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
Re:GNOME accessibility (Score:1)
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.
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.
What about the GNOME Accessibility Framework? (Score:1)
They are working on getting specialized input/output devices like braille keyboards, screen readers etc. working with GNOME.
Arrrggh! i18N (Score:1)
The point of this is that people adding any sort of strange feature creep (i know call me insensitive for not giving a damn about the handicapped and non-english speakers) should be kept modular so there is still a readily available fast and simple version of all functions that are polluted by slow and cumbersome new features.
Re:Arrrggh! i18N (Score:2)
I'm sure you could have just went and found some before i18N libraries somewhere. I'd bet they are all archived. Why reinvent the wheel??
Bogus statistics (Score:3, Offtopic)
You know - like the wildly overstated incidence of spousal abuse on Super Bowl Sunday.
50 Million disabled Americans? Assume (generously) that there are 300 million people in the U.S. - does this mean that one in six people could benefit from accessibility technology?
Don't get me wrong - I believe that the ADA was an excellent law, and am all for accessibility enhancements for software. But grossly exaggerating the (statistical) need seems to weaken the argument more than strengthen it.
Re:Bogus statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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:Bogus statistics (Score:2)
The poster next to me is talking about added difficulties created by accessibility, but I would venture to argue that such problems are often a rarity. Yes, TANSTAAFL. But the fact is that I'd rather have a big area to play with than a small one.
/Brian
Re:Bogus statistics (Score:2, Funny)
Quarters cause cancer!
A breakthrough reporrt has discovered that ordinary Quarters cause cancer. The study was conducted by taking two groups of mice. One group had quarters surgically inserted into their bodies whle the other group was used as a control. The scientists discoverd that the occurence of cancerous cells in the test group was almost double that of the control group!
the morale: don't use quarters!
As a side note, I believe this was an actualy study, although I admit to fabricating the exact details.
Re:Bogus statistics? Not. (Score:2)
The Disabled American Veterans has a million members all by itself. My state issued more than 200,000 handicapped parking permits last year. So why should I not believe those numbers?
Re:Link to some info on the statistics (Score:2, Insightful)
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...
There's a lot being done with IBM's ViaVoice (Score:4, Informative)
Lemmie point you to another article... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't agree that this is the way Open Source should go, but that's the reality of it.
Re:Lemmie point you to another article... (Score:2, Insightful)
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 ProjectRe:Lemmie point you to another article... (Score:2)
I think you're completely missing the point. The previous poster was underscoring the "personal itch" nature of open source. Developers in open source projects, who are almost exclusively unpaid volunteers, tend to focus mainly on coding up programs and features that satisfy a personal need. Just because someone recognizes the importance and need of a feature doesn't mean they'll have the personal need that motivates them through the actual effort of coding up a solution.
Input devices are crucial (Score:1)
Magnifier is 9/10 of the ball game (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Magnifier is 9/10 of the ball game (Score:2)
All the same tech. It just depends on the purchaser. My brother-in-law got a night-vision scope (for night-blindness). Cost government ~$1000. Same product retails for $250. Why the difference? I don't know. Probably the company got a long term contract a long time ago, and just never changed their prices. They might have also gone through some BS certification process or something.
Anyway, my wife likes the command line. Nothing like an 80x24 screen on a 17" monitor. And if that's not enough, I can find one of the terminal font packages and change it to around 40x20 or so.
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.)
Re:Magnifier is 9/10 of the ball game (Score:2)
Are you basically saying that ctrl+alt+plus on the keypad for XFree86 (i.e. to set a 320x200 resolution on a 1024x768 virtual screen scrollable with whatever moves the pointer) is basically 9/10 of the game? Really?
Well, if it is so, let's concentrate on the remaining 1/10.
Re:Magnifier is 9/10 of the ball game (Score:2)
But Seriously, Folks, he's got a 36" monitor running at 640x480. He's tried the magnifier thingies and prefers the optical variety you hold in your hand. (I'll bet no HF folks thought of that one!).
