Hey Maurice, Thanks for the useful info - I'm definitely checking it out now. I've been a little busy these past few days - my apologies for not responding sooner. I agree with you on the visual crud when it comes to OSs for the blind; perhaps there is a solution in dumping the gui in favor of full text. Novell's OpenStudio can customize its distro to your liking, and I may give that a try to see if I can get rid of a lot of the visual stuff. I'll keep in touch with my progress between work & school.
Regards, Spencer Hunley On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 6:00 AM, < [email protected]> wrote: > Send Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list submissions to > [email protected] > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > [email protected] > > You can reach the person managing the list at > [email protected] > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of Ubuntu-accessibility digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. Re: Hello everyone! (Maurice McCarthy) > 2. Persona Survey results (Alan Bell) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:05:24 +0100 > From: Maurice McCarthy <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: Hello everyone! > To: ubuntu-accessibility <[email protected]> > Message-ID: > <[email protected]> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 > > 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. > > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 2 > Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:46:00 +0100 > From: Alan Bell <[email protected]> > Subject: Persona Survey results > To: ubuntu-accessibility <[email protected]> > Message-ID: <[email protected]> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 > > The results of the survey are now in, we had a fantastic response and we > have 26 really great detailed replies. The next step is to group these > roughly by impairment then use the replies as an inspiration to write up > descriptions of realistic but fictional characters that can be used by > developers and user experience designers to ensure that Ubuntu is built > for these characters. > > For a bit of background on design personas in general and how they are > used here is a description of how IBM use them > http://www-01.ibm.com/software/ucd/gallery/software.html > > Canonical have a set of personas already, one of them has a visual > impairment, we want to build a small set of personas with a range of > accessibility needs and write them up to the same standard of quality as > the existing Canonical documents so they can be fed into the design team. > > If you would like to help in the process of getting from survey > responses to personas then please email myself or Penelope Stowe and we > will send you a copy of the spreadsheet with all the responses and just > names and email addresses removed. We decided at the meeting last night > that we would share the spreadsheet with anyone on the list who asks for > it, but we won't publish it on the internet or post it to the list in > it's raw form. > > Alan. > > > > > > ------------------------------ > > -- > Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility > > > End of Ubuntu-accessibility Digest, Vol 57, Issue 18 > **************************************************** >
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