I have spent the last days working on a desktop for Visually Impaired users and found it quite hard to find the balance between Universal Design (which means being usable and useful for everyone without annoyances) and Assistive Technology (adjust the desktop to the needs and not vice versa). Until now “Free” is quite talkative during boot, login and inside the session, and as next step comes barrier-free launch of applications (using shortcuts, an audio menu and voice control) Pidgin reads the incoming messages, unfortunately it is not (yet?) possible to answer with spoken words, but at least keystrokes give audible feedback. Podcasts are downloaded in the background and stored in a /Podcast directory, and radio stations known from Radiotray can be accessed without GUI. Of course there’s also the Speech Synthesis output when text is marked (Ctrl-A) and this works in every application. The “Upgrade Warnings” tools has a new function, it acts as news reader that fetches the Top 10 headlines every 15 minutes and reads them on mouse-click.
If anybody has other ideas or recommendations, I’m all ears!