What Accessibility Options Exist for Unix?

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?

Lemmie point you to another article...

[FortKnox]

As mentioned in a side discussion on the window-less office [slashdot.org] article, open source developers only develop stuff to scratch their own itch. If there isn't handicapped open source developers, you won't find much open source handicap software packages.

I don't agree that this is the way Open Source should go, but that's the reality of it.

Magnifier is 9/10 of the ball game

[SilentChris]

From my experience with handicapped PC users, a decent magnifying utility is 9/10 of the ball game. Most users have supplementary problems with entering input, but nearly all have a difficult time seeing the screen.

Windows XP ships with a decent magnifying utility (called "magnifier") but even they recommend in the opening dialog box getting something more robust. Popular packages to increase the entire desktop start around $19.99, but more "professional" ones can scale all the way up to $700!

Another problem is that, despite "anti-discriminatory practices", handicapped people simply aren't hired for too many computer-literate positions. Many IT managers don't want to foot the bill for high-end accessibility utilities. That's why something more robust than Gnome's project (and KDE's paltry magnifying utility) are so needed.

Commercial advantage

[Wonko42]

This is one of the major advantages of commercial software. Your average open source developer is generally not very interested in developing features that he or she doesn't have any use for. Thus, unless you have a good percentage of handicapped open source developers, your open source projects will tend not to contain good accessibility features. And, unfortunately, there aren't very many handicapped open source developers. :/

This is where commercial software (especially companies like Microsoft who spend countless millions each year on research alone) has a distinct advantage. People who write code for commercial applications or OSes are not writing it for their own benefit -- they're writing it because they were told to and because they get paid to.

That said, I'm very impressed with Windows XP's accessibility features, but I really don't think they would be too difficult to implement in Linux applications. The only major problem is that "Linux" is just a kernel, and accessibility features don't belong in the kernel. Thus, it will be left up to individual distributions (Red Hat, Debian, Mandrake...) or individual application developers. This makes for a very uneven and inconsistent level of accessibility support across different applications. :/

Sadly, this is one area where companies like Microsoft and Apple have much more of an advantage than open source OSes, due mainly to the structure of their OSes.

Re:Bogus statistics

[gorilla]

I'd say that 6 out of 6 people could benefit from accessibility technology. You see, even though the disabled need accessibility, but we all benefit when it's included. If you make a program speech enabled, then it's possible to use that program over a telephone. If a program can be configured to use large fonts, it can be used on an LCD display. If a program has keyboard shortcuts for mousable operations, then we can use the program without taking our fingers off the keyboard.

Section 508

[tomfuck]

I've been working quite extensively within section508 guidelines [section508.gov] which outlines electronic accesibility within government systems - from webpages, to software, to the photocopiers in the office. The statistics that are used in cases like this are misleading to those unfamilar with accesibility. You may not think that 1/6 people are 'handicap', but this term is fairly broad when used in this contex. The term also refers to the color blind, people with carpel tunnel syndrome, people with hearing-impairments (but not completely deaf), and the like - anyone who may require any assistance at all or may have difficulty navigating the web or a software product.

At the rate many of us are going, we're going to have weakened eyesight and carpel tunnel syndrome from so many hours on the computer. So we will be relying on many of these advances in accessibility options in the future.

I really recommend section508.gov [section508.gov] which is a really great resource for accessibility.

Linux Speakup

[CmdrPaco]

Linux Speakup [linux-speakup.org] is an organiztion of blind folks who 'like to mess around with linux'. This is one type of software to help the (visually) impaired. A gentlemen on one of the mailinglists I subscribe to uses this package, and claims it works well. It must work at least half way decent if he's able to be on a mailinglist, and offer all the knowledge that he has, which is quite extensive.

Re:Handicap People--OPEN SOURCE FAILS!

[iCharles]

A critisism of the Open Source model is that nothing gets done unless it scratches someone's itch. I submit that this post reflects that attitude: it it doesn't interest me, why build it? You want it: build it yourself.

That is fine when you want, say, an new video driver. But, you create a catch-22: you need a development environment to create accessability options, but if you have no accessability options, you can't use the development environment.

So, if you want to take the stance of "what's the point..if [almost] noone will get any useage from [it]," you simply prove the "must scratch someone's itch" point. And, you show a weakness of Open Source.

Further, you want Linux on the desktop? Some companies will require an accessability solution.

Did I mention is was, you know, the right thing to do?

Re:50 million

[jonknee]

That is way high, there are what 300 million residents in the US? How many handicapped people do you know? If that was true every 1 in 6 people you know would be disabled... hmm I can't play sports as well as the jocks but that doesn't make me disabled in my eyes but they would have to count things that don't seem like disabilities to us to get a number that large.

