Project:Accessibility

Description
This project will help to make Gentoo more accessible to disabled users, and support them as well. We intend to work closely with the Desktop (and in particular the GNOME team), the Kernel, and the Base System teams to help resolve accessibility issues that come up with orca and other gnome-accessibility applications. We do not intend to make the applications themselves accessible. Rather, we leave that to the upstream authors. However, we can suggest default settings that may help make an application more usable to a disabled user.

Goals
We cannot currently support other desktop environments, because we have not found any others that offer usable accessibility features. KDE and others have tried, but currently GNOME has been the most successful.

We intend to help see that speakup is included and supported in Gentoo.

We also intend to add other accessibility applications to Portage.

We aim to make the Gentoo installation process accessibility friendly as well. This means that we would like to have speakup and brltty included on the Gentoo LiveCD.

Currently, speakup is included on the 2007.0 x86 release of Gentoo's LiveCD, and we are working closely with the Release Engineering team to be sure that speakup and brltty are included on all future Gentoo LiveCDs.

Herds
The accessibility project maintains the following herds:

Mailing List
We recommend that you subscribe to the [mailto:gentoo-accessibility@gentoo.org gentoo-accessibility@gentoo.org] mailing list; this is where accessibility-related discussions should take place.

IRC
If you are on IRC, please join us in on Freenode.