ALViC - Accessible Linux for Visually Challenged launched

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ALViC- Accessible Linux for Visually Challenged was launched on 11th February, 2013 by Prof R. Chidambaram, Principal Scientific Adviser, Govt. of India & Shri J. Satyanarayana, Secretary, DeitY, Ministry of Comm. & I.T., Govt. of India during the CDAC Technology Conclave on 11th Feb, 2013 at Indian Habitat Centre, New Delhi. During the 2-days technology conclave, a number of technologies and products developed by CDAC under various thematic area were showcased.
ALViC is a complete desktop environment which provides a comprehensive solution for Visually Challenged users. This is a GNU/Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 10.04; and uses Orca 3.2.0 xdesktop screen reader as the main interaction mechanism for visually challenged users. They can use it out of the box because accessibility features suitable for fully blind as well as for partially blind users are enabled by default.
Main Features :
  • Free and open source desktop environment
  • Enhanced Orca with skim read, sentence navigation, list shortcut and structural navigation of text documents
  • PDF documents made accessible in Linux environment
  • Easy navigation and search facility on Desktop icon view
  • Accessible login for visually challenged users
  • Suitable desktop themes for partial blind
  • Other assistive tools like OCRFeeder, Audio book converter, Emerson DAISY reader, sound converter etc. useful for visually challenged users are also included.
This product has been released under the project 'Enhancing Accessibility for FOSS Desktops' at CDAC, Mumbai being carried out under NRCFOSS-Phase II. The research and development activities under this project are aimed at developing software-based assistive technologies/solutions for the differently-abled people.
Download:
ALViC can be downloaded from here.
Launch of ALViC can be watched here.
More details and documentation about ALViC can be accessed here.

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