Hi Spencer, Welcome to the list. As you can see it is not hugely active but I think it could be.
I'm new here too and interested almost by accident. I'm too old to learn very much quickly but I've been using Debian based systems for some 10 years now. I'm not too clever with scripts and configuration. At work on the North Sea oil fields I cannot get to sleep in spite of a very active 3 days so I thought I'd do something constructive. Brian Cox has done some truly stirling work putting together the scripts to make Ubuntu more friendly at www.vinux.org.uk As he acknowledges putting a distribution for the visually impaired on a gui-oriented system seems counter-intuitive but he finds the hardware recognition in Ubuntu superior to Debian. I would not have Audacity voice recording working but for Vinux. (I want to put a certain philosophic work into audible which is not available elsewhere.) I'd like to run some thoughts past you. I first started thinking about accessibility issues when I chanced across the grml distro. http://grml.org It is a system administrators distro packed with documentation and text tools. Heavily text biased it has clear advantages for the blind wanting to understand computers better because of the text to speech tools. Grml is maintained by Austrian students in Vienna and though they made a policy decision early on to support accessibility there is no one who especially tends this side of the project. Never the less it has occurred to me that some of their work might be hackable into Ubuntu and Vinux. Secondly, particularly for the blind, Emacs has always seemed full of potential to me in combination with Festival. Emacs does not work like other environments and can seem daunting if you are used to windows ways but I feel it could be so useful. Everything can be done in emacs as it forms a desktop of its own - though I am a rudimentary practioner in it. It would be almost identical in a gui or a braille terminal, I think, and therefore transportable across all linux distros (And at least partly into Windows as gnu emacs for windows can be downloaded from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-22.3-bin-i386.zip ) Obviously I learnt this from grml. They have it set up that in Emacs the command: Say "some region of text" does exactly that. I understand from some of the blind users on grml that the biggest obstacle is the gui - probably because the most common use is browsing and so many interesting sites are http and full of visual crud. Well I'll try to get to sleep again now. Best Wishes Maurice - - - - - - - - - - - Spencer wrote: Greetings, My name is Spencer and I am an avid advocate & self-advocate for those developmental disabilities. Ever since I started using Linux about three to four years ago after growing weary of Windows' high maintenance, I soon discovered the better quality assistive technology and software found in Linux and Ubuntu. Currently I work at a university and am pursuing more affordable assistive technology for all. -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