Even more seriously, I talked his Powers That Be into budgeting for a 51" monitor next year. He's a valuable asset, and this is really chump change compared to the value he provides us.
And just so I'm perfectly clear: we're a not-for-profit. His monitor is a significant dent. Anyone (IT or not) who has a hard time shelling out $700 so someone can work is hurting their employer by making them miss out on what might probably have been a Valuable Asset to their team.
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.
I am handicapped person too, but... (rants) (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Magnifier is 9/10 of the ball game (Score:2)
Well, let me fill in then.
The bitmapped GUI turns ugly when zoomed (staircase effects), while a vector based GUI presumably wouldn't.
However, there's no reason why a magnifying glass must magnify the screen. Most GUIs are already vector based, as far as I know. A window is simply a vector object with colour attributes etc., and it contains other vector objects such as buttons etc. Even fonts are vector objects nowadays.
Re:Aqua buttons aren't vectors (Score:2)
Not at the high levels of abstraction - the raster images are buried in the low levels and, as such, could be replaced with smarter "magnify-friendly" code without disrupting the high levels. In this case "low level" means Gtk+ and Xlib, and you may need some support from theme authors.
Certain things are raster even at the high levels - icon bitmaps are the notable example. But even icons can be vector-based - SGI did it years ago. For icons, though, it's probably easier to use the CDE solution of providing multiple sizes (an icon "file" in CDE is actually up to 4 distinct XPM files 48, 32, 24 and 16 pixels high) and optionally scale these as needed.
notes from wrist injuries (Score:2, Informative)
18% of US is handicap? (Score:2)
There are about 275 million people total in the USA. I find it hard to believe that almost 1 out of 5 is handicap. Okay, maybe if we count all the lawyers it makes sense.
Re:18% of US is handicap? (Score:2, Funny)
*NIX is more accessible than windows (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:*NIX is more accessible than windows (Score:2)
Check out SuSE Linux - they have serious braille support, to the point that the installer looks for braille display devices so you can do a whole install from a barebones computer with no problem (I assume). Call them and ask - they obviously have someone doing QA and testing (or I could hope so) who would be very versed in Linux VI issues.
--
Evan
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.
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.
handicapped (Score:2)
Plays hell with my ability to play, however. Try swinging a bat at a baseball with one eye closed. Or hammering nails.
Uncorrectable (Score:2)
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.
Re:What is "handicapped"? (Score:2)
Depending on how broad you are with your definition of handicapped, I'm sure you can produce a very large swing in the number of people who qualify. At what point does bad eyesight become a handicap? How about a leg injury? Any number of progressive diseases? There's too much grey area... It just makes it a hard statistic to make useful.
-Puk
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.
Well... (Score:1)
There is, as others have pointed out, the GNOME Accessibility Project [gnome.org]
However, I haven't seen anyone point out Linux AccessX [uiuc.edu], which was a project at the University of Illinois, and as should be obvious, is for Linux only. It however, hasn't been updated for 2 years, so I don't think there's much hope there...
Pity... accessibility is the topic of my honours thesis, and from the looks of it, it's probably going to concentrate on Windows... (Not that I really expected anything else though)
Java Option (Score:2, Informative)
This a great option for all platforms.
Features for the deaf? (Score:2)
What kind of features would the deaf need? I have a computer at work with no sound card, not even the crappy little PC speaker. I haven't really found that it interferes with my computing experience at all. Oh wait, the visual bell setting on your terminal! That's about all a deaf person would need so, yep, got it covered ;^)
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.
Re:Actually there are (Score:2)
Your xterm should have an option for a visual bell...
use of hands (Score:1)
In this case, the solution would be hardware based. I worked with one person who had Parkinson's disease (which slowly debilitates motor functions) and they were using one of those great big logitech trackballs.
In more serious cases, there are still hardware options. I read in a paper-based magazine (sorry, no url available and I can't remember which magazine it was) about one kid who was using a device that he could control using his leg because his other appendages were unusable for fine control.
