Accessibility and the open desktop: everyone gains by it

During the first few years of the 21st century, there was a great deal of discussion concerning the state of readiness of GNU/Linux for the mainstream desktop and how it could be furthered. An article, published in LWN almost a decade ago, is typical of the period. Today, with Linux happily ticking away on many end-user desktops and in many schools and libraries, one can no longer doubt that, though world domination may yet be a long way off, presence certainly has been achieved.

This achievement might well in turn lead to even greater recognition and could conceivably take the open desktop from the average user's computer to deployment in large, non-technically oriented corporations and governmental institutions. However, such a possibility brings up a question which may very likely have eluded many key players in the various free desktop communities: Are the various environments on offer as accessible as they are appealing and functional?

In the computing world, accessibility generally refers to the concept of allowing as wide a range of users to interact with a system as possible, either through initial design or through hardware or software palliatives, generally referred to as assistive technology. The special needs of users can vary greatly, but, in general, can be categorized as physical, perceptual, and cognitive. It follows that, in order for a system to be accessible, it must be capable of adapting and catering to such needs, which might imply as simple a feature as the ability to customize the blinking rate of a cursor in order to avoid triggering epileptic seizures or as complex as offering a fully voice-operated system to provide a working environment to a blind person also lacking the use of her hands.

Creating a system capable of accommodating even a subset of users requiring accessibility features is therefore a vast undertaking. This, however, may well be a task which the free software community needs to address seriously, not merely for the good of its users, but to ensure its credibility as a viable alternative to mainstream, proprietary platforms as well.

The legal angle

In the early 1990s, many governments introduced legislation seeking to protect the rights of people living with disabilities; the "Americans with Disabilities Act" (ADA) in the US and the "Disability Discrimination Act" (DDA, since replaced by the "Equality Act 2010") in the UK are typical outcomes of these efforts. One of the important issues these laws were trying to address was that of discrimination in the workplace and the right to equal employment opportunities for disabled people: the wording of Titles I and IV of the ADA, for instance, reflects such an attempt.

These efforts were a vast step forward, but they also came at a time when the workplace was about to be drastically transformed by the rise of the internet and the desktop computer. The laws enacted still implicitly required employers to provide accommodations to their workers in the fulfillment of their duties, regardless of whether those duties necessitated the use of a computer or not. Sadly, this was not made very clear to either employer or employee and could depend upon one's interpretation of the text: see, for example, this out-law.com article discussing the relevance of the DDA to networking and computing in the British workplace and some of the areas left undefined.

Clearly then, legislation needed to catch up with this new situation and specifically address the requirement for accessible computing and information in a working environment. Perhaps the first to react to that conclusion was the US Congress who responded with its adoption of the Section 508 amendment to the "Rehabilitation Act" in 1998, which essentially requires governmental agencies to provide accessible electronic environments to their employees and offers guidelines to that effect. This amendment, directly or coincidentally, seems to have set the tone for similar policies and laws to be enacted or amended in the 21st century.

Take, for instance, the Canadian federal government's "Policy on the Provision of Accommodation for Employees with Disabilities", which seems to be an echo of Section 508, or Germany's far more extensive "Behindertengleichstellungsgesetz", which makes "barrier-free information" one of its key concerns. More recently, in the Canadian province of Ontario, the government adopted the "Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act". This is an interesting piece of legislation insofar as it devotes a great deal of attention to equal access to information and communications in private and public employment as well as education, and refers specifically to software and self-service kiosks. Such laws, whether in North America or Europe, whether they apply solely to the public sector or to all organizations, do form a clear trend, and it is to be expected that more and more legislatures will follow suit, either at the local or national level.

The legal obligation for an employer to provide an accessible platform impacts all software, free or not, of course; unfortunately, free software platforms like GNU/Linux face an inherent disadvantage with regards to accessibility: the lack of third-party proprietary solutions. None of the mainstream commercial platforms had much stock accessibility in the beginning, some still do not, but they all almost immediately benefited from third-party offerings to bridge these gaps.

As we now know from experience, proprietary software on open desktops is scarce; commercial developers are difficult to entice and their reception by the community, should they take the plunge, can be rather mixed. The practical upshot of this is that it is highly unlikely that any assistive technology software vendor will step forward to fill the accessibility gaps on the open desktop. That leaves the responsibility to the community and associated commercial interests. Failure to provide adequate and easily integrated accessibility, however, could very well one day lead to a disaster scenario. An early convert to the free desktop could be fined or forced to provide a more accessible, commercial platform, thereby seriously undermining the credibility of free software as a worthwhile alternative in the workplace.

