What Accessibility Options Exist for Unix? 329
pll asks: "My wife is getting a Masters in Human Factors and Information Design.
Tonight she attended a session on Handicapped Accessibility in Technology. Evidently MS has spent years studying this area, and the
options one has under Windows is supposedly quite impressive (provided you install the accessibility packages). According to the lecturer, there are over 50 million handicapped people in the United States alone, and obviously even more worldwide. This got me thinking...the Free/Open software communities pay an awful lot of attention to i18n, but other than Emacspeak, what kind of attention have we paid to handicapped accessibility? I'm not aware of anything, other than Emacspeak, and that doesn't do much to enable the use of Gnome or KDE to a handicapped person." While Emacspeak does have some uses in this area, it's primarily only useful for the blind. What about people without the use of their hands, or features for the deaf, and so on?
GNOME accessibility (Score:5, Informative)
/Janne
Sun has a team of engineers on this. (Score:1, Informative)
They are making some serious headway too, their developers are very active on all of the Gnome development lists.
There's a lot being done with IBM's ViaVoice (Score:4, Informative)
notes from wrist injuries (Score:2, Informative)
Emacs speak (Score:1, Informative)
What is "handicapped"? (Score:4, Informative)
So more than 1 in 6 people is handicapped. *Looks around the room.* I know of one person out of the 110 or so in my workplace that is "handicapped" to the point that they use accessibility options. Admittedly, there are reasons why my workplace would be lower than average on the number of handicapped people, but I was wondering just what the criteria used were.
Note that I'm _not_ saying that there aren't a lot of handicapped people around, or that accessibilty options aren't important (they're very important to that one individual, who is in turn very important to us). I'm just curious about how those statistics were arrived at, since it feels like an astoundingly high number to me.
After all, 95% of statistics are made up on the spot.
-Puk
p.s. If you're going to flame me about my use of the word handicapped or claiming I'm downplaying the importance of accessibility tools, please don't even bother.
Java Option (Score:2, Informative)
This a great option for all platforms.
Re:*NIX is more accessible than windows (Score:1, Informative)
Sue Center (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.icogitate.com/~perl/sue/
Voice Recognition (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway Ive started looking at Voice Reccognition:
IBM have made there Via Voice SDK [ibm.com] freely available, which is being made use of in the rather interesting looking XVoice [sourceforge.net], though its been passed between developers, the most current page is here [compapp.dcu.ie] ang the mailing list here [voicerecognition.com]. However training hasnt been implimented yet, but Via Voice Dictation for Linux compares rather favourably at ~ $50 compared to several hundred for the windows version.
Alternately, there is the Freespeach/Open Mind Speach project [sourceforge.net], gpl and makes use of the Overflow language/enviroment.
Not really aware of any active projects beyond such, hopefully this ask slashdot will prove to be interesting reading.
BLINUX (Score:4, Informative)
http://leb.net/blinux/ [leb.net]
Complete with FAQ, docs and mailing lists.
"50 Million" is an ADA-based exaggeration (Score:3, Informative)
Traditionally the term "disabled " referred to a segment of the population, perhaps 4 or 5 percent, handicapped by blindness, deafness, problems with mobility or mental incapacity. Crafters of the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, expanded that definition dramatically to where it now takes in 50 million people, including the mentally or emotionally unstable.
No one seems to know exactly how the population to be covered by the ADA was, or is, measured, but that enormous estimate often is cited. Most of that number are mental cases. The psychiatric industry's 300 or so various diagnoses were used in structuring the ADA , meaning that symptoms such as bad moods or anxiety may be taken as indicators of an illness requiring accommodation by the employer. The ADA does rule out direct protection in cases of active users of illegal drugs, pedophiles, voyeurs, compulsive gamblers, kleptomaniacs, pyromaniacs and several other particularly antisocial sorts found in psychiatric diagnostic manuals.
The ADA is a civil-rights law; it's protections span the spectrum of American life because, like racial-discrimination laws, it attempts to level the playing field absolutely -- from the public water fountain to bus transportation to restaurant service to job equality and more.
