In the United States, the Section 508 Mandate is an addendum to the Rehabilitation Act made in 1998 that requires federal agencies to use accessible electronic and information technologies so that people with special needs have the same opportunities as everyone else.

For detailed information about the requirements of the Section 508 Mandate, visit http://www.section508.gov/

The VPAT template details how a particular product or service conforms to Section 508 criteria. The VPAT helps federal personnel adhere to Section 508 by helping them determine whether they are buying the most accessible IT products and services available. The VPAT template participation by private vendors is voluntary. These templates are hosted on the individual vendor websites. The vendors maintain their own information and the government does not endorse this information in any way.

The biggest advantage of the hardware speech solutions is that speech is available before the operating system loads, which even makes it possible for people with a visual impairment to install the operating system. Hardware solutions include speech synthesizers, braille terminals, braille printers, sip and puff systems, and eye gaze pointing devices. These devices are usually very expensive and it is difficult to find drivers for them. Drivers are being written (mostly for speech synthesizers) for Linux but they need to be tested and integrated by the community into "upstream" software projects before becoming part of Fedora.

Jim Van Zandt has also written several servers that work with Emacspeak. These servers can be found in a package called Emacspeak-ss on Jim Van Zandt's website or linked within the Emacspeak HOWTO, available at: http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware-3.3/docs/Emacspeak-HOWTO.

For more information on Emacspeak, visit http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/

This document focuses mostly on software tools and utilities that work with Linux. Most of these tools have been developed by the Open Source community and many have not yet been tested by the Fedora Project.

GNOME supplies its own screen reader Orca. This package is installed by default on all Fedora systems. Additional information on Orca may be found by visiting http://live.gnome.org/Orca/.

To enable Orca you may run orca from the command line. This first time you will be asked a number of preference questions. After the initial configuration, run orca a second time to start orca. The graphical application which starts has options for changing the preferences, quitting the program, and obtaining help. During the initial setup, the questions are also said allow as they are displayed in the terminal.

Alternately, from the graphical menus select System > Preferences > Assistive Technologies and check the box labeled "Enable Assistive Technologies" then click Preferred Applications to ensure that either Orca or Orca and Magnifier is selected.

Speakup is a screen review package written by Kirk Reiser and Andy Berdan and available under a free license. Speakup gives users with visual or mobility impairments the ability to have audible console feedback using a speech synthesizer. Speakup is useful to blind users because it provides an audible installation and is fully supported by the blind open source community.

Speakup works with the following hardware synthesizers:

For more information about Speakup, or to contribute to the Speakup project visit: http://www.linux-speakup.org

Emacspeak is a speech interface that allows visually impaired users to interact independently and efficiently with the computer. Emacspeak has dramatically changed how hundreds of blind and visually impaired users around the world interact with the personal computer and the Internet. A rich suite of task-oriented speech-enabled tools provides efficient speech-enabled access to the evolving semantic world wide web. When combined with Linux running on low-cost PC hardware, Emacspeak provides a reliable, stable speech-friendly solution that opens up the Internet to visually impaired users around the world.

Before using Emacspeak, you should familiarize yourself with some documentation. Start with A Gentle Introduction to Emacspeak by Gary Lawrence Murphy, which is available online at http://tldp.org/LDP/espk-ug/html/index.html

In KDE, KMagnifier, or KMag, magnifies the area around the cursor or a user-defined area. You can also save a magnified portion of the screen to disk. Additional information can be found at http://kmag.sourceforge.net/

In GNOME, GNOME Magnifier (gnome-mag) can be used at the command line but is more commonly used by other client applications or assistive technologies. GNOME Magnifier can be enabled alone or with Orca through System > Preferences > Assistive Technologies.

A program for KDE, KMouseTool provides an alternate method for clicking the mouse by clicking the mouse whenever the cursor pauses and even provides a dragging capability. KMouseTool works with any mouse or pointing device.

Similar to KDE's KMouseTool, GNOME's Mousetweaks provides functions for simulated secondary clicks, dwell clicks, and pointer capture. Additional information on Mousetweaks can be found at http://library.gnome.org/users/mousetweaks/

GNOME's On-Screen Keyboard or gok provides an on screen tool for selecting windows as well as composing input. GOK can be enabled as the default mobility application by selecting System > Preferences > Assistive Technologies then clicking the Preferred Applications button and selecting the preferred mobility application. Additional information can be located at http://live.gnome.org/Gok

Gnome's Caribou is an on-screen keyboard that is still in development. An alternative to the Gnome On-Screen Keyboard, Caribou is still a few months away from being available as a stable release. Additional information can be located at http://live.gnome.org/Caribou.

Dasher is an information-efficient text-entry interface, driven by natural continuous pointing gestures. Dasher is not really a "keyboard" but instead uses a zooming interface and a predictive language model with word completion. Dasher makes data entry easy by people utilizing a joystick, touchscreen, trackball, or mouse for one-handed operations. It can also be utilized by people using no-hand tools such as a head-mouse or an eye-tracker. Additional information on Dasher can be found at http://library.gnome.org/users/dasher/.

BRLTTY provides access to the Linux command line for blind people using refreshable braille displays. This tool provides complete screen review functionality and minimal speech capability. BRLTTY is available in Fedora repositories in RPM format. For information and documentation on BRLTTY, visit http://mielke.cc/brltty/

Let your computer do the talking using KMouth! You can setup phrases you would like to say and your computer will speak them for you. You can even use your own phrasebooks. Visit http://www.schmi-dt.de/kmouth/index.en.html for additional information on KMouth.

In KDE, keyboard and mouse settings can be configured in kcontrol. These settings are available by selecting Personalization > Accessibility. Additional information on Accessibility Tools in KDE can be found at http://accessibility.kde.org/

In GNOME, accessibility controls can be configured by selecting System > Preferences > Assistive Technologies. Additional information on GNOME's accessibility tools can be found at http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/