[Hampshire] Open Source and Accessability

Hi,

Mayday greetings to everyone!

A few weeks ago there was a discussion about making our slides presented at
the meeting easier to read. The discussion was animated and there were lots
of good ideas and suggestions.

As a result I sent an email to the RNIB asking them about advice to make
things easier for people with visual disabilities. I made it quite clear that
I was asking from the perspective of someone in the open source community and
I was running Linux on my computer and not Windows.

They eventually replied with two word documents. The word documents were
pretty much a list of commercial software for Windows only computers, and
were had a lot less advice than I expected. In all honesty I really expected
a list of suggestions and common sense advice rather than a shopping list.

I sent them an email, trying to positive and constructive, asking where was
the general advice and what should I do on Linux. After a long wait they
replied with a fairly unintelligible answer, which boils down to use
Microsoft products. I think the response is very much an answer from
ignorance and not evidence of a malevolent Microsoft plot.

I mentioned this two a few people here and there, and both were quickly able
to come up with opensource screen readers and resources for people with
disabilities. I will be the first to admit that the open source community is
not perfect, BUT the whole point is that people can access the source and can
make changes that help others.

I'm not going to rewrite the kernel, the command line userspace, KDE/GNOME and
a dozen flag-ship open source applications, but I and we can do our bit to
help! I've given two talks with accessability in mind, the desktop talk and
corresponding articles and one sub-section of my web talk. Recently there was
a discussion on "birds of a feather" "BOFs", I'd like to advocate an
accessability group within the LUG - nothing formal but something we can take
part in within the fabric of the LUG.

I think we can:

1) as part of the wiki clean up add links and pages on accessability.

2) have some more accessability talks - I'm happy to do one on accessible web
design.

3) include discussions on this LUG list.

I don't believe that accessability/usability should be an after thought or
something tagged on as a special topic, it is an integral element of
everything, and this being an open group means it's something we can do
something about!

--
Adam Trickett
Overton, HANTS, UK

Stupidity maintained long enough is a form of malice.
    -- Richard Bos's corollary