How far do we take your philosophy? Deny small minority religious groups the ability to celebrate their holiday because they are a tiny minority (sorry, we won't accommodate Johnny taking his test on another day because he will be church then; sorry, you can't take a day off for from work for this holiday, you're fired)? How about a liberal reverse that came up in San Francisco: require that all employers offer domestic partnership benefits (including Catholic charities, a minority among employers in SF)?
In the minority religion case, we go with a general policy that applies to all. We allow any test to be reschedule. Employers give employees a collection of vacation days that they can apply where they wish - such as to a religious holiday. In the San Francisco case, they redefined domestic partner to not be based on a sexual relationship -> one family member caring for another could claim a "domestic partnership" which would then be recognized by all.
The principle here is to define a larger framework into which these "special cases" apply. As for the web - as has been cited throughout this thread, general good web design means it is good for searchability and security and multi-platform/multi-browser and mobile browsers and... Do don't make "special for the disabled" web pages (or "do extra work for the disabled"); make good web pages that meet lots of needs. Better still, make the tools do the "right thing"[tm] as much as possible, so in fact it isn't much extra work at all.
I think key is the circumstances in which a government might or might not force this. Right now (Section 508 of the Federal Rehabilitation Act), it *is* forced by Congress to apply to government websites. Thus, the Federal Government shall not put forth websites for the general public that are inaccessible (a law that is not met 100%...). Many U.S. States apply this law as well, and it applies selectively to many educational institutions. I'm guessing most wouldn't disagree with this application.
Next tier to contemplate are offerings on behalf of the government by others (e.g. a "file your income taxes' website). Is it fair for the government to make accessibility a requirement (one among many existing requirements having to do with privacy and security) for any commercial business/website that it authorizes as handling federal tax filings? I think many would agree with this - it isn't a law exactly, just a contract clause.
The tier after that are commercial establishments that also have a web presence - does the ADA apply to their web presence as it does their physical buildings (National Federation of the Blind v. Target is deciding this matter).
Perhaps the final tier is person-to-person websites (e.g. Facebook). I think most would agree the government shouldn't demand accessibility here.
'course, if the judge who walked in with the seeing-eye dog was an Orca user, he'd of known all about Ubuntu as it's the place lots of blind folks use their Orca screen reader. Then there wouldn't have even been that $50 fine...
It doesn't matter whether the signal coming into the house is HDTV, SD, or whatever (digital in any case, via IP). What matters is what kinds of TVs their service will drive.
This is precisely why the license for OOo changed to LGPL (which happened just prior to OOo 2.0). Under the previous license, code did not need to be contributed back (and the OOo derived functionality in IBM's Lotus Notes 8 came from OOo 1.9.x). The big news in the IBM announcement is that IBM is returning to the community from whence it forked OOo, and contributing back (many? most? all) of their changes. One thing that is being highlighted (and discussed in this thread and erroneously attributed to a Microsoft original source) is that among their first contributions back is the newly created by them Windows edition of the accessibility work that they derived from OOo.
IAccessible2 is an extension to IAccessible, the core accessible object in Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA). It supplements the MS-defined information with a ton of stuff that is missing and is needed to provide real support for assistive technologies (vs. the very limited job Microsoft did). IAccessible2 is actually a port of the GNOME Accessibility API that Sun developed and brought to the GNOME community (see ATK and AT-SPI from the GNOME SVN repository). That was in turn derived from the Java Accessibility API, of which I am a co-author.
Fiber to the end of the block, then twisted pair to a 2-wire router in my basement. They'll route internally over coax or twisted pair (commonly the former if they do the internal wiring). The 2-wire router has three ports: IP of coax, 100baseT, and WiFi G. My connection is limited to 27Mbps down and 2Mbps up. Of that 27, I get 6 for general Internet use, the remaining 21 is for IPTV into a Motorola box running Microsoft IPTV. Of the 2Mbps up, I only get 1 for Internet use (what in the world does IPTV need 1Mbps up for???). My router claims a theoretical maximum 110Mbps down for me from the fiber on the curb. Dynamic IP addresses for now, with a 29-day lease (PITA).
HD movies are nice (all 6 StarWars, just in time for the 30th anniversary). Internet speeds are nice. Price is decent. But what I really want is higher-def still, way faster Internet download, and a static IP address. Told this to their VP, got a nice reply that said little...
