Re: Assistance for Visually Impaired Student
On Sunday 06 March 2011 19:47:19 owens@netptc.net wrote:
> List
>
> I teach a course in Digital Integrated Circuits at the local University.
> One of my students is visually impaired-not totally blind but he requires a
> powerful reader for documents and the equilivant of a telescope to see the
> overhead projection of my course slides. He has expressed interest in
> Linux but, quite understandably, would require some software assistance to
> view documents and circuit schematics, potentially enlarging them at
> specific areas. I run Debian Lenny on my home system and Dual Boot with
> Ubuntu on my University laptop. Can anyone point to some specific software
> that I might have him try. TIA
>
> Larry
Ariadne-Knoppix seems to me better than Vinux. It was "designed" by Karl
Knopper in collaboration with his wife Ariadne, who is herself partially
sighted.
The speech is better (clearer, anyhow a little), and easier to get at. And
the text is very legible.
When I had a look at Vinux, not only did I find it hard to access the speech
facility, but I also did not think that it was very well designed for those
who could see, but not well. The clearer visuals are only skin-deep, and not
very clear at that.
I get better results for myself (I have a small degree of visual impairment)
by configuring KDE 3.5.10 on Debian Lenny or Trinity on Debian Squeeze.
But there are as many degrees of visual impairment as there are people who are
visually impaired, so nothing can suit everyone. Your student would do well
to look at all the offerings and see which suits him best.
Lisi
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