We understand that your wife Adriane is visually impaired. Is that why you made the Knoppix desktop the way it is?
Adriane, my wife, lost her eyesight as a teenager. Before she knew me, she was not much interested in anything computer-related by herself, though I had the impression that the internet with its possibilities could greatly enhance her life. The problem here is, how do you make using a computer easy and fun for someone who just cannot see what’s on the computer screen? Proprietary vendors see accessibility as an ‘add-on’ for a graphical desktop that was designed for seeing people. The mouse as an input device is basically useless if you don’t have visual feedback for its position, so what they do is add shortcuts and audible feedback such as ‘talking buttons’ in order to make it possible, but not easy, to use the graphical interface without graphics.

In my way of thinking, this approach was wrong. A desktop should adapt to the possibilities of the person using it, not vice versa. So Adriane and I discussed how a user interface for working with a computer and using programs without too many barriers, even as a beginner, should work, and came up with a text-menu-based system that can be read by speech output line-by-line, or char-by-char in spell-mode using simple navigation keystrokes on a standard keyboard. That way, it is possible to know everything that’s on the text screen, step by step, or all at once, at the user’s choice. We used SBL (which originally meant ‘SUSE Blind Linux’, but I would rather call it ‘Screenreader for Blind Linux users’ since it works fine on every Linux distribution I know). SBL has a big advantage versus the better-known Britty: it can be completely controlled by keyboard, without having to buy an expensive Braille device (which is also supported, but not required by SBL), and has profiles for individual programs that allow for automatic reading of weblinks or other specific elements. The main menu structure lets you browse through different activities and select one for this console, where you can have up to ten consoles. For text scanning and recognition, we use SANE in combination with Google’s OCRopus and Tesseract, Mutt for email, ELinks for WWW, and gnokii for sending and receiving SMS through a cellphone. For people with [partial] vision, we can start the graphical desktop with speech (Orca) and Zoom (Compiz Ezoom plug-in) for using Firefox or OpenOffice.

The accessibility technology already exists and is working quite well in most GNU/Linux distributions, and the ADRIANE system tries to put everything together as one variant of booting Knoppix as a live system, with the possibility to also install on disk. Work in progress are blind-friendly configuration interfaces for network and hardware setup. The ADRIANE version of Knoppix attempts to boot into a talking, blind-friendly setup so that you can use a computer completely without monitor, which may also be helpful in cases of defective graphics adaptors or monitors.

What do you think of Knoppix in its present form?
There is always room for improvement. The main challenge is keeping up with compatibility to new and partly ‘defective by design’ hardware, which is the reason for the quite long ‘Knoppix cheat codes’ list with workarounds for known hardware problems. Nowadays, I think of Knoppix more as a device-independent OS with applications, rather than a bootable CD or DVD. Modern methods of booting include flash memory (as in cellphones and digital cameras, which make a perfectly bootable disk) and booting over a network. The trimmed-down ‘Microknoppix’ restart of Knoppix is also a good platform for other projects that focus more on specific applications than on a full desktop installation, such as kiosk systems or boot/repair consoles.

You were co-founder of the LinuxTag expo. What made you interested in this?
When GNU/Linux started to become known in the Nineties, one sub-project of the UNIX-AG at the university of Kaiserslautern was experimenting with Linux, first on a brand new 386 computer. A few years later, students and associates of the university were interested in information and support for self-installation of Linux, so we conducted seminars about various Linux-related topics, and install fests using some of the first available Linux distributions. Each year this event grew, until we had an expo with commercial vendors and a large series of talks and workshops. The event grew bigger than the university was able to handle, so we moved it to Stuttgart and later to Karlsruhe fairgrounds, in order to have enough room for 20.000 visitors. At one time, I believe that LinuxTag was the biggest single GNU/Linux-related event in Europe, and this at a time when GNU/Linux was still seen as somewhat ‘exotic’ and therefore new and exciting to the general public. I would say, we were there at the right time and in the right place(s).

This article originally appeared in issue 80 of Linux User & Developer. Click here to find more features and interviews from the UK’s favourite GNU/Linux magazine.