So in the domain on physical-motor-control disabilities, the hardware solutions are already there or are on their way. The *nix community needs to do what it has been doing already and expand driver support.
Commercial advantage (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Commercial advantage (Score:2)
See what happens when management make decisions... (Score:1)
Accessability is very important, however I think this Swedish site took it a bit too far with its Information for deaf people. [radiotjanst.se] (follow the numbered links for quicktime movies)
What? Suddenly deaf people can't read?
Nice gesture, but oh so useless. Moral of the story: Accesability is good, but only when it's done in a way that really helps those that need it.
Re:See what happens when management make decisions (Score:2)
Actually a lot of deaf people can't read. While it is a bit harder for them to learn without a spoken language as a basis, the blame is mostly with a disinterested educational system.
How many handicapped? (Score:1, Redundant)
According to the United States Census for 2000, there is a total population of 281,421,906 people in the United States. For argument's sake, let's round that up to an even 300 million.
So... one in six persons is handicapped?
I suspect accidentally or purposefully inflated numbers, though I'm quite willing to be proven wrong. Does anyone have any hard data that would back up, or refute this particular claim?
Not one out of 6... (Score:2, Funny)
"According to the lecturer, there are over 50 million handicapped people in the United States..."
The population of the United States was 285,663,707 [census.gov] earlier today. That is one out of 6. When you look around you, do you see one handicapped person for every 6 people?
Okay, maybe they don't use Linux, but they aren't handicapped.
--
Links to respected news sources show how U.S. government policy contributed to terrorism: What should be the Response to Violence? [hevanet.com]
Windows used to be good for accessability (Score:2)
The keyboard macros and accelerators in newer versions of windows are hovering somewhere between terrible and non-existant. I'm not speaking of the programming running under 2000. Just the built-in stuff like configuration, server management, the shell, etc.. It wouldn't fair to judge microsoft on 3rd party software
As far as X windows applications go, they are usually worse then Windows applications... although Gtk and QT (and their respective desktop environments) are doing much better then most older applications.
Are things getting better? for unix yes, for windows no. But they both still suck.
It isn't really an issue with the platform, though.. but more of a problem with bad UI designers writing 3rd party software.
Re:Windows used to be good for accessability (Score:2)
As far as X windows applications go, they are usually worse then Windows applications... although Gtk and QT (and their respective desktop environments) are doing much better then most older applications.
Why would a blind person want to run a GUI? You don't need one with Unix, and the command line is fully capable with multitasking and everything... a braille reader and keyboard is all they would need to surf the net with lynx, chat on irc, use email, code, whatever.
Voice recognition, et al, will be brilliant for quadraplegics, but Unix is great for blind people right now! (And deaf people too ;^)
Re:Windows used to be good for accessability (Score:2)
Re:Windows used to be good for accessability (Score:2)
Point.
Re:Windows used to be good for accessability (Score:2)
I have also attempted to navigate some other built-in dialogs as part of the Windows 2000 enterprise server's configuration.
They are difficult, if not impossible to navigate without a mouse.
Sure, apps may be fine. but configuration is nearly impossible.
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.
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:Voice Recognition (Score:2)
Re:xvoice (Score:2)
If I may pester you further, what kind of hardware would you recommend for using with voice recognition software? Ive not been very impressed with the clarity of computer microphone headsets, while messing about with voice over ip stuff, would it be worth investing in a low end muscians mike with a preamp?
And thankyou for the work on Xvoice, as soon as I can figure out a way to download it from the imb server with wget (isp connection cuts every two hours) I want to play with it.
Section 508 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Section 508 (Score:2, Informative)
BLINUX (Score:4, Informative)
http://leb.net/blinux/ [leb.net]
Complete with FAQ, docs and mailing lists.
