Accessibility

Worldwide need for accessibility

Finding good data about disability incidence worldwide is challenging. In America and Europe, we have some general statistics:

• Half of all disability incidence numbers are from people over 65 years of age
• Roughly 0.1% of the population is blind
• Roughly 0.1% of the population has a speech impairment (could benefit from their computer talking for them)
• Roughly 0.05% of the population is deaf, while 0.2% is hard of hearing

Since we tend to get more disabilities as we age, we would expect these percentages to be lower in children. On the other hand, health issues like West Nile Virus that are a huge cause of blindness (and the altitude in places like Tibet, another cause of blindness) aren't significant issues in America and Europe - so you would expect that the incidence of disabilities in the OLPC markets will be higher.

So, until we get better data, it probably makes sense to adopt as rough numbers for OLPC children the general percentages from America and Europe taken across all age ranges.

This means that if the OLPC project reaches every child (so roughly 1 billion systems), we will need to serve 1 million blind children, and 1 million children who have a speech impairment, and 2 million children who have difficulty hearing.

Accessibility and Assistive Technology

Even in "first world" countries like the USA, Assistive Technology and Accessibility adaptations are expensive. People with physical or mental disabilities are often, due to their disability, in the lowest income classes, and have difficulty affording the technologies required.

In the Open Source Software community, a fair amount of software already exists to aid the disabled. However, they are often not installed or configured by default, and can be extremely difficult to add by a normal user.

Under this area, we should seek to list specifically:

• what Assistive Technology software packages should be included in the default olpc distribution
• how they should be configured by default
• what technologies need to have improved documentation to be useful

Accessibility ideas for the OLPC laptop

The following pages in this wiki may be of interest.

XOj in monochrome

Accessibility Computing Numerical Pointer

Helping Blind and Visually Impaired People

Although probably not a main target of the OLPC effort, the blind and visually impaired community seems to be a tight and cohesive community with clear requirements and needs, that could piggy-back on the effort as a whole, and hopefully make technology more multi-media in the true sense. Some resources or ideas:

• JAWS - from Freedom Scientific. Non-free.
• Orca - from Gnome, FAQ and wiki. LGPL license
  • There's a Grupo de usuarios ciegos y deficientes visuales de GNU/Linux (blind and visually impaired GNU/Linux users group) and its wiki.

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