Products

Accessibility

We aim to make Ubuntu, and its derivatives, usable by as many people as possible across ages, languages and physical abilities. This includes providing an accessible platform with high quality assistive tools, and ensuring that other applications work well with these. The assistive tools on Ubuntu, along with the entire operating system, are provided free of charge.

High Contrast

Ubuntu ships with a selection of high contrast themes, complete with custom icons and mouse cursors. To activate a new theme go to the System menu, followed by Preferences -> Theme.

Magnification and Speech synthesis

Orca is a screen reader and magnifier that enables users with limited vision, or no vision, to use the Gnome desktop and associated applications. The magnifier features automated focus tracking and full-screen magnification. The screen reader allows low-vision and blind users to access applications via speech and braille output. Key-mapped functions are organized on layers giving control over navigation, mouse, magnifier, speech and Braille devices. Orca can be customised to individual applications. This can make otherwise difficult interfaces, such as those of instant messaging clients, easy to use. Orca is available on the Ubuntu Desktop CD.

Keyboard modifiers

The Gnome desktop environment supports several options for modifying the behaviour of the mouse and keyboard. The modifier keys (Shift, Ctrl and Alt) can be made Sticky so that when they are pressed once they remain active until the next key is pressed, making it possible to write upper case character or use keyboard shortcuts while only pressing one key at a time.

Other features include Slow Keys and Bounce Keys which control the reaction rate and repeat rate of keys and Mouse Keys which allow the numeric keypad to be used to control the mouse cursor. These features can be activated on the Keyboard Accessibility panel (from System -> Preferences -> Keyboard).

On-screen Keyboard

Ubuntu 6.10 includes the onBoard on-screen keyboard, a lightweight text-entry application, extensible through macros, scripts and custom layouts.

Also available is Gnome On-screen Keyboard (GOK), which in addition to basic text entry, also provides facilities for controlling the entire desktop behaviour through the on-screen keyboard by gathering information about other applications and sending them control signals through the Gnome assistive technology framework AT-SPI.

Getting Started

The Desktop CD

The easiest way to try out the Ubuntu accessibility tools is with the standard Ubuntu Desktop CD, which can be started directly with a range of tools already installed and running. The CD can be downloaded from here (select the 'desktop' version for your architecture).

Activating pre-installed tools

If you install the Ubuntu system after booting the Ubuntu Desktop CD with an accessibility option as described above, those features will also be pre-configured to start by default on your newly installed system.

The most common accessibility tools such as Orca and onBoard are pre-installed on any standard Ubuntu system and are easy to activate. The screen reader, magnifier and on-screen keyboard are all activated using the Gnome Assistive Technology Preferences panel, Found in the System menu under Preferences.