[Kde-accessibility] Re: help for disabled person

[Olaf Jan Schmidt]

[Mauro Chiarugi]
> i'd like to know if (and how) he can use the computer with kde
> (vocal instruments, special keyboard, etc).. are there any features
> for sightless??? He is a programmer C/C++ and he know how to use a
> computer, but now he cannot see.

We have a few aids for people with low vision in KDE, but no software
for blind people yet.

If a screen magnifier is of temporary help to your friend, you can try
out KMagnifier in the kdeaccessibility package -
http://accessibility.kde.org/aids/

We also have a pre-alpha version of kttsd (KDE Text to speech deamon),
which can be used for reading out texts with a new version of the
speaker plug-ins I will commit to kdenonbeta within the next days.
(Sorry, my mainboard has died, so I have to repair my computer before I
can commit.)

If your friend has lost all his sight, then I recommend using GNOME
until Trolltech have extended their Qt accessibility framework, as real
support for people with no vision requires changes to Qt and won't be
ready before Qt/KDE 4.0.

The screen reader Gnopernicus has text-to-speech output and support for
braille devices. You can use it for any GTK2 or Java application,
including OpenOffice and Mozilla. KDE applications currently don't
cooperate with it, but we will support it from KDE 4.0 onwards.

For more information you can have a look at the GNOME accessibility
mailing list:
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list

or onto the GNOME Accessibility Project pages:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/GNOME-Accessibility.html

Olaf