Re: Preparing a Linux accessibility seminar

[David Bolter <david bolter utoronto ca>]

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