Demonstrating the power of Linux for blind people.

[Janina Sajka]

Hi, Amy:

Answers in line below ...

Ghoston, Ameenah writes:
> 1. I want to set up a Linux box with speakup 
> Gnome, and KDE.  

The "everything" choice in the Speakup Modified Fedora will give you
that without additional knowledge or effort on your part.

As an aside to the other debate that flamed over the weekend, this could
not be said of minimalist installation strategies. In other words, I
stand behind my assertion that there are advantages and disadvantes
either way--full blown or minimalist.

Unfortunately, the issue is fairly moot as regards Gnome and KDE. You
are not likely to find much value there yet for the blind user, though
your results for low-vision will prove a bit better.


>  
>  
> 2. I have other projects to manage, so I don't want to spend a significant amount of time screwing with package depencies and what not.
>  
The major Linux distributions generally now do an excellent job of
managing dependencies for you. The tool of choice on Fedora is called
yum. On Debian it's apt, for example.

Once configured, yum works splendidly and can even set to run nightly
without user intervention.

Please note that yum also supports package security through GPG keys.

> 3. I am dealing with the gambit of blind computer users and so, I want a setup that would work for your average user.
I find this a most fascinating question.

Who is an "average" user? More pertinant, what assumptions does this
"average" user bring to computing? I could go on at some length about
this subject, but will keep it brief.

I believe their is no such thing as a generalized computing environment
that can be used without some education and training. Even something as
simple as the plain old touch tone phone requires training. Else, how
does one know that you must first hear a dialtone before pressing the
digits of a phone number successively? My mother can do that, but the
concept of a cell phone is very much beyond her as are answering
machines and voice mail in general. Is she average? Probably for her age
group, post 90 years of age, she is.

To bring this home to "average" computing tasks, I would warrant
something as straight forward and simple as reading and responding to
email is far simpler on Linux than on Windows--but that requires that
someone knowledgable has set up the computer and email application
appropriately.

Would it be "average" to set up a user account that does not boot into a
shell, but rather provides a brief menu of choices like:

Email
Web
Internet Radio

Ten years ago, many of us used dial up accounts with various isps that
provided exactly that.

To finish up my view on this subject, the blind person's computer
interface cannot be graphical by definition, even when using a gui. If a
gui environment provides advantages, and I believe there are
demonstrable instances of advantage, these flow not from the graphical
nature of the gui, but from it's object oriented nature.

An example of how this fails on the console is the background of text in
the cat or chain web browsers when dealing with a pop up or a drop down
dialog box. On the other hand, drop down dialogs are trivial to control
on Linux where they are not so trivial, imho, on gui platforms. Just an
example of the good and not so good in one place.

				Janina