For a few centuries countries like India had their natural resources and human resources sapped for the West (think East India Trading Company). Now some of the > billion people in India, and the > billion people in China, etc., are developing marketable skills and well paying (for them) services and we start to finally see a transfer of wealth back from the West to these countries.
And we're already seeing massive wage inflation, and a similarly massive housing price inflation in regions filled with high tech workers. This 'correction' for several centuries of wealth transfer to the West will be fast by comparison - decades rather than centuries. And somewhere in there the economies of the by then 2.5th world will have grown enough to generate enough demand to need to import products and services from the West again (with the real limiting factor to all this being the impact on the environment of having all of that added consumption in the world).
Yes, no great consolation to Americans' (and Europeans') jobs lost. But unlike India and China, we have all greatly benefited from increased life expectancy and relatively clean water and air. Compare a Western life expectancy to someone in India or China today.
As others have noted in this thread, the mainstream media continues to repeat the falsehood that Microsoft is responsible for the accessibility of MS-Office (which is to say, the extent to which Windows assistive technology vendors have special-cased and reverse-engineering MS-Office). David Berlind's interview with Curtis Chong of the National Federation of the Blind make this very clear (see his blog at: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2163
http://orionacademy.org/ is an interesting and innovative high school focusing on kids with Aspergers Syndrome and NLD. They require all students to have Apple iBooks. Kids with these issues commonly have trouble with the motor skills to write legibly, and also commonly have difficulty with the mental multitasking needed to both pay attention in class and take notes of what is being said. All assignments (except in math class) are done on the computer. The iBooks connect wirelessly to the school server, which in turn has all of the notes from the electronic whiteboards used by the teachers in class.
It also makes the backpacks lighter, as only the laptop is taken from/to school every day.
If you are looking to design an OS specifically for the blind (vs. legally blind/low-vision), look to http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/. This was design by a blind person for himself and other blind users - a complete speech/audio environment within emacs. It isn't an OS, but is a fine example of a UI to consider in making a blind persons' OS.
On the other hand, if you are looking to make a blind-friendly general OS, then look to the "3rd generation approach" to accessibility in GNOME, Mac OS X v10.4, and Longhorn. All of these are doing API-based accessibility, where every object on the screen implements a rich accessibility API which is taken together and then re-presented to the blind (or others with other disabilities). In GNOME this is with the open source Gnopernicus screen reader (see http://www.baum.ro/gnopernicus.html). In Mac OS X v10.4 this is VoiceOver. Longhorn hasn't declared itself fully on this topic yet.
A final thing to look at is the work my co-worker Willie Walker and the University of Toronto Adaptive Technology Resource Centre did with the a speech Look and Feel for Swing.
I just returned from the CSUN Conference on Technology and Persons with Disabilities where Pete DeVasto of Adobe was demoing a beta build of Adobe Reader for Linux using the Gnopernicus screen reader. Speech output, Braille output, working navigation of the PDF documents he showed (including forms), all accessible to him on the Sun Opteron box he was using, running the forthcoming edition of Sun's Java Desktop System Release 3 (GNOME 2.6 with GNOME 2.8 accessibility bits). Even as someone very much involved in this work (I'm Sun's Accessibility Architect), it was really cool to see this, and to see the reactions from folks at the conference to what Adobe was showing.
3. GUI Access. The only real option today is the Gnopernicus screen reader/magnifier http://www.baum.ro/gnopernicus.html that is part of the GNOME desktop http://www.gnome.org/start via the GNOME Accessibility Project http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/ (though other options are being explored). Note: my day job is as Sun's Accessibility Architect, working on the GNOME Accessibility Project and helping with the development of things like Gnopernicus, and another amazing product for people with physical impairments - GOK http://www.gok.ca/.
Users with RSI and a whole spectrum of disabilities that require speech input aren't being ignored. There simply aren't many options for voice recognition software under UNIX besides the very high end telephony products (that cost *lots* of money). There is a new generation Sphinx engine which is showing a lot of promise, and the GNOME accessibility architects at Sun (and elsewhere) are eagerly waiting for it to mature just a little bit more before tackling the first task which is command and control (the current Sphinx engine is starting to product good results in ~1,000 word vocabularies).
