Re: [orca-list] Topics Suggestion for Open Discussion (About Visually Challenged)

[hackingKK <hackingkk gmail com>]

On Friday 09 April 2010 04:51 PM, Amrith Krishna wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The Free Software Cell of FISAT Engineering college, Angamali,Cochin, 
> India is conducting a 3-day national seminar ICE-FOSS'10. We are 
> conducting a 3 hour open discussion on the topic FOSS for the 
> differently abled(focusing on visually challenged). The discussion is 
> going to take place in a group containing both FOSS enthusiasts(Tech 
> side) and Differently abled people. It would be highly gracious if 
> anyone could suggest possible topics and matters that are needed to be 
> covered in the discussion.

HI.
I am Krishnakant Mane from Mumbai.  I had setup a lab for the space 
mission Kerala under the project insight in trivandrum.
This was a project which took big initiatives in trainning blind making 
exclusive use of FOSS.
Infact I had designed the courses and also conducted 4 workshops.
Looking at the kind of idea you are proposing, I can suggest you a few 
things given my background.
I see that the most important problem to address is the pdf accessibility.
At the moment the evince pdf reader is totally inaccessible.
futher more, we also need to work on accessibility of sound editing 
tools like audacity, since many blind people like to do that work either 
as a hobby or as a profession.
There is another important area to address technically.
I am a software engineer myself and find that there are no accessible 
ides for blind programmers.
Eclipse gives some releaf but it is far from being satisfactory.
We must look at netbeans.
Kindly let me know when is the conference.  I will be touring Kerala in 
the coming few weeks.

happy hacking.
Krishnakant.