This page collects several projects, resources and links on free software accessibility.

How to make applications accessible?

Because “One person out of ten consider having a handicap, but one person out of five consider being limited it her activitie”, “15% of the world's population lives with some form of disability”, Laws require accessibility.

Or rather, how to make accessible applications? This section gathers links to documentation and videos talking about it. The idea is that ideally you should not have to focus on accessibility features, but just integrate in your development process good practices which improve accessibility: in a couple of words, simple and logical design, instead of complex and graphical design, and configurability.

Accessibility Howto

There is a guide. It is a bit old, but it still gives a good idea of the needs.

Gnome has its own guide.

KDE has its own guide.

Qt5 has a guide for QWidget and a guide for Qt Quick.

There is also a good LinuxJournal article.

So as to check how good your graphical application looks like, you can try Accerciser.

There is guide for text applications for testing accessibility of text applications.

For GULs, there is a page from the wiki.

For making an Linux installer accessible, there is a page from the wiki.

Talks

How to make applications accessible? at LSM 2010 (40' video, slides).

How does software accessibility work? at LSM 2014 (40' video, slides and transcript).

Designing accessible applications, FOSDEM 2016, (15' video, same video with better sound, slides and transcript).

Why not extending non-regression tests to accessibility matter? at LSM 2017 (40' video and slides).

Maintaining accessibility through testing?, FOSDEM 2018, (18' video, PDF slides and ODP slides).

More documentation and talks

Documentations, wikis

Debian has three wiki pages:

Freedesktop: Accessibility principles in X11/Wayland

Talks about accessibility

A series of talks about accessibility have been recorded at LSM, FOSDEM, GHM (GNU Hackers Meeting), Debconf (Debian Conference), XDC (X.Org Developer's Conference):

Complete lists, included non-recorded ones:

Slides

Slides of a presentation done at the Villette, general introduction to accessibility (in French)

Slides of a presentation for a round table, software accessibility: alternative solutions for visually-impaired people (in French), HTML version.

Articles about accessibility

Tools for accessibility

Accessibility Howto

There is a guide. It is quite old, but it still provides ideas.

Gnome has its own guide.

BrlAPI

Available in BRLTTY, BrlAPI is a way for your applications or screen readers to easily output braille without having to tackle all the nasty technical details, through the use of a library which forwards the braille output to the BRLTTY daemon. See the documentation of latest stable version and the reference manual

.

NEW: in the new release (0.5.0), BrlAPI has Python, Java, Tcl, OCaml and CLisp bindings!

BrlAPI is already used by leading screen readers like Gnopernicus, Orca, LSR, NVDA, and Microsoft's Narrator Braille support.

Several programs were written for transferring files to/from braille devices:

Linux

A set of fonts/keyboard mappings for typing braille on the linux (>= 2.6.17rc1) console with regular keyboard.

Braille tables

You can find here some braille tables which don't seem to be supported by nowadays' screen readers.

Brltty for Windows and DOS

You can get some old Windows and DOS version of brltty here.

Free Braille Displays

Braille devices are expensive and non free, please join us on the Free Braille Display project.

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