The Current State of Accessibility

I once spent a year limiting my use of sight on and off by using a blindfold. One of the things I quickly discovered is how useless many of the built in accessibility tools were. Using a web-browser was impossible, as was the window manager in general.

Over the course of the year I built tools that made accomplishing tasks when blindfolded possible or easier. Using the command line and Unix friendly programs (programs that work with text streams) worked best. Emacs already had some accessibility projects out there and extending them was easy enough. With a set of rules and inbetween scripts I was able to get the text to speech to speak "C" and added audio cues to aid navigation. A similar set of scripts and rules in addition to audio cues made debugging with GDB possible.

After my experiment was done I went back to using my normal setup full time but I learned quite a bit.