Linux Screen Reader (LSR) is an extensible assistive technology for people with disabilities. The design philosophy behind LSR is to provide a core platform that enables the development of LSR extensions for improving desktop application accessibility and usability and shields extension developers from the intricacies of the desktop accessibility architecture.

The primary use of the LSR platform is to give people with visual impairmen
ts access to the GNOME desktop and its business applications (e.g. Firefox, OpenOffice, Eclipse) using speech, Braille, and screen magnification. The extensions packaged with the LSR core are intended to meet this end. However, LSR's rich support for extensions can be used for a variety of other purposes such as supporting novel input and output devices, improving accessibility for users with other disabilities, enabling multi-modal access to the GNOME desktop, and so forth.