Thus far the commercial vendors of desktop speech recognition technology (Dragon, IBM, etc.) have not made a public commitment to develop commercial products for UNIX environments. Though I'm hopeful that may change, we are continuing to work on Sphinx 4 so we have that as an option (and Sun is contributing to that effort).
We are building a completely new accessibility platform in GNOME from the ground up. We aren't going to have 100% of the pieces in the first release. As we were able to move more quickly with technology for people with a wide range of visual and severe physical impairments, we felt it made sense to release those now rather than holding up a first release so that voice recognition could be part of it.
The GNOME accessibility architecture was designed with voice recognition in mind from the very beginning.
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In the minority religion case, we go with a general policy that applies to all. We allow any test to be reschedule. Employers give employees a collection of vacation days that they can apply where they wish - such as to a religious holiday. In the San Francisco case, they redefined domestic partner to not be based on a sexual relationship -> one family member caring for another could claim a "domestic partnership" which would then be recognized by all.
The principle here is to define a larger framework into which these "special cases" apply. As for the web - as has been cited throughout this thread, general good web design means it is good for searchability and security and multi-platform/multi-browser and mobile browsers and... Do don't make "special for the disabled" web pages (or "do extra work for the disabled"); make good web pages that meet lots of needs. Better still, make the tools do the "right thing"[tm] as much as possible, so in fact it isn't much extra work at all.
Now, as to whether this should be forced on a web site, and by whom, and in what way... that is a separate discussion. See my reply to that at: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=526280&cid=23114106
I think key is the circumstances in which a government might or might not force this. Right now (Section 508 of the Federal Rehabilitation Act), it *is* forced by Congress to apply to government websites. Thus, the Federal Government shall not put forth websites for the general public that are inaccessible (a law that is not met 100%...). Many U.S. States apply this law as well, and it applies selectively to many educational institutions. I'm guessing most wouldn't disagree with this application.
Next tier to contemplate are offerings on behalf of the government by others (e.g. a "file your income taxes' website). Is it fair for the government to make accessibility a requirement (one among many existing requirements having to do with privacy and security) for any commercial business/website that it authorizes as handling federal tax filings? I think many would agree with this - it isn't a law exactly, just a contract clause.
The tier after that are commercial establishments that also have a web presence - does the ADA apply to their web presence as it does their physical buildings (National Federation of the Blind v. Target is deciding this matter).
Perhaps the final tier is person-to-person websites (e.g. Facebook). I think most would agree the government shouldn't demand accessibility here.
'course, if the judge who walked in with the seeing-eye dog was an Orca user, he'd of known all about Ubuntu as it's the place lots of blind folks use their Orca screen reader. Then there wouldn't have even been that $50 fine...
Typical U-verse (as delivered to my house in Oakland, CA) uses a Motorola VIP1200 IPTV set-top box (see http://www.motorola.com/content.jsp?globalObjectId=7460-10536-10543), which among things has an NTSC composite video output connector (see http://www.motorola.com/mot/image/16/16315_MotImage.jpg). It will even send a signal via an RF coax connection fercrissake!
This is precisely why the license for OOo changed to LGPL (which happened just prior to OOo 2.0). Under the previous license, code did not need to be contributed back (and the OOo derived functionality in IBM's Lotus Notes 8 came from OOo 1.9.x). The big news in the IBM announcement is that IBM is returning to the community from whence it forked OOo, and contributing back (many? most? all) of their changes. One thing that is being highlighted (and discussed in this thread and erroneously attributed to a Microsoft original source) is that among their first contributions back is the newly created by them Windows edition of the accessibility work that they derived from OOo.
More specifically, the IAccessible2 header files are copied almost directly from the OpenOffice.org UNO Accessibility API - the IAccessible2 headers contain a Sun copyright! See http://blogs.sun.com/korn/date/20070910 and http://blogs.sun.com/korn/date/20061214 for more on this.
Fiber to the end of the block, then twisted pair to a 2-wire router in my basement. They'll route internally over coax or twisted pair (commonly the former if they do the internal wiring). The 2-wire router has three ports: IP of coax, 100baseT, and WiFi G. My connection is limited to 27Mbps down and 2Mbps up. Of that 27, I get 6 for general Internet use, the remaining 21 is for IPTV into a Motorola box running Microsoft IPTV. Of the 2Mbps up, I only get 1 for Internet use (what in the world does IPTV need 1Mbps up for???). My router claims a theoretical maximum 110Mbps down for me from the fiber on the curb. Dynamic IP addresses for now, with a 29-day lease (PITA). HD movies are nice (all 6 StarWars, just in time for the 30th anniversary). Internet speeds are nice. Price is decent. But what I really want is higher-def still, way faster Internet download, and a static IP address. Told this to their VP, got a nice reply that said little...
