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?
*NIX is more accessible than windows (Score:4, Interesting)
Unix's main accessability strength (Score:2, Interesting)
Seriously, all of the blind people I know at school love linux because it is very friendly to doing real work with text. The importance of this cannot be understated.
Re:Bogus statistics (Score:2, Interesting)
Sometimes, people forget (I'm not accusing you of this) that making things easier for the disabled makes things easier for the rest of us as well. A wide elevator and access ramps are essential for someone in a whellchair, but are also a great help whenever you need to move something heavy. Kitchen utensils designed for arthritic use are usually also much easier to use for everybody. Websites designed to comply with standards for screenreaders are easier to navigate with a text browser as well. Consistent menu and button placements are a help both for visually impaired and for everyone else.
/Janne
Not all disabilites are obvious (Score:2, Interesting)
I, like many people, have red-green colorblindness. This doesn't mean that I can't tell those colors apart, but certain shades give me problems.
For example, those damn red LED screens that all the fast food restaurants are putting in their drive-throughs look completely blank to me during the daytime.
My own company's application, OpenView, uses green, red, and yellow icons to show status of managed nodes. I can't tell the default green and yellow apart, forcing me to modify the Xdefaults file.
Unix does need work. In Windows, I can easily make my mouse pointer larger, add trails, and change the color so I don't lose it on the screen. Under X11, I'm hosed and at the mercy of each application.
- Necron69
Let's think about this (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows was based on the Macintosh (which had speech synthesis in 1984, a screen magnifier in 1985, and sticky keys by 1986, by the way). The Macintosh was based on the Xerox Star/Alta/Lilith. This was based on a user interface design done 30 years ago by some very young people with fine eyesight and motor coordination. They built the entire user interface on their assumptions about the visual and motor systems of healthy young people.
So, now, on top of all that are some tools to degrade the experience enough to improve the system for specific disabilities. All of a sudden, Microsoft is a Disability Hero.
Yeah, right.
Consider UN*X and its command line interface. With any reasonably well designed command line program, it is possible to pipe standard input from any device and send output to any device. I have seen interactive Braille output devices hooked up to UN*X systems and working with essentially everything. In 1982. That's 19 years ago.
With the right physical devices and some code that takes a weekend to write, a person who could only operate a single switch and could only recieve information by means of Morse Code with wires on his tongue could use almost all of UN*X, up to and including rewriting the kernel.
TANSTAAFL (Score:2, Interesting)
Curb cuts make it easier for wheelchair users, but harder for the blind to detect curbs. Wheelchair toliets are higher, making bowel movements more difficult, especially for the elderly. (These two examples taken from The Death of Common Sense by Philip Howard). Making things accessible drives up the cost.
Does this mean we in the computer industry shouldn't try to make our products accessible? Of course not. With software it is much easier than with physical devices to make something that can be all things to all people. But it is still not free. Increasing complexity makes things harder to debug--epecially when you have multiple UIs. Using accessibility layers makes it harder to reuse existing code.
Re:Voice Recognition (Score:2, Interesting)
My experience with ViaVoice for Linux has been extremely disappointing. It is not a real product and it is most definitely not ready for anything
close to primetime. My major complaints:
1) extremely poor handling of sound systems
There are no tools, utilities or guidance to help you diagnose sound problems. Part of this is due to the immaturity of Linux sound systems but
part of this is clearly a problem with IBM's package. It would be wonderful if they would come out with a single standardized version that
was guaranteed to work with USB audio! I wouldn't care if I have to go purchase a specific USB audio pod (as long as I can use my microphone
note: this is could also be part of Red hat's value add. for speech recognition purposes, you do not need to get all soundcards working because
most soundcards are crap on audio input. Simply getting USB audio to work mixed with standard soundcards output would solve the 90 percent
case. Requiring both directions of audio (input and output) to be USB would solve the 80 percent case.
2) totally ineffective support.
There is a mailing list and the people there do try to be helpful but it's quite clear that their hands are tied and they are not able to help as much as is needed by the customer. personally, I have spent thousands on speech recognition software and hundreds on speech recognition related hardware. I would gladly spend more on a Linux solution that worked right and only required a small number of hours of setup effort.
