As a spin-off of another thread, I decided to start this thread specifically on forensic tool accessibility. This way others who are interested in the field and who have various disabilities can perhaps learn what they are facing in terms of tool accessibility.
I am totally blind, and have been working in the field of software accessibility for 9 years, and am familiar with both linux and windows operating systems.
My desire is to put together a totally accessible toolkit prefferably on a livecd so that I can control my environment when attempting to perform forensic investigations.
On linux, there are, of course, many command-line tools like dd, dcfldd, md5sum md5deep,. All of these are inherently accessible if you are using a linux console that supports speakup, yasr, brltty or a gnome terminal with orca running.
My biggest concern is the more sophisticated tools like SMART whose installer isn't even accessible.
f anyone has tools they would like to suggest, I would be more than happy to test their accessibility and report back with what I find.
I would like to eventually develop a livecd similar to farmer's bootcd but with all the accessibility features built in.
So I understand that once the voice tools kick in, you can do pretty much anything you need on the command line. However, in my experience, live CDs need help getting to boot about 25% of the time (with different hardware each time that is) and a further 10% or so they just don't work at all. How do you diagnose and correct a boot problem? Are there displays that give you text in braille on the BIOS screens?
I've worked with a hearing impaired colleague, and a friend with MS and a missing hand, but I'm still trying to figure how you work around certain issues without sight, and how fast you can process large amounts of data - e.g. sampling search results to determine relevancy and to refine your search techniques - and of course data in non-text form such as graphics and video.
patrick,
Accessing the bios screens is something I am still struggling with. There is no way that I have found to access those screens.
As for non-textual information like graphics/video, they too are problematic. I personally have little problem absorbing and processing large amounts of textual data, but then I have been working like this my whole life.