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
For people with physical impairments
Physical impairments range from fairly minor (difficulty using the mouse), to more significant (unable to use a normal keyboard, but still have a fair amount of upper body dexterity), through to being paralyzed from the neck down. Repetitive stress injury is another issue, though incidence of that is currently probably quite low in OLPC's target market.
Roughly 0.2% of the U.S. population has "difficulty using hands and fingers, e.g. to pick up a glass or grasp a pencil".
- OLCP should be fully operable from the keyboard, without requiring the trackpad for operation. Something like a painting program might be an exception; but otherwise, tasks like launching programs and browsing the web and reading a book (and ideally most games) should be fully operable from the keyboard
For people with visual impairments
For people with minor visual impairments
- ...
For people with 'low vision'
- ...
For people who are blind (from 'legally' blind through totally blind)
- ...
For people with hearing impairments
- ...
For people with cognitive impairments
- ...
For people with speech (generation) impairments
- ...
Misc.
The following pages in this wiki may be of interest.
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.