The Adriane desktop for the sight impaired

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Article from Issue 92/2008
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The Adriane audio desktop system delivers Linux to sightimpaired users.

Linux has many beautiful desktops, including rotating cubes, wobbly and burning windows, and mouse gestures for semi-automatic functions that do terribly smart things. Unfortunately, from the beginning of mouse-oriented computing, the graphical desktop has been designed for users who work within a visual context.

Consider, for example, a nicely configured KDE desktop with tidily sorted icons. If you switched off your monitor, would you be able to start your email client and read your mail? Most users wouldn’t even be able to find the program icon without visual feedback, yet this is how a graphical desktop “looks” to blind people.

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