FOSS and Disabled Communities Out of Touch 263
Yinepuhotep writes "Newsforge has a thought-provoking article on the lack of communication between the FOSS community and disabled persons." From the article: "How can the FOSS community address the issues of the disabled? The most urgent task is to improve documentation. Perhaps you can make it a personal goal to be able to configure your favorite FOSS tool blindfolded while someone reads your improved instructions aloud. Your local LUG could organize ways to connect volunteers to assist disabled users with installations. Be sure to contact local disability rights groups to let them know what you're doing. They may also be able to provide more feedback about needs in your community."
This is a tough place for developers to be in... (Score:5, Insightful)
As mentioned in the article, this leads back to an earlier Slashdot news post, on the Consistency/Efficiency debate.
I would be inclined to lean towards consistency myself, and side with the disabled folks, but how can you create new and exciting platforms while still being maintaining familiarity. If you ask me, the web is an excellent case study in creating exciting new products, while simultaneously establishing conventions.
Perhaps this article shouldn't be taken as a call to turn all of the FOSS software into retail clones, but to concentrate on bringing innovative features, while still maintaining a consistant and familiar interface.
Gimme, Gimme, Gimme (Score:5, Insightful)
Once your favorite OSS tool is installed can a blind person use them?
How about other types of disabilities? How about if a person is blind and deaf? Or is missing both arms? Or is a quadrapeligic? How do we help them install and use linux?
It seems to me that you have to draw the line someplace. If somebody wants to put forth the effort then great but honestly why don't we concentrate on getting the documentation so that a reasonably intelligent non disabled person can use it first. Then we can worry about the blind.
In the mean time if a blind person wants to run linux please have them contact their local LUG, I am pretty sure somebody would step up to the plate. Another option might be to buy a pre-installed linux machine, lots of companies sell them.
Just FOSS? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's funny... (Score:4, Insightful)
larger problem (Score:3, Insightful)
This isn't limited to FOSS. For a perfect example, see Netscape.
Every man for himself (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not to say that all accessibility enhancements must be made by the disabled; there are of course a few charitable developers out there who'd be willing to take on these tasks for the greater good, and there are the friends and relatives of the disabled, who are in some sense "closer to the front line"... Realistically (or perhaps cynically) though, unless capable open-source developers are suffering without it, or unless someone sits down and pays for the development of it, the accessibility of open-source software is always going to be a low priority.
Don't like it? Do something about it yourself, or create a charitable foundation to pay for other people to. Such is capitalism, and such is human nature.
Wrong expectations (Score:3, Insightful)
* This is not to reflect on their intelligence or discount exceptional cases, but you know it's just harder for these folks to do things.
Re:Gimme, Gimme, Gimme (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think that's a very good excuse though: "sure we suck, but the other guys do too."
Fact is, a blind person can still both hear and read. Linux has some base advantage here, because everything can be acomplished from a command-line, and face it, if you're blind it's a lot easier to do "cp a b" than it is to point at the tiny picture and drag it to the othe tiny picture, then let go.
It's usually not that hard to make a program more accessible. It's not an all or nothing thing. A little improvement is still a little improvement.
I agree with you that being able to *use* a system is more important than being able to install and configure a system, but that doesn't mean both aren't desireable.
Community a natural market for FOSS (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. However, what surprises me is that the Free Software community doesn't have stronger ties with community-centric organisations such as voluntary groups, human rights groups, etc. They're really natural allies, considering the ethical concerns that both groups take seriously etc.
Re:Gimme, Gimme, Gimme (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe more important is that the OSS community focus on making user software accessible to people with disabilities. Gnome focuses on this quite a bit. Firefox has done a decent job by including mouse gestures. There's still plenty of room for improvement, however.
My wife works as an occupational therapist and I spoke with her about this a few months ago. She said that most popular Windows software is pretty well designed for people with handicaps (customizable menus, font sizes, color schemes, layout, etc). She hasn't worked with many linux programs, so she couldn't provide much of a comparison, but your comments are why disabled people might not choose linux over Windows. Just like most users, they just want software that works for them. If the software needs to be designed slightly better to work for them, then where's the harm in trying to improve it?
huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not for me it isn't. "Open Source" does not mean "good works for charity".
Standardization helps assistive technologies... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Community a natural market for FOSS (Score:4, Insightful)
The cool thing is that when lots of people concentrate on things that are important to them, most things get covered and most things get covered fairly deeply. Sure I don't want to contemplate a world where everyone is an RMS, but a few of them are a very good thing.
Re:Slashdot Editor's Being Un-PC (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Crock o' Shit (Score:3, Insightful)
Tell that to somebody with perfect eyesight and impaired motor skills [diveintoac...bility.org]. There are a lot of dimensions to accessibility.
Set up a team of softare developers! (Score:3, Insightful)
I would suggest that the representative organizations set up a mixed team of blind and seeing software developers who could contribute to the FOSS community.
Two words: (Score:3, Insightful)
Idiot.
Re:Community a natural market for FOSS (Score:2, Insightful)
Then again, I know that there are many deaf programmers out there who we don't know about.
That said, now that we know deaf people can use Linux without a problem, we need to focus on blind people. I don't know exactly how we should do that, though; that's why we need blind programmers.
Re:So true. (Score:2, Insightful)
The truth is that software, especially open source software, doesn't work like this. Resources are flexible with interest areas, some improvements in design reap efficiency rewards in development, while others cost.
Most accessability improvements in user faceing software tend to benefit all users by regularizing and streamlining interfaces. To some extent this work will also be undertaken by people who would not be undertaking the work (whatever it is) that you think is more essential.
But also there is the matter that accsessibility is something that permeates interface-oriented software. It is to some extent like security. Starting with a good set of accesibility design principles makes it easy. Trying to make an interface accessible long after it has been built into complexity is likely to be more work than caring about it from the start. Thus, advocating "putting this work off" will likely make it more costly (in resources) in the long run. Seperately, because of crossover benefits I believe it will make the software less good in the short run.
Of course, luckily, these decisions won't be made because of anything you or I advocate in these silly comments.