Re: Blind user complaining on Adobe web site

[Arthur Torrey]

Jean Louis pointed at Vinux - which I had found and looked to me like a 
near-dead project - The home page is non-https, and is skeletal at best...  The 
Wiki is talking about the 'latest version' as of 2015, and while it says the 
last update was in 2019, the download site doesn't connect (Firefox times out 
w/ can't find site error) and there have only been about 2 changes to the wiki 
since it was created in 2013 according to it's history page...

I found a few other low vision projects and they seemed similarly moribund.  I 
asked on another site and the response I got was either similar pointers to 
seemingly dead projects, or that because most of the mainstream distros now 
have some level of accessibility built in, the low-vision / blind specific 
projects have mostly died.

As a non-programmer, who has listened to a few presentations at Libre-Planet 
and read articles here and there I can't contribute any code, but as a 'partly 
baked idea' my thought about how it might be possible to do a better job on 
accessibility might be to try and tap into the system at a much earlier 
level....

What would happen if instead of trying to put accessibility in at the window 
manager (KDE / Gnome / etc.) level, there was instead an X-Windows driver that 
provided input to a screen-reader as a "display type"?  How about having an 
"accessible keyboard" option (probably as an intermediate layer between the 
usual keyboard choices and the rest of the system as that would make it easy to 
use any desired key-mapping underneath it?)

It seems to me that the closer the accessibility options are to the "bare metal 
hardware" the less they would be relying on window managers / programs to do 
the "right thing", and the more universally consistent they would be.

Possibly less universal, but still coming in at a fairly low level, what if 
there was an "accessible" option for choosing the internationalization when 
setting up?

As I said this may be something that wouldn't work for reasons that are above 
my pay-grade to understand, but perhaps might just be something that hadn't 
been considered.

------------------
Arthur Torrey - <arthur_torrey@comcast.net>
-------------------