[SLUG] Opinions wanted with accessibility issues.

[DAVID KNIGHT]

My main passion is accessibility, in particular I would like to improve accessibility to computers for the elderly and for the blind (of course these sadly often go hand-in-hand). I am an optometrist with plenty of experience dealing with these groups and there is a great desire for an easy to use, simple OS. There a smattering of very expensive Windows based applications catering for these people at present but no good freeware option. Ubuntu has orca and screen reader but in my opinion it's putting the cart before the horse. The best way of improving accessibility for people with visual disability is not to provide tools for people to access the standard interface. They are not required if the interface is designed correctly in the first place. The standard 'windows' environment is the problem here. The majority of users in these groups want a limited selection of applications ie word processing, e-mail, internet, OCR (a must for vision disabled persons) and photo viewer.
 That's pretty much it, except for perhaps VOIP. The question is how easy would this be to implement?
   
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