[SLUG] Opinions wanted with accessibility issues.

[Roy Hainsworth]

Hello 
Re Linux Accces. Here at Scarborough Blind Association we have been experimenting with Linux for over a year. After trying out various "flavours" we have at the moment got "Mandriva 2007 free" installed on one of our PCs. 
At home I am using "Suse 8.1" which works quite well apart from the usual hardware recognition issues
There are a few bits of accesibiity tools for Linux, but they are very hard to find and install and don't allways work,
The fact is that Windows are recognising the need for better accesabilty and each new OS has vast improvements built in (Vista), which to a certain extent applies to Linux.
If you would like to get involved and and bring some new ideas and help, that would be great, contact me.
Roy 

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: DAVID KNIGHT 
  To: scarborough at mailman.lug.org.uk 
  Sent: Saturday, May 19, 2007 5:42 PM
  Subject: [SLUG] Opinions wanted with accessibility issues.


  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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