For a few centuries countries like India had their natural resources and human resources sapped for the West (think East India Trading Company). Now some of the > billion people in India, and the > billion people in China, etc., are developing marketable skills and well paying (for them) services and we start to finally see a transfer of wealth back from the West to these countries.
And we're already seeing massive wage inflation, and a similarly massive housing price inflation in regions filled with high tech workers. This 'correction' for several centuries of wealth transfer to the West will be fast by comparison - decades rather than centuries. And somewhere in there the economies of the by then 2.5th world will have grown enough to generate enough demand to need to import products and services from the West again (with the real limiting factor to all this being the impact on the environment of having all of that added consumption in the world).
Yes, no great consolation to Americans' (and Europeans') jobs lost. But unlike India and China, we have all greatly benefited from increased life expectancy and relatively clean water and air. Compare a Western life expectancy to someone in India or China today.
It also makes the backpacks lighter, as only the laptop is taken from/to school every day.
On the other hand, if you are looking to make a blind-friendly general OS, then look to the "3rd generation approach" to accessibility in GNOME, Mac OS X v10.4, and Longhorn. All of these are doing API-based accessibility, where every object on the screen implements a rich accessibility API which is taken together and then re-presented to the blind (or others with other disabilities). In GNOME this is with the open source Gnopernicus screen reader (see http://www.baum.ro/gnopernicus.html). In Mac OS X v10.4 this is VoiceOver. Longhorn hasn't declared itself fully on this topic yet.
A final thing to look at is the work my co-worker Willie Walker and the University of Toronto Adaptive Technology Resource Centre did with the a speech Look and Feel for Swing.
I just returned from the CSUN Conference on Technology and Persons with Disabilities where Pete DeVasto of Adobe was demoing a beta build of Adobe Reader for Linux using the Gnopernicus screen reader. Speech output, Braille output, working navigation of the PDF documents he showed (including forms), all accessible to him on the Sun Opteron box he was using, running the forthcoming edition of Sun's Java Desktop System Release 3 (GNOME 2.6 with GNOME 2.8 accessibility bits). Even as someone very much involved in this work (I'm Sun's Accessibility Architect), it was really cool to see this, and to see the reactions from folks at the conference to what Adobe was showing.
1. Console access. These include Speakup ftp://ftp.braille.uwo.ca/pub/speakup/, Screader http://www.euronet.nl/~acj/eng-screader.html, YASR http://yasr.sourceforge.net/, and many folks' favorite BrlTTY http://dave.mielke.cc/brltty/
2. Specialized environment. The most obvious option here is emacspeak http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/ but there are others.
3. GUI Access. The only real option today is the Gnopernicus screen reader/magnifier http://www.baum.ro/gnopernicus.html that is part of the GNOME desktop http://www.gnome.org/start via the GNOME Accessibility Project http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/ (though other options are being explored). Note: my day job is as Sun's Accessibility Architect, working on the GNOME Accessibility Project and helping with the development of things like Gnopernicus, and another amazing product for people with physical impairments - GOK http://www.gok.ca/.
A pretty complete list of F/OSS accessibility projects can be found at the Linux Accessibility Resource Site (LARS) http://lars.atrc.utoronto.ca/current.html. I maintain a blog on this stuff as well, which has lots more information: http://blogs.sun.com/korn.
Thus far the commercial vendors of desktop speech recognition technology (Dragon, IBM, etc.) have not made a public commitment to develop commercial products for UNIX environments. Though I'm hopeful that may change, we are continuing to work on Sphinx 4 so we have that as an option (and Sun is contributing to that effort).
We are building a completely new accessibility platform in GNOME from the ground up. We aren't going to have 100% of the pieces in the first release. As we were able to move more quickly with technology for people with a wide range of visual and severe physical impairments, we felt it made sense to release those now rather than holding up a first release so that voice recognition could be part of it.
The GNOME accessibility architecture was designed with voice recognition in mind from the very beginning.