Many of my fellow disabled did not have the chance to use even that much sight, or did not get the time I did at a young age to learn things the "normal" way before my accident. That gave me a slight advantage, as now I know both worlds.
Most of us dont have that. But then again most people dont understand, they cant. So everybody reading this, pick a day out of the week and go to bed the night before wearing a blindfold. Wake up with it still on and go through just one day without your ability to see. At all. Then maybe you will get a hint of what it is like for us, OOS's most eager and unwelcome members. And I say only a hint as that is all you will get; Because the first time you fall down, bump into something and break soemthing, want to cook a meal or need to take a piss, the first thing your going to do is take that blindfold off. Just remember that many do not have that option.
- d
There is BLinux.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
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.
One of the Rhodes Scholars I knew back in my PhD program is blind. He was one of our best numerical analyst and could code in C or MATLAB as well as anyone else. He had a device that he connected to his computer that would scan whatever line the cursor was on and then raise some pins to form Braille. To read math books, he would request the LaTeX source from the publisher. He made all of his graphs in GNUPlot. He could even scan a page from a note and have OCR translate it to ASCII. He had no trouble getting his work done.
Trigun, don't feed the anoynmous trolls! And being an extreme-right winger myself, disabled users sounds like a great underexploited market niche.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
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.
The Open Source solution framework is, by all appearances, going to be a far better, overall, experience for blind users -- but it's going to take some time to ramp up to the point where it's operationally better than (or even equivalent to), the current solution that third-party providers have managed to back-hack onto Office.
In the meantime, it's going to take some work to convince these people that there's some long term value to helping the FOSS community get up to speed.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
The most urgent task is to improve documentation.
Not for me it isn't. "Open Source" does not mean "good works for charity".
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
Standards Schmandards
Check out the video at channel9 (click the source link above). There's especially one really good question/answer combo in there, I'll transcript it:
[ Start: 08:50 ] Interviewer: How could the software be improved for you? What would you tell the Visual Studio team, for instance, to do to make the software better.
Kenneth: Visual Studio has been very difficult for me to learn with JAWS. JAWS company itself does not specifically support Visual Studio as of now. And they're really working hard on adding the support to the JAWS software. So I think as of now that's the main thing that's holding back the accessibility levels, that JAWS itself hasn't really fully incorporated it. But I think Visual Studio relies very heavily on colored text, for symbolizing things. So rather than having the text that's related to one thing versus another isolated in different locations on the screen, they're all in a list and the different categories are symbolized for different text colors and background colors. I think that makes it a little bit difficult to sort things out on the screen with a screen reader.
So that would be one thing I could suggest, but I think we're primarily waiting on JAWS. [...] As long as they're continually aware of the accessibility levels of their software and test them for that aspect of the usability. Then I think it'll continue to be usable, as long as the specialized software such as JAWS evolves along with it. And so I think that they're working hard at companies like JAWS and their competitors to stay current. And sometimes they fall behind, and I think for specialized programs like software development that aren't as common as say Word processors that sometimes are not as up to date. [ End: 11:12 ]
define: JAWS
"JAWS (an acronym for Job Access With Speech) is a screen reader for the visually impaired." (Source)
Perfect is the enemy of done.
Talking to Niall Sclater, Virtual Learning Environment Programme Director at The Open University on what they're having to do to Moodle to bring it up to scratch for their large community of blind users was very interesting. The OU have 100,000 students, 10,000 of them with a registered disability, basically they're have to completely redo the accessibility of Moodle.
There was, however, no suggestion that any of the alternatives, commerical or open source were any better.
cheers, thingie
If you're interested in hearing Niall speak on such issues, or have a pointed question to ask him, why not register for our up-coming Open Source and Sustainability 2006 conference
Guidelines exist for software as well but are rarely used for some reason. A few examples that would help all users:
I believe that following these and other specifications would make life much better for all users. These guidelines will make sure your software works with most assistive technologies as well.
There are also a lot of open source developer tools to help you test your applications. E.g.:
Standards Schmandards
The disabled users in Massachusetts do have a point:
I'm not saying that is right or wrong, but that is where we are. If you force a switch to other platforms and applications, you do need to ensure that at least the current (and pretty awful) level of accessibility is maintained. And that's not just developing accessible FOSS applications, but providing training and support to the users, including the special needs evaluators & trainers. It's not a trivial task.
My own PhD research into improving the accessibility of mass-produced mobile devices (phones, pda's, psp's etc) is based on open and international standards. All work products (as far as my university allows) will be released under the GPL or eqivalent. So I'm not anti-FOSS at all, but one step forward and two backwards isn't progress. Unless it's managed properly, switching platforms and applications (to FOSS based ones, or to any others) can cause real problems for disabled users.
Wouldn't the effort be better spent trying to fix the actual disability in the first place? We spend a frighteningly small amount on fundamental research, and it seems that almost every development comes up against the "moral" luddites who don't want any kind of medical breakthrough in case it offends their religion. *sigh*
- 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:
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.
This is an additional reason to learn proper (X)HTML, CSS et al. They have very interesting accessibility features which cannot be matched by ad-hoc MSIE HTML.
BTW, while I'm evangelizing standards, every web developer, *especially* framework developers (Rails guys, I'm looking at you), should be required by law to read the damn HTTP RFC. Content-negotiation is so underrated; it could be very useful for accessibility. HTTP rulez, it's a shame that so few reconize it.
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
I am all for these man pages that read themselves aloud. Sometimes it is just so hard to muster the proper indignation needed to tell a blind newbie GSTRTFMTY (Get Someone To RTFM To You).
Until I witnessed a 100% blind person using a computer, my
understanding of the problem was very flawed. With the
monitor turned off he could browse web sites, read/write
email, and puzzle through popup error messages. He used
a text to speech software package that read to him faster
than I could listen. The package also provided an interface
for configuring a huge number of custom hotkeys which he
programmed and used extensively. The way his brain adapted to a
sound based interface was amazing. I've never seen anything
like it.
Yes! We're all individuals!
I'm not!
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
This whole story sounds just about completely made-up to me. I've talked with a lot of blind people who use Linux, and they all say how great it is, and how completely impossible it is to use Windows.
A few Linux distros were put together for the express purpose of making a distro for the disabled. Some, like Slackware, come ready for disabled users, having a "speak-up" enabled kernel on the CD, meaning you only need to type a few characters before it will start reading output to you...
The individual who they detailed in the article presumably already had someone set-up Windows for him, installing all the speech software necessary. His problem is that he'd have to install Linux (not hard really, hook-up a null-modem cable between computers), get speech-synthesis working, and he apparently doesn't understand English in the slightest, needing brazilian translation as well.
This frustration doesn't strike me as being any more serious than the standard Windows user trying to switch to Linux, when he's not familiar with it... They just don't want ANY CHANGES at all. I really don't see this as a disability issue at all.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
where's all that Karma?
Stephen Hawking
Idiot.
#SickNotWeak
... 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
On the bright side, one is shielded from effects of goatse then...
One that hath name thou can not otter