How do visually impaired people work with computers and how can they explore their surroundings? It's not easy and the available software tools may help the visually impaired users a lot or, on the other hand, they can exclude them. This presentation will provide an insight into how visually impaired users can interact with the world using computers and Open Source software, from connecting the necessary devices to a computer and starting an accessible desktop, to running a street view application and struggling with bugs.
The presentation will demonstrate how a visually impaired user can (or cannot) work with computers on GNU/Linux in practice. A cross-platform street view application, Feel the streets, will be presented. It allows visually impaired users to virtually walk across cities using data from OpenStreetMap and to explore streets and interesting objects around the way.
The need for cooperation between visually impaired and sighted developers will be emphasized. After this presentation, you should have an idea how visually impaired users work with computers, how to enable accessibility on GNU/Linux and what you can do to make the life of visually impaired computer users easier, or at least not harder.
There are visually impaired employees at Red Hat. Red Hat supports various diversity & inclusion initiatives and cooperation with students. Lukáš is a visually impaired intern at Red Hat, working on his master thesis about Feel the streets within the academic cooperation between Red Hat and Faculty of Informatics at Masaryk University in Brno.
A visually impaired student at Masaryk university working for Red Hat and interested in accessibility and all the related stuff, Rust and anything interesting that comes along.
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