Thursday August 04, 2005

2 million accessible desktops!

As has been noted elsewhere, there are now over 2 million registered Solaris 10 desktops out there in the field. Cool news for Sun. And I trust for our customers who are enjoying the many great features of Solaris 10. But this is also especially cool news for people with disabilities!

In the United States the unemployment rate for people with disabilities is frightingly high. We are rightly alarmed the the unemployment rate of black Americans is of over 10% (compared to the general unemployment rate of a touch over 4% - see THE EMPLOYMENT SITUATION: JUNE 2005). But if that figure is alarming, what about the 75-80% unemployment rate of blind Americans? That figure is overwhelming! And it highlights a tremendous waste of potential and contribution to our workplaces, communities, and planet.

Which is why I'm especially thrilled that there are now 2 million deployed, registered, accessible Solaris desktops out there since the release of Solaris 10 earlier this year. Because that means there are now 2 million desks out there at which someone who is blind can work - without the need for expensive, additional accessibility software. And the same goes for people with a severe physical disabilities, who also have an outrageously high unemployment rate (and of course peole with less severe physical disabilities can likewise take advantage of the numerous other accessibility features of the Solaris 10 desktop).

But returning for a moment to the blind and low vision community - as California Speaker pro Tempore Leland Yee has noted, among the 25-30% of the functionally blind who are employed, virtually all of them (93%) use Braille. In fact, the importance of Braille literacy has been stressed over and over again as critical for empowering the blind in work and education. Which is why I'm very proud that the 2 million registered Solaris 10 graphical desktops all support refreshible Braille displays. With Solaris 10 and a supported Braille display, blind programmers (using NetBeans or Oracle JDeveloper 10g) can be more efficient - easily reading the difference between a comma and a colon, rather than trying to hear it. Blind authors can easily verify that the text they've written is in boldface or italics in StarOffice and OpenOffice.org. And blind folks taking part in on-line chats and reading e-mail and browsing the web can more easily read the smilies and abbreviations that everyone uses! And the set of applications people with disabilities on Solaris 10 can use is growing daily, as the set of applications using the GNOME/GTK+ libraries and the Java/Swing libraries grows.

P.S. to the anonymous commenter who fairly points out that many Solaris 10 installations are in headless servers and not in desktops. This is a good point and absolutely true. Nontheless, administration of these systems is an important and often well-paying job, and with very few exceptions system administration is likewise accessible - which is really the key issue. The large and growing set of Solaris 10 systems is opening up new opportunities for people with disabilities to get jobs and gain and education and ... And that is pretty cool. (2005-08-04 20:10:41.0) Permalink Comments [1]