Date: Sat, 25 Jul 1998 00:32:28 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: mike@smith.net.au (Mike Smith) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com, mike@smith.net.au, pvernon@purdue.edu, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, max@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Accessability (was Re: question) Message-ID: <199807250032.RAA18039@usr06.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <199807250022.RAA01204@dingo.cdrom.com> from "Mike Smith" at Jul 24, 98 05:22:49 pm
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> > It seems that it would be a good idea to provide some way to invoke > > this with as little work as possible from a boot floppy. > > There is an option in the bootstrap to probe the keyboard; I'm not sure > if it's the default or not. If the keyboard's not present, it will use > the serial port. Presuming that the machine will not ask the user to hit F1 if the keyboard is missing. The bigger question is whether or not the screen-oriented install methodology would not be a problem. The issue here is that the words on the screen are not painted in "speech order" -- the order a human would read them aloud -- nor are they painted in their entirety, due to minimal redraw optimizations. > > It would also be a good idea to start thinking in terms of accessibility > > functions for the console, the keyboard driver, and Free-B.S.D. in > > general. > > Thinking is easy; finding a developer interested in taking on the work > less so. > > Your suggestions are pretty good though (if unoriginal 8) They were intended to be food for thought, not original. Once invoked, other options which are more original could be fine tuned; for example, instead of making the modifier keys sticky, turn them into "dead keys", where you hit "shift" then "sp", and you get upper case "S" and lower case "p". You could also define multiple shift key hits to start the accessibility mode; it's possible that someone with parkinsonianism, for example, would not be able to hold the shift key down long enough to activate it, if holding it down a long time was the switch. I'm not claiming that I'm the first guy to think about this, only that someone with the ability to make the changes to the FreeBSD source tree *should* be thinking about it. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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