Accessibilities for me? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Magnifier is 9/10 of the ball game (Score:4, Informative)
Well, there's xmag (which has been around forever), but it's certainly not feature-rich. Besides it probably makes things too big and doesn't magnify much of the screen at a time.
A better idea might be using XFree with a low resolution and a large virtual desktop. Then things will look big without reducing the workspace size. Jumping between a bunch of different modes (with Ctl-Alt-Numpad+/-) would give differing levels of magnification. Since XFree lets you do pretty much any screen resolution you want (that your hardware can handle) this could be as finely grained as wanted. (Okay, so entering a hundred modes in XF86Config would be a pain, but it's doable.)
Perl helps the disabled (Score:2, Informative)
Here [perl.com] is a link to an article about a Perl project to help the disabled. It contains a link to the project's website, as well.
Re:Magnifier is 9/10 of the ball game (Score:3, Informative)
Secondly, a full-featured screen magnifier which we hope will be on par with expensive commercial offerings is now under development, with an LGPL license, as part of the Gnome Accessibility Project, called "Gnopernicus", and now available from Gnome CVS. It also provides screenreading and braille display support. It is being developed in coordination with a commercial firm with extensive experience in this area.
Re:GNOME accessibility (Score:3, Informative)
GTKeyboard [nols.com]. This is an on-screen keyboard for X11 that allows redirection of keypresses to foreign windows, remapping keyboards, multiple layouts, and lots of other features. This is a type of application that's listed in the GNOME accessibility page, although it doesn't have any particular affiliation with GNOME.
Re:Section 508 (Score:2, Informative)
I'm hard of hearing -- my experience (Score:4, Informative)
First off, let me say that I'm glad that there are some provisions for the deaf in Windows; I recently installed XP and used 98SE before that. (At this point, the applications I use basically require Windows, though I have several Linux boxes in the house for applications where free software exists; I also use MacOS X). I will concentrate on Windows because that's (unfortunately) what most people use.
The accessibility options for the deaf are relatively scant. Yes, it's true that those who are hard of hearing don't need a lot in the way of assistance because we can see just fine (aside from sometimes wearing glasses, like me). But there are two major issues with the built-in accessibility tools: (1) They aren't installed by default (I don't think they are; I had to check the box for them when custom installing XP and I believe I did for 98SE as well), so if you don't know that they exist, you won't get them. (2) They don't do a heck of a lot. I've checked the boxes for having applications flash a visual alert, but I've yet to see one do this outside built-in (for that app) options. (I use SecureCRT for telnet; it too has a "visual bell" setting.)
Now, I do a lot of chatting over the Net (you don't know how empowering it is to sit in a group of two dozen people and not miss a word and be part of the conversation until that is denied you in the real world) and I use MUSHClient and mIRC to do it. Both of those applications have built into them options to flash the taskbar button if new text arrives while the program is not the foremost window. All well and good. However, again there is the problem of obscurity: while the options are of course installed with the software, they are not turned on by default and are usually somewhat hard to notice. MUSHclient's is buried deep within the preferences for a specific connection and isn't program-wide, so I can't check "Flash visual alert on activity" in global preferences -- I have to do it one at a time. mIRC is much the same: I have to right-click on a channel's mIRC-Taskbar button and select "Flashing" (not too descriptive an option name; Flash on Activity would be better) and it seems to be rather sporadic at times regarding whether or not it does it in query windows.
Games. I'm a gamer. And a lot of games these days have options for subtitles (Wing Commander III-V stand out here, having options for French and German as well as English subtitles) and a lot don't (why is Starlancer, also made by Chris Roberts, missing them?!). I can't play Thief because it doesn't put up any visual cues. Return to Castle Wolfenstein has none in its cutscenes but since it's a first person shooter game, I can get by without the cutscenes
It is not that hard to add subtitles; fan petitions got some added to at least one of the Zork games. Movie theaters don't have them yet because people claim they're intrusive, but as long as they can be toggled (with a control in a plain, obvious place!), that's not an issue.
