Hi, I am wondering if there has been any development into Inkscape accessability.

There is a retirement community with a laser cutter. We work with them occasionally. We use inkscape to set files up for the laser, and when we try to teach inkscape to them, they have a hard time seeing the icons, as well as clicking the icons.

Yesterday, someone asked if I could rearrange the icons on the toolbar.

Is accessibility in general something that has been developed in the past? I've done cursory poking around on the forums and the website, but have not found anything related.

Thank you!

It's a recurrent topic, but none that really gained momentum at any time, as far as I can tell.

You can change the size of the icons to 'large' in the preferences (Edit -> Preferences -> Interface), if that helps.
Don't use Hidpi screens, Inkscape isn't ready for that yet.

Being able to adjust the different bars to one's own needs is a feature many people have requested again and again. To my (non-developer) understanding, before this can be done, there is some ground work necessary (which is planned to be done anyway). So I'm quite sure this will come, some day, but it will not be in the near future.

At last year's Hackfest, there was some discussion about accessibility, and a commitment was made to make improvements. As a result, any text created in Inkscape, (and even if the text has been converted to paths) can now be read by screen readers.

A couple of years ago we had a few requests (all within a few months) for manuals or tutorials written for people who have learning disabilities such as ADD/ADHD. I did a little research, and wrote 2 or 3 chapters, just as kind of a test, to find out how much interest they would get. But I have not had one single comment about them. So I think it was just random luck that those few requests came so close together.

You know, it might help to start a thread (either in a forum or mailing list), or maybe even formal feature request where specific features that might be needed can be discussed. If developers don't know specifically what is needed, they aren't likely to do anything.

Edit
As Moini mentioned, you can make the icons bigger in Inkscape Preferences > Interface. And I want to add that you can also make handles and nodes bigger, which would probably help a lot, for people with visual issues. Inkscape Preferences > Input/Output > Input Devices > Handle Size. It works with even a regular mouse (you don't have to install any kind of fancy mouse).

For most every kind of tool that creates paths, the strokes are 1 px wide, by default. But you can set it up so that they draw wider paths. This tutorial explains how: Customize Your Inkscape Tools' Styles.he

So for the Pen/Bezier tool and Pencil/Freehand tool, you can set so that they draw paths with a wider stroke. But for the shape tools -- Rectangle, Ellipse, Star, etc. you can set their strokes to be wider as well.

Note that when you make the stroke of an object wider, it makes the object larger. To avoid that, you can change from Visual Bounding Box to Geometric Bounding Box. Inkscape Preferences > Tools

And of course, I'm sure you're familiar with zooming and the Zoom tool.

If it's hard for your clients to be very precise with the mouse and selection, you can adjust the Grab Sensitivity.

That's about all I can think of at the moment. But I'll post more tips if I think of them