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 visually 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. Speakup, Emacspeak, Festival and BRLTTY have been tested by Red Hat; and Emacspeak and Festival, among others, ship with Fedora.

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/.

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

The Emacspeak HOWTO written by Jim Van Zandt is also a very good resource, although the document is limited to the Slackware distribution. The Emascspeak HOWTO is available online at: http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware-3.3/docs/Emacspeak-HOWTO

The following sections describe how to perform various tasks using Emacspeak and Fedora.

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/

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 the ability to doubleclick, dwell clicks, and pointer capture. Additional information on Mousetweaks can be found at http://library.gnome.org/users/mousetweaks/

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/