Jonathan Deamer

I’m not exactly a hardcore Linux user – I just have a couple of knackered old laptops on which it’s installed, one that I use as I media centre and one that I use for geeky Frankenstein experiments.  But I do really admire a lot of the principles behind open software and culture (especially Creative Commons – everything I write here is CC licensed).

For this reason I’m planning on attending OggCamp, a free software / free culture unconference organised by the presenters of the Ubuntu UK Podcast and Linux Outlaws (Are you coming? Join me on Plancast). At the moment I’m reading up on one of my recent pet interests, assistive and accessibility technology, to see if I can carve a suitable presentation out of the topic for the event.  A lot of this sort of software is hugely expensive (£200 to 300+) as there of course isn’t the mass-market demand for it that there is for games, to-do list managers and iPhone fart apps, yet for many people with even mild disabilities they’re essential parts of daily computer use.

Often the accessibility features built into operating systems or mobile devices are more of a box-ticking marketing exercise than an attempt to genuinely make computers useful and usable for all.  But I’ve a nascent theory that open-source software could make accessibility software technology much more affordable, given the gift economy that so often applies where its development is concerned.

Further, it could be argued that devices with a (partly) closed ecosystem like my beloved iPhone are at the mercy of the company that developed it in the first place as far as accessibility is concerned. Software to aid people with visual impairments, for example, requires special API access to the user interface so it can monitor and control it accordingly. The iPhone’s built-in zoom and text-to speech is rudimentary at best, and the rules for 3rd party apps mean it’s difficult (if not impossible) for a developer to create an alternative that could be run system wide.

So could the open-source Android platform form the basis for an truly accessible smartphone?

I’m no expert in software development, accessibility or open source, but I’m hugely interested in all of them. So I’m going to keep thinking at this cross-section of my interests, and hopefully form the outline of a theory that I can present at Oggcamp in May. I’m at a very early stage in my thinking (I don’t even know what sort of accessibility features Android ships with), so feel free to share any thoughts.