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Accessibility In Linux Is Good (But Could Be Much Better)
An anonymous reader sends this report from opensource.com: GNU/Linux distributions provide great advantages over proprietary alternatives for people with disabilities. All the accessibility tools included in Linux are open source, meaning their code is readily available if you want to examine or improve it, and cost nothing. Hardware devices, of course, are still going to cost money. Additionally, accessibility software on other platforms generally contain licensing constraints on the user. ... When it comes to accessibility, Linux is not without issues. ... The number of developers who specifically work on accessibility tools is quite small. For example, there is only one Orca developer, two AT-SPI developers, and a single GTK developer. ... Developers who do not depend on assistive technologies tend to forget—or don't know—that a disabled person might want to use their application, read their web page, and so on. ... The problem is not necessarily that developers do not care. Rather, it's is that accessibility is highly specialized and requires someone with knowledge in the area, regardless of platform.
Also, from the article:
Unlike proprietary alternatives, Fedora (and other Linux distros with the Gnome desktop) includes accessibility tools out of the box, such as:
Screen reader: A text-to-speech system to read what's on the screen
Magnifier: Helps users with visual impairments who need larger text and images
High-contrast mode: Helps users who have trouble seeing text unless contrast is corrected, such as white text on a black background, or vice versa
Mouse keys: Controls the mouse using the number pad
Sticky keys: Helps users who have trouble pressing multiple keys at once, and users who have use of only one hand
Bounce keys: To ignore rapidly pressed keys or if a key is accidentally held down
On screen keyboard: Helps users who cannot type at all, but who can use a mouse
Visual alerts: Replace system sounds with visual cues
Um... unlike what proprietary systems? He surely can't be talking about Windows, because it has every single one of these features, and has had most of them since Windows 95 two decades ago!
It's great that Linux/Gnome now also includes these features, but the author doesn't really help his cause by misrepresenting (I'm being kind in my choice of words here) the competition's features.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Trying to apply the usual "do it yourself" attitude is probably why accessibility is a problem in the first place, especially since we're talking about a portion of users who legitimately can't do it for themselves. Programming for accessibility takes particular expertise and paying careful attention to the requirements I mentioned before. On top of that, if different developers and communities go off and do their own thing without striving for any real standards beyond the bare minimum requirements, it would surely be a nightmare for users who do need those features to go from one program to the next.
I certainly get that developers have limits, but putting accessibility features on the same chopping block as anything else based on user percentages is very short-sighted and the kind of cold, corporate-like response one might expect from Microsoft or Apple (ironic, then, that they readily provide those features). I'd hate to be the director who has to tell a vision-impaired user she isn't important enough or that there aren't enough of her kind to waste time and resources catering to.