If you have had problums using scratch because of your disability you can give sigestins to improve scratch even if you don't have one. An idea I came up with was to have a button that would go to another page of the scratch website that lets you select what you need to help you like seeing small text on projects or parts of the scratch website, if your blind and need a voice to read out text on projects or parts of the scratch website without a person, and if you have color problumes with your eyes and need to select an invert color.
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mariotornado: This is an excellent subject to focus on! My first project in Scratch was my LightCycle game, in which a major goal was to develop an alternate play-interface for those who would find a keyboard challenging. The furthest I got was to control the cycle with the <loud> block as a trigger, allowing players to clap or yell - anything to trigger the cycle's turn. I am very interested in further exploratory development geared towards accessibility.
I would be very interested in whether a text-to-speech reader could look inside a .sb file for the visually impaired. I know it wouldn't read text as images, but if the "native" text in Scratch stays UTF-8 or whatever, it may be fairly easy to get that part into a reader.
Most computers have the whole screen inverted when a user benefits from that view, as well as high-contrast and zoom. (Macs are *really* good in this area). However, it would probably be simple to implement several accessibility features into Scratch, redundant or not, as an extra measure of support for those needs. That's just me guessing though, I admit I'm not a Squeak/Smalltalk programmer (at least, not beyond hello-world's) yet, so I can't judge well the effort involved.
Last edited by TegansPoppy (2008-02-18 14:00:13)
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