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Please Include Linux in Your Research

Tuesday, 23 February 2010

If we're talking about a single research MSc, my guess is that a narrow focus on just PDF, Flash and Windows based screen readers might be as much as can be achieved, especially since we would want to cover a very wide range of content types, from structured text, through forms and data to audiovisual content. If we are able to collaborate with others, then we might collectively be able to cover a lot more technologies. Our initial primary focus will be whatever we perceive to be causing the most problems for our user community here in Ireland. Right now, we don't perceive a great amount of Linux use, at least among the Irish vision impaired community, but we would look carefully into that to determine the right focus. We would, however, hope to define a methodology that could be repeated for any technology - different web content technologies as well as different user agents and platforms. Then if we extend this research outside of Ireland or collaborate with others internationally, a new scoping exercise might result in a different focus, including Linux. But in the end, it's all about hitting the major problems first which is why we're looking at Flash for example rather than Silverlight and why we'll probably (not certainly), start by looking at Windows, PDF, perhaps MS Word, rather than Linux, Open Office, etc. I take your point that it would be great to cover all technologies if possible.