Where we stand

The next logical question is, "How are we doing and how far do we still need to go to achieve standards compliant accessibility on the open desktop?" In some areas, the progress has been very positive, whereas others seem to be experiencing difficulty coalescing into a meaningful movement.

Visual accessibility on the Linux console has now been adequate for over a decade, with long-standing projects, such as Speakup, Emacspeak, and Brltty, providing advanced screen reviewing functionalities through braille or speech. Reasonably good text-to-speech (TTS) processing has also been available for some time through such free software synthesizers as Festival and Espeak. This means that, when the time came to develop the Orca screen-reader for the GNOME desktop, well-tested output mechanisms already existed and could easily be integrated, allowing developers to focus on interface-related accessibility.

Orca itself has been gaining in stability and functionality steadily over the last few years, making critical applications, like Firefox and the LibreOffice suite, functionally available to the blind and visually impaired. Recently, as part of an accessibility push in GNOME, many bugs and shortcomings of Orca have received some attention, and the underlying accessibility framework and libraries it employs, ATK/AT-SPI, have become fully integrated in GNOME 3.6, becoming formal dependencies. This is very positive because, in the words of Joanmarie Diggs, the main Orca developer:

GNOME is not the only desktop environment accessible through Orca; there have been some efforts in other quarters, with the inclusion of preliminary accessibility support through AT-SPI in version 4.10 of Xfce4 and the early development of a Qt AT-SPI bridge for KDE.

This is all very good news for visual accessibility, but weak areas remain. There is no accessible PDF reader for the open desktop, for instance, and the accuracy of optical character recognition (OCR) software is improving at a very sedate pace. Yet these would be crucial applications to a visually impaired person in virtually any modern working environment.

There also have been recent examples of decisions by distributors which can affect out-of-the-box accessibility in a negative manner, such as the likely decision by Debian to make Xfce4 its default desktop environment in Wheezy, or the announcement by the Ubuntu team that the historically more accessible Unity 2D desktop will no longer be distributed as of release 12.10. The bulk of the recent accessibility improvements to Xfce4 were introduced in version 4.10; however, Wheezy will be shipping the older and virtually inaccessible 4.8.1 release. As for Unity 3D, Luke Yelavich, an Ubuntu accessibility developer, made it clear that he does not expect it to be as accessible as Unity 2D until the next LTS release. While a more accessible environment can usually be installed with reasonable ease, such decisions could result in a poor first impression for an inexperienced user and a wrong assessment of the level of accessibility available on the platform.

Such complaints are minor, however, when comparing the state of visual accessibility with that of physical palliatives; here, the results of GNOME's accessibility efforts seem to be rather mixed. Components key to accessibility for physically disabled people, such as the Dasher predictive text input engine or the Gnome-voice-control application do not seem to have undergone significant development, or indeed a release, in over a year and appear to be stalled just at the brink of basic usability.

This stall leads to a difficult situation, because the very people needed to test the software and provide feedback and bug reports cannot quite use it without significant help, thus placing a barrier on further development. If that barrier can be overcome, physical accessibility efforts will hopefully pull together and achieve the same kind of momentum seen with GNOME, Orca, and various related projects.

In the meantime, many interesting projects are still being developed and sponsorship can help nudge them in the right direction. The Sphinx speech recognition project was part of the Google Summer of Code this year, for example, while the Opengazer gaze tracking project received some support from AEGIS. F123.org also sponsored accessibility improvements in WebKitGtk+. Such support not only benefits projects directly, but also serves to give them visibility, which can help attract potential users and contributors, thus building a stronger community.

The matter of accessibility is by no means the only stumbling block on the road to a wider adoption of the open desktop; however, with ever more stringent laws regarding accessibility in the workplace and an aging population likely to require an increasing level of accessibility from public services, it certainly is not an issue likely to fade away of its own accord. It may well be that solid, out-of-the-box universal accessibility is not something which can be achieved by one FOSS project, but requires a greater level of collaboration and concerted vision across all the projects and sub-communities which make up the open desktop as we know it.