Hi, I've reused parts of "Digital ramps and handrails" quite often - and it always goes down very well.
The presentation is in 3 movements, basically: 1. What is computer accessibility, and why should I care? - Computers have inputs & outputs: keyboard, mouse, screen - But those aren't enough - some people can't use a screen, others can't use keyboards, others can't use mice. - It's not just people with visual or physical handicaps either - old people find it hard to use mice, children can't use keyboards, and so on. One French report found that 12 million French people had some handicap - from an isolated or minor difficulty to more serious physical or mental impairment. - Mobile phone users are essentially handicapped for web use - small screens, thick fingers on touch screens, difficulty reading small type, not being able to do chording of keyboard entries, text-only renderings of web pages... all things which are typically associated with accessibility - So accessibility is important to a very large group of people, and not just a small and ignorable subset of the population 2. What to do about it? - First, let's look at the various hardware inputs & outputs. Let's start simple & reuse things that might not be considered accessibility advices: * Joystick & roller ball mouse * graphics tablet * Earphones/speakers, microphone * Video game controls (the Wii is groundbreaking in this regard) - Then there's the specialised hardware: * Braille keyboards * Eye trackers - And on top of that, even if you don't have any special hardware, there's a wide range of software that you can use to make your computer experience more accessible. 3. GNOME and accessibility (DEMOS) - Here's where GNOME comes in. GNOME has built accessibility into the heart of the project, not as an add-on, but as a core principle. - GNOME's vision of universal access has three main facets: internationalisation and localisation (you can use GNOME regardless of culture), usability (you can quickly learn to use GNOME, even if you never have before) and accessibility (you can use GNOME, regardless of any visual or physical handicap) - There are a bunch of basic GNOME features which make it more accessible: * Keyboard navigation - you can do just about anything in GNOME without using a mouse * Theming - large text, high contrast themes make it easier for people with visual impairments (including older people with failing eyesight) to use GNOME * Sound - sensible use of sound effects (for example, a distinct sound when your computer has booted up and reached the login screen) makes it easier for blind people to know what is going on and when they can use their computer * Sticky keys - many people have trouble chording on keyboards (for example, typing Shift-T or Control-C). Sticky keys lets you chord easily by simulating a held control key * Slow keys - for people with conditions such as early-onset Parkinsons who have hand tremors, typing can be very hard because pressing a key once can often result in multiple key-press events. Slow keys allows you to set the sensitivity of the system to this kind of accidental repeat-typing - On top of this, there are a bunch of features which can be optionally enabled by activating accessibility support for GNOME (short explanation of AT-SPI, GAIL and ATK, explain that most GNOME applications are accessible by default because they use GAIL via ATK) * Dasher - a great little application which gives great demo. Drive throughh an adaptive maze of letters to write what you want to. Import a sample text from some strange language like C, and change alphabet to write C with only a pointer (nice for a developer audience). * MouseTweaks - click on buttons without clicking using either a panel applet or directional gestures (demo both). This is a particularly nice demo (but long) coupled with a working webcam and MouseTrap - make sure this is working well for you before you demo it. You can use head movements to type with Dasher, and click stuff with MouseTweaks * Orca - Text to speech, screen magnifier (Note for presentation: gnopernicus is dead, Orca's screen magnifier is what I should have screen-shot) Mag on a projector can be a tricky demo. * Onscreen keyboard - Can be a tricky demo. Make sure you get the set-up right. So tricky I ended up pasting screenshots for one presentation. * Mention Braille keyboard support is quite advanced, supporting both "normal" Braille and contracted Braille - Accessibility support has pleasant side-effects! * GNOME has three different graphical testing frameworks, which are made possible because accessibility support allows introspection of the graphical display of applications. Scripts are used to do automated tests of graphical applications, and there are also applcations which can test that applications are accessible * GNOME on mobile devices allows for easy extension of GTK+ inputs to add support for T9 support, and StickyKeys makes it easy to enable standard mobile chording behaviour. (this is a pretty hairy argument, but hey...) The main criticism which I would make of this presentation is that it starts with heartstring-pulling stuff (babies & grannies) and doesn't finish with a bang - there's no take-away. But the parts split fairly logically (even though while writing these notes I see that there are things I have left out, and some slides I should re-order), and can be made into separate 5 to 10 minute segments. Cheers, Dave. Stormy Peters wrote: > At the GNOME Marketing Hackfest we talked about creating GNOME > presentation materials[1] that everyone can use. > > The idea is to create 5-10 minute segments on different topics. We want > to make them all with the same slideset template so they can be easily > combined. > > Here's the list of segments. Feel free to add more ideas or to add > slides for any of the ideas. (Feel free to grab them even if someone is > assigned to it. We divvied them up among the people in the room at the > time and I'm sure there are others that can contribute.) We also need > people to go through and review things as they are added, point out > holes in the notes, add images, etc. > > The idea isn't to dump whole presentations (although there is a spot for > that at the bottom) but rather to create building blocks for people to > create their own presentations. > > Best, > > Stormy > > [1] http://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/MarketingMaterial/Presentations > -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [email protected] -- marketing-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
