Accessibility
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The Accessibility Team
Mission
Our goal is to make Ubuntu and its derivatives usable by as many people as possible across ages, language and physical abilities. To do that we must provide wide access to the platform, the included software and ultimately to the information we all use and exchange. For some groups of users, platform access requires specialised assistive technology (AT) tools, and those tools must be proven to work well with the remaining desktop software and information on the web or in other formats. Ubuntu is about computing for everyone.
Current Priorities
- Research with existing users of Ubuntu to identify what accessibility requirements exist and what work needs to be done in these areas (personas ie., blind, partially blind, deaf, etc.). With these personas defined we will be able to identify solutions for each persona and if required coordinate development to implement them.
- Increase developer awareness concerning accessibility to encourage applications to be designed from the start with accessibility in mind. This avoids unnecessary refactoring of applications.
- Create focus groups around different areas of software (for example text-to-speech, screen readers, voice recognition etc) to bring together people interested in each area.
- Current community documentation must be updated
The features we are currently working on are described in the Specifications section.
note: We welcome your input on these, either as edits to the specifications themselves or via posts to the mailing lists or forum.
An accessibility session should be submitted for the each UDS (Ubuntu Developer Summit), which is where the specifications and blueprints for each release are discussed.
About
The Ubuntu Accessibility Team works with developers to improve the accessibility support on the Ubuntu platform and the software that runs on it. We communicate on IRC, via mailing lists and in the Ubuntu forum.
General Information
Read more about the general issues of computing with disabilities or about the needs of specific user groups.
External Links
- a11y projects for desktop environments:
- a11y projects for software:
BLINUX - Project who's aim is to improve the usability of the GNU/Linux operating system for users who are blind.