[laptop-accessibility] How can the XO be made accessible to blind

[Albert Cahalan]

On Jan 8, 2008 12:09 AM, Duane King <dking at pimpsoft.com> wrote:

> personal end goal is that somebody can use a OLPC device without needing to
> look at the screen at all. In fact, the screen should be powered off to
> conserve power in this state, and any system that is only used for the GUI
> should be unloaded from memory to make more room available for the audio
> interface libs.
...
> Actualy, Sugar is disqualified. We should be able to turn it off as part of
> the accessability goals, as a GUI system taking up valuable battery power and
> cpu cycles has no use to somebody who can only hear the sounds the XO makes.

This is an interesting take on things.

For a long time now, I've thought that accessibility adaptations
are kind of the wrong approach. That means trying to use audio
to describe video, when the video is trying to describe some
abstract internal state. Ideally one would skip the middle-man,
going straight from the internal abstract state to the audio.

The pros are a much more efficient human interface and a huge
reduction in resource requirements. The cons are a need to
create new blind-specific software largely from scratch, with all
the problems of feature sets maybe not keeping up, and the
resulting inability of a blind person to get assistance from a
typical sighted person.

Perhaps there is a need for both. Common stuff that gets
used every day could be written to be optimal for audio control.
Random seldom-used things could get the normal treatment.