Open sourcerers tweak Linux for access
By Adam Marcus 
EE Times - October 9, 2000 - page 151

The recent commercialization of Linux has brought with it mass appeal, with
its open-source status allowing those masses to more easily share tools and
solutions. But ease of use is a different issue for the nation's 54 million
disabled citizens, and accessibility is a somewhat complex proposition to
define. 

Determining what people want and reasonably expect from "accessibility" is
something that IBM's T.V. Raman thinks a great deal about. Raman, who lost
his sight as a teenager, developed what has become a standard text reader
while a graduate student in the computer science department at Cornell
University. That program, Emacspeak, permits blind users to write and send
e-mail, surf the Web and do most things a sighted user would do.  

http://www.eetimes.com/story/career/timespeople/OEG20001004S0036