IRILL - Research and Innovation on Free Software

Freedom #0 For Everybody Really?


"Freedom #0 For Everybody Really?"
by Samuel Thibault Jean, Philippe Mengual,
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Freedom #0 is "to run the program, for any purpose". However, being allowed to run a program does not necessarily imply that one is able to use it. A lot of software is just completely unusable for a non-negligible part of our users, due to accessibility issues, i.e. because they can not see the screen, or have only one hand to type shortcuts, or can not hear the sound effects, or have cognitive issues to understand the complexity of the interface, etc. Of course, freedom #1 permits to modify the program, so users "just" have to make it accessible to their needs, but that just can not happen. We would like to explain the situation, and discuss: is Freedom #0 only about a legal right, don't we want to extend it "for the real world"?