<blockquote style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;" class="gmail_quote">1. Design a feature in the XO that makes it easy to "plug in" any required<br>additional equipment (for example, suppose it were decided that adding a
<br>Braille interface to every XO were not desireable or feasible, for cost or<br>other reasons. That means you need a way to plug in a separate Braille<br>interface so that deaf-blind children can still use the XO, or so hearing
<br>blind children can still use the XO to learn Braille and use Braille to<br>read text in situations when they don't want to use sound--for example if<br>they're studying at home after their younger siblings have gone to bed and
<br>don't want to disturb them).<br></blockquote><div><br>We did. They are three USB ports.<br> </div><blockquote style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;" class="gmail_quote">
<br>2. Of course, design the "plug in" feature so that it is cheap, sturdy,<br>affordable, etc.<br></blockquote><br>We have a peripherals mailing list and several pages on the wiki. Maybe we should find people to suggest more accessibility devices to construct.
<br><br>Seth<br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Jan 9, 2008 1:50 PM, <<a href="mailto:ashettle@patriot.net">ashettle@patriot.net</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Duane King (with a quote from Albert Calahan) said:<br><br>"> Perhaps there is a need for both. Common stuff that gets<br>> used every day could be written to be optimal for audio control.<br>> Random seldom-used things could get the normal treatment.
<br>Exactly. You really don not need to an image application for example to<br>have accessibility controls, at least not for the fully blind. The reason<br>the partially sighted have more tools and greater ease of use on today's
<br>desktop is because as much as the sighted developers may want to help,<br>they still find comfort in the gui.. and this leads to the sighted who are<br>working on helping out blind accessibility to invariably start using or
<br>adapting GUI items, or wasting time trying to get GUI's to work with<br>audio... so the idea of not using the GUI available seems to be a strange<br>and impossible one."<br><br>I don't speak computerese so I don't understand this "GUI" stuff -- but I
<br>do understand the general point here. I see a similar situation when<br>talking with hearing people about accessibility for deaf people. When I<br>started my current job, I asked my employer for a TTY that plugs directly
<br>into the phone jack. The guy who came to help hook me up so I could use<br>the phone (via TTY) kept wanting to plug in both a phone AND the TTY and<br>was rather perplexed when I said I didn't need the phone at all, just the
<br>TTY.<br><br>This is one more reason why designers and developers (for ANY product, not<br>just the XO) should always be consulting carefully and directly with<br>people with disabilities when designing accessibility features. They may
<br>need feedback directly from disabled consumers in order to "shake up"<br>their old ways of thinking and understand what the REAL needs are, not<br>their preconceptions of the needs.<br><br>I think it can also help to bear in mind general principles of "universal
<br>design" (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_design" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_design</a>). Universal design<br>is partly about making things (building, technology, whatever) more
<br>accessible to people with disabilities -- but it's also a philosophy, a<br>paradigm, a way of thinking. In the old approach, companies usually<br>design a product meant for "average people" -- moderately educated (high
<br>school graduate or higher) non-disabled people between the ages of 18 and<br>65 in the "average" weight range with no particular health conditions etc<br>etc. -- and then "add on" features for anyone who doesn't fit those
<br>standards as an afterthought. (Oh, we forgot about children. Oh, we<br>forgot about elderly people with arthritis. Oh, we forgot blind people,<br>deaf people, people with cerebral palsy, people with intellectual<br>
disabilities, etc)<br><br>With "universal design" you take a new idea in the conceptualization stage<br>and think FROM THE BEGINNING how to make it as usable as possible by as<br>wide a number of people as possible, including people who just don't have
<br>a standard body size and shape, or a standard pair of eyes and ears and<br>legs and hips and arms and hands working to standardized standards as<br>described in the Requistion Manual for Standard Homo Sapiens. So instead
<br>of building one entrance for people with legs that work to standardized<br>specifications and a separate (ramped) entrance for everyone else, a<br>building might be designed in a way that everyone can use the same<br>
entrance, while also being attractive and friendly to use for everyone.<br>Or instead of building a computer to be used by people with standard eyes<br>and ears and then going, "Ooops, this feature and that one isn't
<br>accessible, we need a fix now," it would be designed with accessibility in<br>mind from the start. (The above wikipedia link gives a general intro to<br>the idea of "universal design" for both buildings and technology; then
<br>there's also<br><a href="http://www.aarp.org/families/home_design/a2004-03-23-whatis_univdesign.html" target="_blank">http://www.aarp.org/families/home_design/a2004-03-23-whatis_univdesign.html</a><br>which is really about houses, not technology, but the general philosophy
<br>is still roughly applicable.)<br><br>It's too late obviously to start the XO off on universal design principles<br>(that should have started 5-plus years ago). But we can certainly move<br>forward on those principles from here on out.
<br><br>At the same time, "universal design" does have certain inherent<br>limitations. There will always be exceptions, and exceptions to the<br>exceptions. Sometimes people with different disabilities -- or even the
<br>same disability but with different needs -- will need directly conflicting<br>accommodations. Audio for hearing blind people and visuals for sighted<br>deaf people, for example. To some extent you can solve this by simply
<br>providing both: a visual equivalent for every auditory feature, and an<br>auditory equivalent for every visual feature, as well as a tactile<br>equivalent for both in order to accommodate people who are both deaf AND<br>
blind. But in other cases, it may not be possible to design universal<br>accessibility into the standard product. In other words, the goal of the<br>perfectly universally accessible XO for every child may not be fully<br>
achievable (though we SHOULD be aiming for something as close to it as<br>possible). In some cases we might need to resort to a few "add on"<br>features. In this case, we would need to:<br><br>1. Design a feature in the XO that makes it easy to "plug in" any required
<br>additional equipment (for example, suppose it were decided that adding a<br>Braille interface to every XO were not desireable or feasible, for cost or<br>other reasons. That means you need a way to plug in a separate Braille
<br>interface so that deaf-blind children can still use the XO, or so hearing<br>blind children can still use the XO to learn Braille and use Braille to<br>read text in situations when they don't want to use sound--for example if
<br>they're studying at home after their younger siblings have gone to bed and<br>don't want to disturb them).<br><br>2. Of course, design the "plug in" feature so that it is cheap, sturdy,<br>affordable, etc.
<br><br>3. Figure out a way to make it easy for individual children in individual<br>schools to request these plug in features (for one thing, make sure ALL<br>children and ALL schools and ALL governments are aware they exist in the
<br>first place), and make it easy for governments to figure out how many they<br>need to order and how to identify where they need to be sent. Kids who<br>need the plug-in feature should not be left out simply because they (and
<br>their teachers or schools) don't realize that they even have the option of<br>asking for one.<br><br>One approach: have an announcement in the XO laptop itself that this<br>feature is available; this announcement would instruct students to "ask
<br>their teacher" for this feature, and would instruct teachers to "consult<br>the contact person at the school who orders these computers."<br><br>Sorry for throwing so many different ideas into one email. I hope it was
<br>still possible to follow the multiple threads.<br><br>Andrea Shettle, MSW<br><a href="mailto:ashettle@patriot.net">ashettle@patriot.net</a><br><a href="http://wecando.wordpress.com" target="_blank">http://wecando.wordpress.com
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