Re:50 million

[C. Mattix]

Think about the elderly. One day you are going to be 80. Are you going to be able to see the screen and use the keyboard as well as you do now? Most of us can't type for more then 2 hours on a standard keyboard as it is without having thingly, numb wrists and fingers. In the next few years, the number of elderly people are going to explode in number. They my not be "disabled," but they will be old. The research that is done in HCI now will be well worth it to them (and hence us).

Re:Lemmie point you to another article...

[bhaneman]

Actually, there are a lot of open source/free software developers who are interested in accessibility either to 'scratch their own itch' or that of a friend or loved one.

Traditionally, disabled computer users have faced a very frustrating situation - they desperately need/want improved accessibility and certain bugfixes, but there was no 'market justification'.

Add to this the fact that careers in computer technologies are well suited to many disabled people, and you get the result that many disabled programmers have been stymied by their desire to improve their situation but have not been able to because of proprietary software. Open source software (and perhaps even more so, completely free software) takes that barrier away, and for the first time the disabled community no longer must appear as supplicants begging for the fixes or technical documentation required to make software products accessible.

Historically many of the first accessibility solutions have been pioneered and developed by end users, in a situation that parallels much of the history of the free software movement. Now that accessibility is gaining a toehold in the linux GUI world via Gnome Accessibility and the nascent KDE Accessibility projects, I think we will see a sea change in the quality of accessibilty support, notwithstanding the impact of legislature such as the US Americans with Disability Act.

- Bill Haneman, Architect, Gnome Accessibility Project

I am handicapped person too, but... (rants)

[antdude]

I was born with Nager's syndrome and have multiple physical disabilities. I am currently unemployed (laid off from a dotcom company about eight months ago). I noticed a lot of employers are afraid of people with disabilities like me. This is true when I go for job interviews (already had about ten of them and applied over 650 jobs within eight months).

My field is in the Information Technology (IT) area and I have a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. My strongest areas are in Web Development/Design and Software Quality Assurance (SQA).

The thing I have is that I don't need heavy accomodations. I don't need special computers, tools, access, etc. The only thing I need is people's patience to understand that I am like people without disabilities. I tell them that I have speech impairment (can't talk clearly), but this shouldn't stop them from hiring me because I can type, e-mail, ICQ, AIM, write my sayings on papers, etc. I can still handle any IT jobs like programming, testing, etc.

When I was working for the last company, everyone was impressed with my skills and knowledge. I always worked hard and done a lot overtime. I was serious about my job.

With the downturn of the economy, it makes my job search situation even more difficult and frustrating. Having disabilities make my chances very slim.

Re:Link to some info on the statistics

[spanky555]

And you did a good job of pointing out the problem with "disability"...it has grown beyond what most folks with common sense understand as a disability into absolute nitwittery. The ADA started out as a reasonable idea, and spiraled into something circling the drain...

As an example: first we had handicap spaces and this made sense...then many, many more handicap spaces (with folks who know someone who can get them a plate or sticker) than are ever legitimately used - I mean, Sam's, Costco, WalMart have something like at least 10 such spaces - not great, but okay, I can live with that. And now we have the "pregnant women" parking spaces. Who's to say they are or are not pregnant? And since when is being pregnant a "disability"? It's an insult to those that are truly disabled, but all this crap comes in under the radar and you don't notice things like this until it's out of hand - the cloaking device, BTW, is called "political correctness".

I don't know if these new type of spaces are a result of the ADA (or the original ones for that matter), but all I can ask is, what's next? Spaces for PMS'ers, and spaces for men who were just downsized? How about spaces for someone with a leg that fell asleep? I know (and have known) several people who legitimately have need for such things, and I have absolutely no beef with that. I do, however, have a problem with so many whiners calling themselves disabled just because they feel like it. Good grief, common sense seems to go downhill daily in this country. I wonder if something similar happened during the last days of Rome...

is "fatass" considered a disablility?

[PhuCknuT]

If so, then 50 million is way to low.

Blind users and Linux.

[Noryungi]

I have had some experience working with and helping blind users and, in my opinion, Linux use would greatly help them for one reason (and one reason only): character/terminal-based applications.

While the focus of most developers today is the pretty GUI/multimedia/gizmo-of-the-day, there are literally tons of useful applications that work perfectly well in text mode -- and that can be used with a Braille output and keyboard configured as a serial terminal.

Applications such as Lynx, links, mutt, vi, Emacs, nano, TeX, ispell, ps2ascii, etc... provide blind users with a level of service and capabilities they would hard-pressed to find under Windows. As a matter of fact, Linux and *BSDs are the only operating systems I know to maintain such a huge number of terminal-based applications.

Whenever you are tempted to program something only for a GUI, remember the UNIX philosophy and program a command-line utility, as well as graphical (X) shell -- you'll probably help a blind user somewhere!