What is LSR?

The Linux Screen Reader (LSR) project is an open source effort to develop an extensible assistive technology for the GNOME desktop environment. The goal of the project is to create a reusable development platform for building alternative and supplemental user interfaces in support of people with diverse disabilities.

The original use of the LSR platform was to give people with visual impairments access to the GNOME desktop and its business applications (e.g. Firefox, OpenOffice, Eclipse) using speech, Braille, and screen magnification. The extensions packaged with the LSR core were intended to meet this end. Development on these extensions has ceased. However, the core of LSR might still serve its purpose as a platform in other creative endeavors, such as:

• Supporting novel input and output methods, such as joysticks, web cams, game pads, audio icons, and environmental sounds.
• Creating interfaces for other users, such as people with mobility impairments, people with cognitive impairments, children learning to use a screen reader, and so forth.
• Supplementing the graphical GNOME desktop with useful audio feedback for sighted users, such as text-to-speech reporting of events in a monitored window.

See our 14-minute screencast titled Linux Screen Reader ... is not just a screen reader for demonstration of LSR's extensibility.