Peter Korn's Weblog

The KDE Accessibility project had been working on a variety of aspects of desktop accessibility as part of the KDE desktop (the other main graphical UNIX and GNU/Linux desktop, other than the GNOME desktop). Their work includes defining the keyboard sequences for desktop operation, themes for use by folks with vision impairments, and also the development of some assistive technologies. They are also working to implement support for the AT-SPI (the accessibility programming framework that came out of the GNOME Accessibility Project).

The KDE Accessibility folks recently teamed up with linaccess to do a usability study of open source accessibility solutions. Their study involved 5 members of the linaccess team - three partially sighted individuals and two blind individuals - with varying UNIX and Windows experience. The main 47 page report covers mostly the KDE desktop accessibility features and accessibility theme support, but also includes some Gnopernicus tasks. They also produced a screen magnification report that evaluated the software screen magnifier that is being developed by the KDE Accessibility project.

This usability work is the first of its kind to my knowledge looking at the usability successes and challenges of graphical UNIX desktops for folks with vision impairments. The KDE Project and linaccess have done a great service to everyone working on open source and UNIX accessibility. To excerpt a bit from their summary description of this work:

The goal of the usability tests was not to achieve statistical data, but to gain an understanding of the needs of the represented user types. As a general conclusion we found that while both KDE and Gnome provide very good tools to make the Linux desktop usable for partially sighted and blind users, they are lacking consistent support among the major desktop applications. In KDE, key applications like the text editor Kate or the shell Konsole did not apply high contrast colour schemes; in Gnome, the contents of crucial tools like the software installation (Ubuntu) could not be read by Gnopernicus and were therefore "invisible" for the blind users.

Another way I might summarize the situation is that, while a lot of the basic tools for success are coming together, their remains work to do in (a) many of the applications on the graphical desktop; and (b) in the UNIX and GNU/Linux distributions, many of which add their own installation/packaging applications which haven't been sufficiently developed and tested for accessibility. In other words, not all UNIX and GNU/Linux distributions are the same when it comes to accessibility - the apps they put together and test play a huge role in the user experience.

I'd also like to comment on a few specific things brought up the report. One problem noted was the inaccessibility of the default GNOME Evince PDF reader. While not an open source application, Adobe makes their Adobe Reader application available as a free binary download for GNU/Linux and Solaris, and it works well with Gnopernicus and also has features for reading documents aloud directly (without the need for a screen reader). Another problem noted was the hassle of installing the Sun Java Runtime with Java Accessibility support in order to gain screen reader access to OpenOffice.org. This dependency is going away in OpenOffice.org version 2.0.3, and nightly builds of 2.0.3 are already available with this functionality present. Finally, the study noted that it was cumbersome to use a chat program GAIM with Gnopernicus. While still relatively new, the open source Orca screen reader is designed around the idea of application-specific customization to improve the blind and low-vision user experience, efficiency, and productivity. One of the first Orca scripts was for GAIM, and our blind Orca designer Mike Pedersen uses Orca with GAIM all the time (see the Orca blog entry about this).

Again, I think this underscores an earlier observation: it takes some care and thought to put together an accessible UNIX desktop. We aren't yet at the place where all UNIX graphical desktops are completely accessible out of the box. (2006-05-31 17:03:08.0) Permalink


	Peter Korn's Weblog The collected occasional commentary by Peter Korn, Accessibility Architect at Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Open Source Accessibility usability study