23 Feb
2005
23 Feb
'05
5:56 a.m.
"Noah Roberts" <nroberts(a)reachone.com> writes:
Mario Lang said:
I can try to summarize the main issues here for you. I'm afraid I dont
know of any specific web sites which would be detailed enough
to explain the whole situation to you.
In general, at soon as some application has a text-mode
user interface (ncurses, command-line based, readline based or so on),
it is quite useable by people with visual disabilities (braille
or speech output users).
If you use GTK2 as a toolkit, there is a slight chance your application
might be useable by the same category of users since there
is some ongoing effort to make GNOME accessible. However, I'd like
to emphasis that this kind of accessibility is not very widespread
yet (only early-adopters are playing with the technology right now,
there is a very small user-base and many bugs yet to squish before
it gets really useable), and some blind people might
not be happy with having to use graphical interfaces at all,
even if there is a bit of accessibility in there. That is mostly
because some people feel that having to use a GUI in the first place
is an inherent inefficiency which should be best avoided.
I'd be more than happy to answer any questions some of
you folks may have after reading this. Either send my private mail,
or through that list... I'm also frequently on IRC as 'delYsid',
feel free to pester me with questions about this.
--
CYa,
Mario
james(a)dis-dot-dat.net writes:
[...]
What are some websites developers could look at for help in designing
their programs to be more accessable? As a blind linux audio user, you're in a
minority in a minority in a
minority.
You'd be supprised how "large" that minority actually is :-).
I don't think anyone has ever looked into
this side of things,
I've raised a thread about it on LAD about a year ago or so.
or if they have they haven't documented it.
That is true, because there isn't much to document at the moment. Its
much more important to make developers of tools aware of the specific
problems, since the majority of linux audio apps currently is very
inaccessible per design. Properly used OSC helps a lot there (see SC
and Om).