Re: [Fsfe-uk] OOo accessibility

[Chris Croughton]

On Mon, Mar 20, 2006 at 10:03:36AM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:

> Alex Hudson <address@hidden>
> > I suspect strongly that free software is great for people who have
> > difficulty with data input/control. I suspect we suck in varying amounts
> > for those who have difficulty seeing*. I would be interested in hearing
> > other people's experiences in this area. 
> 
> I think my most common bugfix is correcting cases where some
> designer has done something "stylish" that either makes part
> of the user interface invisible to people with colour vision
> problems, or makes a control too hard to use with motor control
> problems.

One thing which is worth checking is the use of non-standard colours
which get 'dithered' on displays with low colour resolution.  I had that
with a friend's website, she had used what was (to her on a display with
16-bit colour) a high contrast combination of pink background and blue
text -- when I looked at it on a display with an 8-bit colour depth the
browser dithered red and blue to get the pink and as a result the blue
text became fuzzy and unreadable.  (She was most embarassed since she
worked at the time for RNIB and her website was in other ways totally
accessible!)

> I've seen people using blinux and emacspeak http://www.leb.net/blinux/
> - what else is out there?

I will ask some of my friends with visual problems what they use now, I
know one used to use MSDOS with lynx and a text to speech module.

Chris C