Feature changed by: Peter Grasch (bedahr) Feature #309502, revision 4 Title: Improve accessibility for disabled users through speech recognition openSUSE-11.3: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Important Requested by: Peter Grasch (bedahr) Partner organization: openSUSE.org Description: Linux accessibility has always been a bit of an issue. Recent GNOME releases are already quite good and include essential tools like the screen reader Orca. However, while alternative forms of input exist - for example in the form of an eye tracking controlled dasher, one of the most promising input method has been neglected: Speech recognition. I am the co-chairmen of the friendly society simon listens (http://simon-listens.org/) and for the past few years we have been working on an open source speech recognition solution called simon (http://sourceforge.net/projects/speech2text/) . simon is targeted towards physically disabled people and the elderly. I propose for Novell to partner with simon listens in a project to implement the necessary steps to make simon an integral component of the SUSE accessibility solutions. Business case (Partner benefit): openSUSE.org: OpenSUSE : Making OpenSUSE accessible through voice control would make it easily accessible for a wide array of users who were previously confined to proprietary systems where similar solutions already exist. Suse Linux Enterprise Edition : More and more public institutions are considering moving to (enterprise) Linux installations. Through professional support and high quality distributions like SUSE Linux Enterprise Edition many were able to move from more expensive and unstable proprietary systems to free and open source software. However, some companies - and especially government institutions - need to make their systems accessible to a wide array of disabled users - in some contries this need is even enforced by law. Making SLES, and on a larger scale GNU/Linux in general, more accessible would open up these markets. Discussion: #1: Alin M Elena (ealin) (2010-05-28 23:27:21) simon is packaged in playground now http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/KDE4:/Playground/openSUSE_Fac... (http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/KDE4:/Playground/openSUSE_Fac...) Alin + #2: Peter Grasch (bedahr) (2010-05-31 10:43:26) + Hi Alin! + + Thank you very much for packaging simon! + However, that is not really what I was looking for. I think that + tackling a task as big as accessibility is something that has to happen + on a much broader scale. + One of Ubuntus main goals for 10.04 was to boot faster. They set + themselves an ambitious goal and comitted their resources to achieve + it. The intention was public and so was the goal: Boot Ubuntu 10.04 in + 10 seconds on their reference plattform. + I think improving accessibility should be a similarly large and public + campaign. + Please don't get me wrong I really appreciate you taking the time to + create simon packages! + + Greetings, + Peter -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/309502