[Athen] more than one question!

[Travis Roth]

Hi,

As for question 3:
"Question #3 - the students are siblings from Pakistan. Their principle 
goal with regard to completing this degree is to create a screen reading 
system similar to Jaws in Pakistani languages. Besides connecting with 
Freedom Scientific, are there any other suggestions for achievement of 
this goal besides them doing it themselves after 4-5 arduous years in a 
software engineering program?"

They of course could start from scratch.
Depending on the study program and its goals, I'd suggest that they and
their instructors evaluate adding this goal as a task to an existing
open-source project.

For example, an open source screen reader for Gnome (runs on Linux) is
called Orca. Orca is written primarily in Python, and takes advantage of the
accessibility API in Gnome. Find more info at http://live.gnome.org/Orca .

Another recently launched open-source screen reading project for Windows is
called Nonvisual Desktop Access (NVDA).
http://www.kulgan.net/nvda/


-----Original Message-----
From: Jean Salzer [mailto:jeano at uwm.edu] 
Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2007 1:56 PM
To: athen at athenpro.org
Subject: [Athen] more than one question!


Hi all,

I just met with some folks from a small, private college in the area. 
They are interested in learning more about how colleges have 
accommodated totally blind students with computer science majors. We had 
some discussion of assistive technology, however, part of their concern 
is the world of windows and graphics versus just 'code'.

Question #1 - is there anyone out there who has been able to accommodate 
a qualified blind student through a 4-year degree program for software 
engineering?

Question #2 - how well can the Tiger embosser and software work with 
Jaws so the students can create tactile representations of the graphics 
they'll need for coursework completion?

Question #3 - the students are siblings from Pakistan. Their principle 
goal with regard to completing this degree is to create a screen reading 
system similar to Jaws in Pakistani languages. Besides connecting with 
Freedom Scientific, are there any other suggestions for achievement of 
this goal besides them doing it themselves after 4-5 arduous years in a 
software engineering program?

Thanks in advance.