Status Report on LINUX ACCESSIBILITY
INTRODUCTION
This text is aimed at clarifying the status of current accessibility in Linux. What tools are they and how well do they work? Do note that this article leans towards visual impairment, because that is what I have, and the applications I mainly tested lie in that field.
SYNOPSIS
Using VMWare Player on Windows (see SYSTEM SETUP) I managed to install and configure Ubuntu, install the Gnopernicus screen magnifier, and set it up to use full-screen magnification. And the result is quite pleasing at this stage I have to say, allthough everything is a bit snappy mostly due to the fact that I’m running a virtual machine. All in all Linux accessibility has gone a long way, and still has a long way to go. The current status is almost sufficient for me to be able to work in a Linux-based environment.
SYSTEM SETUP
The system is basically a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB RAM, an ATI Radeon 9600XT videocard and an Abit VT7 mainboard. I’m running Windows XP Professional and on top of that VMWare Player and Ubuntu Linux 6.06 “Dapper Drake”.
INSTALLATIONS AND CONFIGURATIONS
After having installed the basic system along with my favourite packages, and set up the desktop, it was time to install Gnopernicus, which turned out to be very easy. Enabling the accessibility support in GNOME and then starting the magnifier worked flawlessly. Now came the tricky point: to configure xorg.conf to have a virtual screen. This can be automated, and I guess there soon will be a script to do all this for us, but for now I had to do it by hand.
All done and I now have a snappy full-screen magnifier that “sort of works”.
RESULTS
As I stated earlier this setup works out quite nicely. The only permanent bug I got afterwards is that the gnome-panel crashes sometimes. I haven’t looked further into that yet. There could be a solution out there allready. For more information be sure to check out the Ubuntu Accessibility Forums and the Ubuntu Accessibility Wiki, where Jason Grieves has written an excellent guide on how to get all this working.
