at Maurice

Mon Aug 23 19:58:19 BST 2010

Hey Maurice,

Thanks for the useful info - I'm definitely checking it out now.
I've been a little busy these past few days - my apologies for not
responding sooner.
I agree with you on the visual crud when it comes to OSs for the blind;
perhaps there is a solution in dumping the gui in favor of full text.
Novell's OpenStudio can customize its distro to your liking, and I may give
that a try to see if I can get rid of a lot of the visual stuff.
I'll keep in touch with my progress between work & school.

Regards,
Spencer Hunley

On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 6:00 AM, <
ubuntu-accessibility-request at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:

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> Today's Topics:
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>   1. Re: Hello everyone! (Maurice McCarthy)
>   2. Persona Survey results (Alan Bell)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:05:24 +0100
> From: Maurice McCarthy <manselton at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Hello everyone!
> To: ubuntu-accessibility <ubuntu-accessibility at lists.ubuntu.com>
> Message-ID:
>        <AANLkTimMNxBS2Q77NcD0jy1YuFq7Ktwo_YB5t7-fNcWS at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> Hi Spencer,
>
> Welcome to the list. As you can see it is not hugely active but I
> think it could be.
>
> I'm new here too and interested almost by accident. I'm too old to
> learn very much quickly but I've been using Debian based systems for
> some 10 years now. I'm not too clever with scripts and configuration.
> At work on the North Sea oil fields I cannot get to sleep in spite of
> a very active 3 days so I thought I'd do something constructive.
>
> Brian Cox has done some truly stirling work putting together the
> scripts to make Ubuntu more friendly at www.vinux.org.uk  As he
> acknowledges putting a distribution for the visually impaired on a
> gui-oriented system seems counter-intuitive but he finds the hardware
> recognition in Ubuntu superior to Debian. I would not have Audacity
> voice recording working but for Vinux. (I want to put a certain
> philosophic work into audible which is not available elsewhere.)
>
> I'd like to run some thoughts past you. I first started thinking about
> accessibility issues when I chanced across the grml distro.
> http://grml.org It is a system administrators distro packed with
> documentation and text tools. Heavily text biased it has clear
> advantages for the blind wanting to understand computers better
> because of the text to speech tools. Grml is maintained by Austrian
> students in Vienna and though they made a policy decision early on to
> support accessibility there is no one who especially tends this side
> of the project. Never the less it has occurred to me that some of
> their work might be hackable into Ubuntu and Vinux.
>
> Secondly, particularly for the blind, Emacs has always seemed full of
> potential to me in combination with Festival. Emacs does not work like
> other environments and can seem daunting if you are used to windows
> ways but I feel it could be so useful. Everything can be done in emacs
> as it forms a desktop of its own - though I am a rudimentary
> practioner in it. It would be almost identical in a gui or a braille
> terminal, I think, and therefore transportable across all linux
> distros (And at least partly into Windows as gnu emacs for windows can
> be downloaded from
> http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-22.3-bin-i386.zip )
> Obviously I learnt this from grml. They have it set up that in Emacs
> the command: Say "some region of text" does exactly that.
>
> I understand from some of the blind users on grml that the biggest
> obstacle is the gui - probably because the most common use is browsing
> and so many interesting sites are http and full of visual crud.
>
> Well I'll try to get to sleep again now.
>
> Best Wishes
> Maurice
>
>  - - - - - - - - - - -
> Spencer wrote:
>
> Greetings,
>
> My name is Spencer and I am an avid advocate & self-advocate for those
> developmental disabilities. Ever since I started using Linux about
> three to four years ago after growing weary of Windows' high
> maintenance, I soon discovered the better quality assistive technology
> and software found in Linux and Ubuntu.
> Currently I work at a university and am pursuing more affordable
> assistive technology for all.
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:46:00 +0100
> From: Alan Bell <alan.bell at theopenlearningcentre.com>
> Subject: Persona Survey results
> To: ubuntu-accessibility <ubuntu-accessibility at lists.ubuntu.com>
> Message-ID: <4C6DA618.5050902 at theopenlearningcentre.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> The results of the survey are now in, we had a fantastic response and we
> have 26 really great detailed replies. The next step is to group these
> roughly by impairment then use the replies as an inspiration to write up
> descriptions of realistic but fictional characters that can be used by
> developers and user experience designers to ensure that Ubuntu is built
> for these characters.
>
> For a bit of background on design personas in general and how they are
> used here is a description of how IBM use them
> http://www-01.ibm.com/software/ucd/gallery/software.html
>
> Canonical have a set of personas already, one of them has a visual
> impairment, we want to build a small set of personas with a range of
> accessibility needs and write them up to the same standard of quality as
> the existing Canonical documents so they can be fed into the design team.
>
> If you would like to help in the process of getting from survey
> responses to personas then please email myself or Penelope Stowe and we
> will send you a copy of the spreadsheet with all the responses and just
> names and email addresses removed. We decided at the meeting last night
> that we would share the spreadsheet with anyone on the list who asks for
> it, but we won't publish it on the internet or post it to the list in
> it's raw form.
>
> Alan.
>
>
>
>
>
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> End of Ubuntu-accessibility Digest, Vol 57, Issue 18
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