How blinds can use Knime?

Hello,

I’m not sure if this is the right place for this post. If it is not, please move it forward.

Some of my students are completely blind. They reported me the WCAG software they use is incompatible with KNIME Platform. Is there any tool inside the KNIME to help people who can’t see use the platform? If it is not, is there some known third-part tool which is compatible with KNIME?

If the answer to both of my questions are “no”, perhaps it is time to think about some accessibility of this great platform. Any help will be welcome! Sincerely!

13 Likes

Hello @Kamusett,

Thank you for mentioning this. While we are supporting Screen Reader on the KNIME Server Webportal we don’t have a solution for blind users for the KNIME Analytics Platform, only general Accessibility settings.

We will look into the mentioned WCAG software and will check if we could implement a support for it.

Sincerly,
Michael Respondek

7 Likes

…this is an interesting question that we really didn’t think much about so far, I must admit. As (the other) Michael wrote, on the WebPortal side it works to some extend, but on the workflow editor side of KNIME Analytics Platform it’s a bit more complex. Eclipse’s GEF (on which this is currently based), seems to have experimental “WCAG 2.0 support” but we’d need to investigate what this actually means for our workflow editor. We are moving this part to a browser editor anyway right now, so it’s probably smarter to keep this in mind for the future development instead.

Do you have some pointers how workflow-editor type environments are made accessible to blind people? From what I could find (disclaimer: so far- I didn’t spend days searching!), this would require some sort of a textual representation which would make the data flow editor type logic rather convoluted. Are there more modern representation/reading devices that can also deal with some degree of graphical elements? Any pointers would be appreciated.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Michael

10 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 182 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.