[dot] aKademy Interview: Lars Stetten About Unix Accessibility

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URL: http://dot.kde.org/1095054549/

From: aKademy Team <akademy-team at kde.org>
Dept: where-work-is-underway
Date: Monday 13/Sep/2004, @07:49

aKademy Interview: Lars Stetten About Unix Accessibility
========================================================

   During the KDE Community World Summit 2004
[http://conference2004.kde.org/] "aKademy" the 'Unix Accessibility
Forum' [http://accessibility.kde.org/forum/] took place which gave
possibility for handicapped persons to come in touch with Unix. We
talked with Lars Stetten, a partially sighted computer science student
from Marburg.



     Dear Mr. Stetten, you study computer science in Giessen. How do you
estimate  the situation for handicapped working with computers?

     The current situation with Linux is not so good. Sure, the SUSE
installation kernel has had  support for the braille line for many
years, but you can't operate a graphical user interface  with this
feature alone.

     Is the support in Windows better?

     There is only a tiny market for handicapped accessible software.
There are some suppliers, but  their software is expensive and health
insurance funds only pay for the cheapest software.  Unfortunately such
software does not function properly in many cases and even  crashes from
time to time.

     Can you go into some details please?

     This technology lies in between the driver and the application
functionality and lacks flexibility. Let me  give you some examples:
There is some software, that reads directly from the keyboard to
preprocess key strokes. But this software  was written for the German
keyboard layout only; it is not possible to use a keyboard with another
layout.  I can, of course, connect another keyboard and configure my
Windows box to use the proper layout for  the desktop, but the support
for the partially sighted will fail because of the different layout!
Another example from the  Windows world: There is a software screen
magnifier, but when it is installed you will run into problems compiling
as soon  as you try to write OpenGL applications, which makes debugging
difficult. Nobody is searching for errors while running the  compiler in
a software for screen magnification? And last I want to mention the
text-to-speech software that can read out  the menu points from your
browser, but not the content of a webpage!

     So far we have just talked about visual impairments. What is about
other handicaps?

     Visual impairments are the most common handicaps. This is the
reason why there are the most tools for this area. I know  that there
are eyetrackers and headtrackers for those with a neuromuscular
handicap. With these tools, which are known to work well, you can
control the mousecurser or type text.

     Can we say that the partially sighted won't need special hardware?

     This is more or less the truth for visual impairments, but not
those who are blind. In the GNOME project  there is the support for
visual impairments as part of the applications; Gnopernicus does this
well, and supports type-to-speech, the braille line and magnification
for screen areas. Harald Fernengel from Trolltech built support at the
base on the toolkit Qt 4.0. If these classes are used by the application
maintainers, KDE applications based upon Qt 4 will be an enthralling
prospect. Because the same API that GNOME uses will be used there will 
be no difference between a KDE or a GTK application concerning
accessibility. With KMouth, KMouseTool and  KMagnifier the KDE project
has three tools for handicapped. With these tools the audio-visual
output is  supported and mouse control for people with neuromuscular
problems are improved. KMagnifier at last is a  screen magnifier.

     But with alpha blending or hardware accelerated applications a
software magnifier won't work. The  software will never know what the
graphics adapter has rendered.

     This is right. You can not magnify OpenGL graphics which such
solutions. But particularly for using video  players like Xine or
MPlayer there is a simple solution that doesn't require the installation
of additional  software: it is easy to change the screen resolution to
320x240. So you can watch movies without  installation work.

     Mr Stetten, we thank you for this interview and hope you have an
interesting conference.