Accessibility for the blind

gossett · January 5, 2011

I recently found out that I have a legally blind student in my class where I require the use of either Zotero or Mendeley. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any information on how accessible Zotero is to the blind. Does anyone know of some sites that might be able to help with this?

ajlyon · January 5, 2011

There was a discussion of this ayear or so ago, and no concrete limitations were identified by the person who started it, although that person was quite concerned that perhaps Zotero might not be taking accessibility into account.

At that point, Dan explained that Zotero should be accessible thanks to its roots in Firefox, but he said that the devs had not explicitly tested it.

My understanding is that this shouldn't be a problem, but it would be very good to know what in Zotero ends up posing difficulties, since accessibility is of course valued, and the developers will definitely make any needed changes to address them.

Maybe your university's office that handles such accommodations could help you test out Zotero with such software?

fbennett · January 5, 2011

There have been some reports in the past of trouble with accessing the tinyMCE fields (currently used for notes) via Dragon Naturally Speaking. While it's admittedly not terribly responsive to your question, feedback on how that works in the current version would be very helpful to the cause.

bdarcus · January 6, 2011

Shouldn't this be a FAQ entry?

Rintze · January 6, 2011

See also

http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/10023/accessibility-voicerecognition/
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3754/is-zotero-section-508-compliant/

fbennett · January 6, 2011

Shouldn't this be a FAQ entry?

The main hurdle to making it so may be that the leading product (Dragon Naturally Speaking) is proprietary software to which relatively few people have access.