Hi all,
My name is Mats Lundalv (employed at the DART AAC and AT centre, as well as at the Swedish Institute for Special Needs Education (SIT) in Goteborg, Sweden). I'm a new voice in this forum, but have been encouraged by Steeve Lee and David Bolter to post my thoughts here, following from the discussions in the Oatsoft email forum.
My main reason for writing now is to advocate for putting the spotlight more on one or more of all the good things that are found – and possibly a bit hidden – among all the good things down in the http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/GetInvolved listing. I would like to see them among the high priority tasks.
The background is a survey we did at SIT comparing the accessibility and AT support situation for the WinXP, MaxOSX and Ubuntu-GNU/Linux platforms. We found that the big problem with the GNU/Linux environment is its total lack of proper support for the largest groups of users with accessibility problems - that is; users in need of basic reading and writing support (other than users with pure visual impairments)!
This is the reason why we cannot currently recommend the free and open source platforms for schools from an inclusion and accessibility point of view, as students with reading/writing and learning disabilities - ranging between 5-15 % of the students in different educational environments - are left without proper assistive support.
If, on the other hand, these needs were reasonably well supported in the basic GNOME - GNU/Linux environment, this would immediately make it a very attractive alternative for the educational areas. This is a strategic issue for the wider acceptance of the free software alternatives for the educational systems – and in general.
I would really like to challenge this forum to consider ways to start addressing this problem now, rather than leaving it further down on the wish list for another round.
The question is where and how to start of course. A few points:
Proper
tts support for these needs is the fundamental thing. This could
either be taken on as a separate project, based on existing tools for
Windows – as indicated in the "Dyslexia and Learning
Disabilities" point in the list etc.
Another idea would be
to look at the possibility of building on all the good functionality
of Orca and refurnish that for providing basic reading and writing
support. I'd like to see your views on that approach. An indication
of what's needed and what Orca has to offer, and would additionally
need:
Needed: In
Orca
Basic settings:
Options to shut the speech up
and - no – context info reading etc cannot be disabled
just
provide the support needed as far as I can see
Keyboard
input echoing: ... - basically supported
...
key-by-key on/off - yes
word-by-word on/off -
yes
sentence-by-sentence – after
punctuation/new
line on/off - no
Reading tools:
...
Key_command_controlled: ...
whole text (with reading
cursor) - yes (cursor?)
line-by-line (with reading cursor) -
yes
word-by-word (with reading cursor) - yes
sentence-by-sentence
(reading cursor) - no
GUI-based: ...
... above reading
tools through
a reading toolbar - no
... + read highlighted
text ...
by double-clicking word - no
by copying to
clipboard - no
More demanding GUI-based additions:
read
text under mouse cursor – in menus and dialogues, in web pages
(primarily) and other text content (as far as possible)... (on/off by
key command)
That's a picture of the tts needs and current support by Orca. Would it be possible and attractive to consider this for the Orca team: Either a special slimmed-down and complemented Orca version, or starting a complemented Orca in an alternative reading/writing support mode. I think I would prefer the later option if feasible, as it could allow for more options to support users with multiple impairments.
Looking forward with some curiosity to your reactions to these issues. Unfortunately I cannot personally offer any help with coding in addition to ideas, functional specs contributions and follow-up testing and feedback.
I will be keen continue to do all I can to promote support of different kinds for the accessibility and AT work on the free software platforms – within my professional environments. There's a lot left to do to raise awareness there.
There's a lot more to be said about other issues related to the one I've concentrated on here – like wordlist/prediction support, higher quality speech options, the lack of a DAISY Player and state of the art OCR etc, but I'll stop my too lengthy writing here.
Cheers,
Mats