The 1000 minds project (Score:2)
http://www.supportwizard.com/1000Minds/
Linux Speakup (Score:2, Insightful)
Probably better off asking here than on slashdot: (Score:2)
Information and discussions for blind SuSE Linux users (english)
Software for Blind Linux Users: Brass - Braille and speech server [onlinehome.de]
"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.
Re:"50 Million" is an ADA-based exaggeration (Score:2)
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
re: colorblindness (Score:2)
Upshot: OpenView or whatever should have clearly different icons for status, and the color should only be provided as a backup indicator.
Accessibilities for me? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Accessibility needed for government contracts (Score:2)
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.
The Monopoly is OK on This One (Score:2)
As far as I'm concerned, I'm more than willing to let M$ have the monopoly on producing accessibility software. The *NIX world, Linux especially, has other areas of GUI development and polishing that need attention before accessibility issues. Not having an office suite that is as-good-as-or-better-in-all-aspects as M$ Office yet is a larger deficit to overcome than, say, lacking Speech Recog. or something like that. The major things need to be worked on before the minor ones, folks. And face it: the handicapped are a minority, especially in the IT world. Not that this is a bash on them, don't get me wrong. I'm just looking at practicality issues here.
Cold truth is, it doesn't pay to develop server rooms that are wheelchair accessible (and if they're anything like mine, they have cords and all manners of things that make it hard for walking individuals to navigate!). In a similar manner, it doesn't pay (or benefit, for you free software folk) to develop accessibility software for *nix at this time. At least, not on a large, concentrated scale.
Those numbers don't seem right (Score:2)
Huh? 5 million maybe. If there are 50 million, that means that one in every six, or about 17% of the population is handicapped. If that's true, we need a LOT more handicap parking EVERYWHERE. 5 million seems more likely - that would put it at about 2%. Still significant, but not nearly so.
Unless, of course, the lecturer is counting MCSE's in that tally...
What About Apple's Pioneering Work? (Score:2)
While Windows has largely caught up, OS X still has a number of disabled-friendly options [apple.com] to it, and since OS X is (all together now) based on UNIX, that means [the completion of this sentence is left as an exercise to all Slashdot readers with an IQ over that of an electric can opener, which probably excludes some [slashdot.org]...]
Mozilla accessibility (Score:2)
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.
Don't underrate Emacspeak (Score:2)
pVoice (Score:2)
Jouke Vissier's pVoice [perlmonk.org] is an outstanding example of creative itch scratching. pVoice allows people who cannot speak to synthesize speech by means of a grapical interface. It's written in Perl, free for personal use, and runs on both Windows and Unix systems.
And, interestingly, it's entirely the work of one dedicated hacker, written primarily for the benefit of his own daughter.
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
Some helpful sites (Score:3, Informative)
Some questions here about your statistics (Score:2)
"Handicapped" is a pretty large term here
Second of all, only 2 kinds of handicappedness effect your ability to use the computer -- blindness or no arms to move a mouse (and no, deaf dosen't count,.. no sound is meerely an annoyance, none of the computers at my work have speakers, and we all get along
All the other kinds of handicapped don't count
My cousin can't eat strawberies, he still gets in 6 hours of the sims a day
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.
is "fatass" considered a disablility? (Score:2, Insightful)
Features for the deaf? (Score:2)
Well, considering that the deaf people I've known have a better time communicating with the outside world using a computer than without one, I would say that there aren't many software features that a deaf person can't use, with the exception of winamp.
To me saying that we need operating system features for the deaf is like saying we need features for people without legs, or lower back spinal cord injuries. These just aren't disabilities that impede the use of a computer.
Blind users and Linux. (Score:3, Insightful)
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!
Re:Don't worry. (Score:2)
Re:Don't worry. (Score:2)
Ummm, I believe Linux already supports every direct neural interface on the market today. Of course, so do all the other OSes. (:
Re:Don't worry. (Score:2)
Re:50 million (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:50 million (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:50 million (Score:2)
Re:Handicap People--OPEN SOURCE FAILS! (Score:2, Insightful)
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?