3) dependence on a specific Java release
While I have no problems with Java as a language, I must admit I get rather tired of having to load up a half a dozen different versions of Java
virtual machines to work with different Java based applications. Note: this is true whether you run on Windows or Linux. Java is truly write once, debug everywhere.
3a) not keeping up with advances in Linux releases.
this is clearly a damned if you do and damned if you don't situation. On one hand, building for an old release is one way to make the product usable by the widest population but on the other hand, if it only works with an old release then the user population can't take advantage of improvements in performance, stability, and driver availability.
In my situation, I cannot run any Red Hat release except 7.1 on my (speech recognition driven) laptop because the video, PCMCIA, networking and sound system software didn't work right(er) until Red Hat 7.1. Therefore any product that counts on Red Hat 6.2 is not a product I can use.
4) dependence on user downloaded packages
If I buy a commercial piece of software, I expect to get *EVERYTHING* I need to run a package. I should not have to go scurrying across the net to download a Java run-time environment or fonts just to run the silly thing.
5) not fixing known bugs
Actually, this is a complaint about all software. We are all guilty of rewarding software manufacturers for creating crappy products by buying their products. Then we reward them for fixing what should not have been broken in the first place by purchasing updates. We would not accept this kind of quality in cars, food, or other products. Why do we accept it in
software?
While my language may be harsh, it's mostly out of frustration caused by being so totally dependent on speech recognition for computer use. I do
recognize the efforts folks have made here to try and produce workable speech recognition under Linux but when it comes right down to it, it just
isn't there yet.
Re:What is "handicapped"? (Score:2, Interesting)
An example of a similar misuse of statistics was when a date-rape activist came to speak to the dorm where I worked. She said that one out of every 5 people have been the victim of sexual assault (and that only one out of 10 get reported(?)).
We resident assistants got an extra question and answer session with her, and someone asked what defined sexual assault. She said any unwanted physical contact.
Well, using that criteria, I guess you can add me to that number since some chick grabbed my butt back in high school.
I still do not know how they figure out how many are not reported.
As for the handicapped issue at hand, they could mean that there are 50M Americans who do not have 20/20 vision, or who are not coordinated enough to type effectively.
Could be that you and I are hadicapped, and just haven't been told.
The Command-Line Interface - Ideal For Blind Users (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's a quote: "Linux applications rarely employ graphics, and most of them are already linear, just like the mode (speech or braille) that is our Karma. All other things being equal, Linux is the best operating system for a blind user."
The author makes several interesting points like 'ed' is better than 'vi' or 'emacs' and mentions some interesting tweaks to basic utilities such as 'ls' to make it more usable for the blind.
Where are the handicapped people? (Score:2, Interesting)
1 out of 6 is including minor disabillities of course. I find it remarkable however, how few people with a handicap reacted.
If you're a bit spastic [spastic.nl] like me, but you still can type a bit, get an old IBM keyboard. They're solid and have membranes, so you know for sure when you hit a key (handy with passwords). It's also fairly easy to write a mouse driver which translates the mouse movements. You could make a very slow acceleration curve with a cutoff so your jerks get filetered out. As a windowmanager, I recommend ion. It's designed to be used with the keyboard and you can even beat a normal person with a mouse when it comes to window handling...
Marijn
First thing's first... (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft has done a good job in this area. You know, I even like switching to large fonts or icons sometimes, or using the magnifier... even though I don't consider myself to be disabled. It seems helpful to relax or just goof off.
Make no mistake - Microsoft has spent a boatload of money making their OS usable by as many people as possible with the lowest learning curve. Don't take that to mean it's superior by any means. But the more people who can use it, the more people Microsoft can sell to. Wouldn't you agree?
That brings me to my point - some people say "just because Microsoft did it that way, doesn't mean it's the right way to do it." (often referring to changing display resolution from within Xwindows). Hey, it makes total sense to do it that way, it's intuitive to most people, and they did usability research on it. Why don't we leverage some of that research; let them spend the money on it. This is the way Microsoft used to be anyway (say, Win95 days) - XP just blows my mind thinking about what they were thinking when they created it.
Of course, an alternative would be to listen to the "blathering idiots" and "newbies" on the newsgroups who are also giving the open source community feedback - for free - which can be used to improve open source software.