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Accessibility

At the core of the Ubuntu philosophy is the belief that computing is for everyone and access should be free and complete whatever your economic or physical circumstances. With the people at GNOME (the project that delivers the interface) and other contributors we have included in Ubuntu a range of assistive technologies that make Ubuntu one of the most accessible desktop operating systems around.

Orca Assistive Technologies For sight impaired users. Orca combines speech synthesis, braille and magnification for a highly functional interface to many of the applications and toolkits that Ubuntu distributes including Firefox, OpenOffice, Acroread, Transmission and many more. Orca defines a set of default behaviours (reactions to application events) and key bindings (reaction to user key presses).

Orca Assistive Technologies For sight impaired users.

These default behaviours and key bindings can be overwritten on a per-application basis. Orca creates a script object for each running application, which merges both the default behaviours and key bindings, and the application specific ones. Orca provides the infrastructure to activate and deactivate scripts, as well as a host of services accessible from within the scripts.

Slow Keys and Gesture Support. Ubuntu offers multiple variants of slow key support which is an essential tool for the physically impaired allowing the keyboard to be used as a mouse for instance. Also supports an on-screen touch screen keyboard which can be used with pointers. Gesture support is also supported.

Slow Keys and Gesture Support.