So what does Unix need, then?
It needs built-in alert options, which are part of the default install, as part of window managers. KDE, GNOME, Enlightenment, whatever. A standard needs to exist for how applications will address it. Apps need to use it.
The controls to turn these on need to be in an obvious place and marked with clear symbology (the white-on-blue wheelchair symbol is a good start.)
Applications need to be marked as captioned for the hearing impaired on their web sites and on packaging. Develop a standardized symbol for this.
If I sound rather platform-independent, then that's a good thing. If I use all sorts of OSes, then other people out there like me do, too.
Mac OS X is the best non-Windows option. (Score:4, Informative)
The Universal Access System Preference offers enhancements to keyboard and mouse input. Sticky Keys makes modifier keys stick so that a person can type with one finger or with a mouthstick. It has great on-screen feedback, with translucent icons that float over a corner of the desktop showing what modifiers are currently active without blocking your work. Mouse Keys makes the numeric keypad into a mouse substitute. Mac OS has long had standard key shortcuts that work everywhere (Command+F is always Find if Find is available, Command+G is Find Again, Command+Q always quits an app, etc) so a person who is using the keyboard can count on those things working in every application. Macs also have keys on the keyboard for volume up/down, mute audio, brightness up/down, and the eject key for removable media is also on the keyboard, which helps a lot of users. You can also eject disks from the GUI by dragging and dropping or using a menu or key command.
In the Keyboard System Preference, you can enable Full Keyboard Access, which enables you to navigate the entire Aqua GUI with the keyboard. Key shortcuts highlight the menus or Dock so you can move through them from the keyboard, and you can move through dialog boxes and similar things of course. This is an option that many people use outside of whether they have a special need
Speech recognition is and text-to-speech are also built into Mac OS X. It's trivial to open applications and run scripts using your voice. It's easy to have text read back to you in a variety of voices, from almost any application. If the built-in speech recognition isn't enough, then IBM's ViaVoice is available, and enables you to navigate the GUI and dictate into almost any application.
In Finder, you can set icons to be displayed at 128x128, which is large enough that even on a 1600x1024 display, a person with vision difficulties can still have honking great icons. Icon labels are large and bold as well. You can also navigate and perform all kinds of file management tasks using only the keyboard. There is an Undo feature in Finder so that if you make a mistake while you're learning these features, you can easily go back a step, even if you Trashed a file. Those kinds of safeguards benefit every user, of course.
Another aspect to consider is that the Mac UI itself is considered to be much simpler to learn (a bonus when you also have to learn the accessibility features on top of what everyone else has to do), and these kinds of accessibility features have been around since System 6 on the Mac
The downside is that there is currently a transition going on between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, so for now and for about six more months, most users have an extra layer of complexity as they work with a mix of native and Classic apps. I don't know how that affects accessibility, but it makes sense that the slight differences between how native and Classic apps react to certain things are going to have to be managed a bit by the user. Window controls are slightly different on new and old -style windows, for example. This is temporary, though. There's a new native "marquee" app coming out about every week. The most recent were Microsoft Office, IBM ViaVoice, and Adobe Illustrator. Also, most Mac freeware and shareware is already native, and there are UNIX and Java2 apps up the ying yang.
AppleScript is another technology that can really help out a person with special needs. You can encapsulate an entire workflow in AppleScript, essentially turning a user task into a script task. So you can make a script such that you drop a file on it, and the file is opened in five or six applications and modified in certain ways and passed onto the next application and then finally uploaded and made live on the Web. This benefits all users, but if I were using a mouthstick, I'd probably have twice the AppleScript collection that I have now, because extra keystrokes are even more precious. Also, it's trivial to add languages so that you can script the Aqua GUI with JavaScript if you want. The component for that is free.
Some helpful sites (Score:3, Informative)
LARS (Score:1, Informative)
is at http://trace.wisc.edu/linux/