How can accessibility benefit from open source solutions? And how do you build a business based on open source solutions? Current success stories and an exclusive peek at the future through Erik's crystal ball.

1. Open Source
and
Accessibility
Erik Zetterström, ICT Enablers
t12t meetup, November 22 - 2018

2. Open Source
• Open Source wasn’t that a thing 10 years ago?
• What is Open Source?
- Software
”source code is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to study,
change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose” – Wikipedia
- Hardware
- Creative Commons
• License type djungel
(MIT, BSD, GNU GPL,GNU Lesser GPL and more)

3. Successful Open Source
• Use a commercial friendly license
• Needs a strong community
- too add new features
- maintain the code
- fix and find bugs, vulnerabilities
• Be aware of security risks
- hijacking code for malicious purposes

4. Accessibility Open
Source• Main-stream open source projects
- Can be used to create accessible products and assistive technology
examples:
asterisk – Open source framework for communication.
Can for example be used to build a relay service,
or an accessible call center service.
https://www.asterisk.org/
Arduino – Open source hardware.
Can be used to build assistive technology or
provide physical accessibility.
https://www.arduino.cc/
WebRTC – Provides browsers and mobile applications with
Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities.
Can be used to build sign-language communication
services.
https://webrtc.org/

5. Accessibility Open
Source• Specialized accessibility open source projects
WebSpeech – An easy to use API providing in-browser
speech recognition and speech synthesis.
Can be used for live or video captioning,
or speaking web-sites/services.
Open source in Firefox and Chromium.
NVDA – Open source screen reader.
https://www.nvaccess.org/
ATbar – In-browser accessibility toolbar
https://www.atbar.org/

6. Accessibility Open
Source• Creative Commons license
- 6 different licenses, basic concept; give attribution to the author (BY).
Basic license is CC BY. This is combined with attributes for limitations.
• Media Resources
- Images for various uses
https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/
- Symbols for Augmented and Alternative Communication
https://www.opensymbols.org/
- Sound effects
https://freesound.org/
- Music
Creative Commons resource list

7. Revenue Streams
• Build or use an open source base –
build premium features on top
• Build an open source app –
charge for proprietary content
• Build an open source service –
charge for reliable service access
• Build an open source app –
charge for user training and/or installation of the
system/assistive technology

8. The Crystal Ball
• Open source AI is going to have a big impact on
accessibility!
- Natural language conversation interfaces
- Predicting user intent, actions and input
- Autonomous wheelchairs and guidance systems for people with low vision.
Current open source toolkits: The Microsoft Cognitive toolkit, TensorFlow
• Government entities will adapt to the Software as a
Service approach.
- Making it easier to sell open source accessibility solutions.

9. Demo
• Of the WebSpeech API, ifthere is time …
- Web Captioner
- Webbkonversation.se

10. Thank you for listening!
erik@ictenablers.com
@ICTEnablers