Screen reading for web browsing on Ubuntu 7.10

Posted Oct 9, 2008 17:48 UTC (Thu) by plaxx (guest, #53703)
Parent article: Accessibility in Linux systems

I always thought that Linux was accessible since almost every distro release talked about accessibility improvements (mostly done in Gnome but still).

As part of a little assignment at University, I wanted to try the state of screen reading in a Web browsing context under Ubuntu 7.10. It was not very successfull.

See my blog post[1] describing what I tried.

[1] http://www.bottomlesspit.org/2008/08/04/blind-web-browsin...

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Screen reading for web browsing on Ubuntu 7.10

Posted Oct 9, 2008 18:04 UTC (Thu) by sthibaul (✭ supporter ✭, #54477) [Link]

Yes, distros talk about accessibility improvement, but we are still
a bit far from _real_ mainline accessibility. GUI accessibility is
still some mess, but hopefully with firefox 3 integrated in all distros
the web part will work nicely.

About the bugs & such you encountered, that's unfortunately mostly
because distributions haven't yet done their part, integrate components
together, so that you have to mix things together by hand.

Now, what you tried was GUI accessibility, which is quite recent. Try
CLI accessibility, _that_ has been working for more than a decade now;
so you can say a linux _text_ system definitely _is_ accessible.