Ubuntu Accessibility

[Henrik Nilsen Omma <henrik gotadsl co uk>]

Hi,

I'm a member of the Ubuntu Accessibility Team [1]. As you may know, this 
is a new Debian-based distro that uses Gnome as its primary DE. We have 
teams for various aspects of the OS (Laptops, Security, Documentation, 
etc.) and have now set up an Ubuntu Accessibility Team to get some 
proper focus on that aspect. The first release is now imminent, so our 
work now will focus on the next release, due out in six months.

We are currently running a rather dated version of Gnopernicus (0.8.4). 
I've tried compiling a later version, but had problems with braille 
support and I see now from this list that this is a common issue. I 
guess I'll just wait for that to stabilise a bit. I'd like to start 
working on some improved end-user documentation for Gnopernicus, but I 
should probably wait until I can run a more up-to-date version. The 
documentation on the gnopernicus website doesn't specify what version 
that is based on. Does anyone know?

Dasher runs successfully on Ubuntu, but on my test-laptop (Dell Inspiron 
8000, 850 MHz) it's quite slowly and seems to consume a lot of 
resources. Is that normal? Perhaps I should try disabling some of the 
more advanced features such as context-sensitivity.

Does anyone here have any experience with X-10 home automation on Linux? 
I know it's slightly off-topic on a list that deals with making 
computers themselves accessible, but it does pertain to part of the 
user-group. AFAIK, the X-10 hardware is quite standard and relatively 
inexpensive comparing with custom-made technical aids. I'm thinking it 
would be handy to have some Free tools for controlling that hardware 
easily available on Linux. Any thoughts?

Anyway, just saying 'Hi' for the moment. Feel free to stop by our wiki, 
and do correct any errors you might find :) I'm sure I'll return here 
with more questions later.

Best wishes,

   Henrik
   
[1] http://wiki.ubuntu.com/AccessibilityTeam