Slashdot Mirror
The State of Linux Accessibility
Dog's_Breakfast writes "This week's edition of DistroWatch Weekly News features a unique story entitled 'Linux Accessibility — What is it and Why Does It Matter?' The article was written by Robert Cole, a blind person with a computer science degree. Mr Cole points out that Linux offers an excellent set of free tools for seeing-impaired users. Putting together a similar set of tools on Windows would cost at least US$600, about double what a retail copy of Windows itself costs."
Close your eyes. Let your mind take control. And turn your brain into a dance floor.
Dance floor build initiated.
Start the drums. Building graph sequence. And the baseline created the melody. Melody programmed.
Now, add the people. Enter access code... Access granted.
Welcome to the dance floor. Here is your DJ, Armin van Buuren. This is... THE STATE OF LINUX ACCESSABILITY!
Because you can do everything with the command line. Keyboard text input. Spoken text output.
...Because when I saw "accessibility" I immediately thought "ease-of-use" and had a laugh.
When you boot up an Ubuntu live CD or USB drive, press CTRL+S when you hear a drum sound. This will start the Orca screen reader, and you can either try Ubuntu using Orca or install Ubuntu with your eyes closed; it's entirely your choice. I was able to do a complete installation (including partitioning my drives) without having to look at my screen!
Didn't know about this option. I have to say that this is pretty cool.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
It has tons of accessibility features for the visually impaired if you know where to look.
I get this same feeling every time I lose my glasses. The bitter irony of having to look for your glasses...
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
...because the article is about accessibility tools for seeing-impaired users?
Because it lends credibility to him writing an article about accessibility, which is mostly about the blind when it comes to computers.
I used to work with a blind programmer. He is a Linux geek. Every year or two he tries the screen readers in Linux, and says they all suck compared to Jaws in Windows (including Orca).
So he does all his email, web browsing, etc in Windows, as well as as much programming as he can get away with. For him Linux has been relegated to a toy he plays with once in a while.
Beetle B.
Because as a person with good site your views on accessibility features are quite different then someone who is blind. A webpage using graphic as text without a good alt tag could be the difference between a good ui and a bad one. Or even just the fact that someone when a form requires something to be filled in it may just be in a different color. Most UI enhancements are visual. I myself have good eye site, and operate my computer with the speakers on Mute, So my perception of a good UI is based on my site. Having known a few people who are blind, I understand that their perception of computing is much different, and you things that you take for granted are much different.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I just wonder how a blind user knows whether the install CD is inserted the right way up in the first place.
And I'll add that this is important because, as a sighted developer who once worked on a website specifically intended for blind users, I know it's ridiculously easy to make really bad assumptions about what blind people want. That design with a list of options arranged to be read first is great for a front page, but gets really annoying after it's read on every page....
Sighted people suck.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Well, I would hate to try using computer with no hands. I was almost there once. I got a medical condition that disables legs and hands and spent almost 4 months in hospital. The lucky thing is, it only affected my legs and my hands continued to work. That meant four full months of nerding in bed while nurses brought me food, drinks and took my shit (I had to literally shit in bed as I couldn't move).
Odd, being highly visually impared, I've found Windows to be much easier to work with than a Mac. Mind you, I'm not completely blind, so I don't know about how well the screen reader software is (though, in my experience, it isn't so bad). Also, without doing anything special, I can use the keyboard for almost everything in Windows. The only Mac user I know, who uses the keyboard for everything, had to do quite a lot of tweaking to set it up.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Anybody who isn't on welfare switched to OS X years ago.
Yep, even my blind aunt agrees. She thinks it's sad Apple ran out of cat names, and that Swahili was an odd choice, but "Ubuntu" is her new favourite OS.
You're right, your description is clearer. Thanks for the clarification.
Do you know of any easy way to rely on that without getting fingerprints all over the data side?
Sure! Licking it will not leave a fingerprint!
As others have said, CDs and DVDs already have a built-in feature for blind people and people changing discs in the dark. The side that goes towards the laser (usually "down") has a ridge near the hub. It's prominent enough that you can easily feel it through a paper sleeve (and if you have a jewel box, you should already have it the right side up, but you can still feel for it if in doubt).
An interesting and related problem: A website aimed at the deaf took the time to provide video of their site translated into ASL. At first glance, this seems stupid - many deaf people can read perfectly well. But it actually turns out that people who were born deaf or became deaf in early childhood have significant literacy problems, especially if they learned ASL first, because reading English engages the auditory senses.
Asking a sighted person on how to design properly for the blind, or a hearing person on how to design properly for the deaf, makes about as much sense as asking a marketing guy about how to design a web server: They may have some ideas, but will have no clue which ones are good.
I am officially gone from
OS X is still the only OS that doesn't have any way to uniformly scale all UI elements up (say, to 150%). Which is a major pain if you have poor eyesight, or just want to use a Mac Mini with a 30" TV.
What tools/features are you using for Windows? I'm legally blind, -22 diopters of correction for each eye. What I'm currently using is a modified dark theme so that I can use the built in accelerated magnifier (I can't tolerate bright themes) and I've mapped the magnifier to win+mouse wheel to make it more like compiz. I'm also nearly entirely hotkey driven, I use the mouse very little for every day tasks.
Of course there are so many applications that don't follow the windows colour scheme, even the built in High Contrast classic theme is ignored by so many apps, hardcoded font colours and so on.
What really erks me are web pages. I use Firefox with Stylish (or just vanilla FF and set my custom colours to my taste) but most sites have issues rendering correctly because it overrides a lot of colour/style rules.
I can't really comment on Linux's features as I don't use Linux as a desktop, just for servers. Mostly because it doesn't run my music software or my games and I hate dual booting.
Accessibility is still a joke in Windows and for internet browsing.