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>
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