Re: Preparing a Linux accessibility seminar



Hi Enrico,

That is great that you are giving a Linux accessibility seminar. If it is not specific to accessibility for people with visual impairments, I would like to alert you to other aspects of accessibility, including gok (http://www.gok.ca/), AccessX (Sticky Keys, Mouse Keys...) etc.

I'm not the best person to address your question but I hope this helps.

cheers,

David Bolter

Enrico Zini wrote:
Hello,

I've been asked to give a Linux accessibility seminar at the local
university, and I'm now trying to gather up-to-date informations about
the state of the art.  I'm here to ask your help in correcting and
integrating my understandment with your knowledge about the directions
of your work.

So far I've looked at http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/, but
latest news are jul, 29 2003.  I also tried to use Gnopernicus 0.7.1
from Debian Unstable.

One part of the seminar is intended to be goal oriented: given specific
user goals, I try to tell what's the status now and what are the
possibilities for the future.

Goals I have identified, also based on questions commonly asked at
accessibility workshops and by visually impaired people, are:

 - Browse the web with as little limits as possible: Javascript, frames,
   tables, forms, dynamic pages should not be causes of worry
 - Read books and other printed material (invoices, bills) using
   scanner, OCR and Braille/speech
 - Blind people are getting interested in Linux as a way to get a job
   doing system administration, so they need agile access to a terminal
 - Reading e-mail and mailing lists
 - Using a word-processor
 - Having tools useful with everyday life: appointments, addressbooks,
   phone directories, personal finance
 - Using arbitrary custom applications at the workplace (this is
   probably not common, yet, but it's something I'd personally like to
   keep an eye on.  Status of bridges towards QT, KDE, Mozilla, Java,
   OpenOffice.org and other toolkits get interesting here).

As far as I know, the only stably supported task among these is doing
sysadmin work using a Linux console and BrlTTY.  Is there a way to have
terminals spoken and brailled under XFree, too?

I couldn't get GTK or Gnome applications to speak (more feedback in the
next mail), but maybe it's me doing something wrong.  What is the
current status in this respect?  Are there applications that are already
usable?  Which ones?

As to OCR software, I looked around something more than a year ago and I
haven't seen anything usable for Linux.  Has anything changed?  Is there
some good quality OCR software running on Linux, even if not yet
interfaced to ATK?

I know Gnome has ATK stuff build-in, and it's very cool!
I know Java has a working accessibility infrastructure inside: how's the
  status of using Gnopernicus to access Java applications?
How is the situation wrt QT/KDE, Mozilla and OpenOffice.org?  Do they
  have working accessibility support inside?  Are bridges to their
  accessibility technologies being worked on?


This is what I'm trying to gather so far.  Slides and notes of my
seminar will be published on the web, but in Italian.  However, if I can
gather enough informations to make something interesting, I'll be happy
to prepare a short current-state-of-the-project doucument in English for
you.


Ciao,

Enrico

--
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico debian org





[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Thread Index] [Date Index] [Author Index]