By now I’m sure you all know that I’m a huge fan of assistive technologies. Sure, my interest was sparked when my nephew started trying some out, but it’s more than that, they interest the geek and humanist with in me. Check out this project:

Of course I do have to plug this this system is running on Linux. It looks like Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10.

I do think that free and open source software (FOSS) has a lot of potential for helping people with disabilities. For a lot of needs, the current best options all run on Apple computers, unfortunately, Apple products are horribly over priced. Other systems, such as my nephew’s eye gaze computer run on systems that are even more limited and proprietary than Apple.

By shifting these systems to FOSS it would allow users to have lower cost systems, require less frequent hardware upgrades, minimize maintenance, and allow for a greater deal of control and flexibility to the end user. It would also take products that are being developed by a very small team and open it up to thousands of programmers and other developers to maximize the amount of work, either on original programming or bug fixes.

Linux would also allow users, blind people for example, who have no need for a Graphical User Interface (GUI) they can’t even see, to not even install one. This would free up a lot of wasted resources, freeing them up for something else. Now I’m not sure how web browsers would work in that kind of an environment, so maybe X server and a basic window manager would be needed, but certainly not a full GUI.

(Via OMG! Ubuntu)