Hi everyone. This is how Ubuntu users see Debian.
I am very sad about such postings. However, to get something positive out of it, we should at least use it to reflect on the past. 1. Ubuntu would not exist without Debian. I guess even some of the "Ubuntu Accessibility" packages are taken from Debian. BRLTTY at least comes to mind. 2. The Ubuntu Accessiblity project launched after the Debian accessiblity project. Still, they seem to have acquired much more publicity. 3. Still, we seem to be much less effective than the Ubuntu people. At least the impression is generated in some users. This even went as far as some AT developers recommending to users to switch from Debian to Ubuntu, since Ubuntu is supposed to work better with accessibility. Why is that? I am not entirely familiar with the Ubuntu developer model, but could this be related to the fact that Ubuntu (Cannonical) is paying its developers? It might be that Accessibility is exactly one of these areas that *would* need payment to get the necessary work done, since the user group that benefits from accessibility improvments is so small, and therefore, no many developers work on that area in their spare time... Or is this a communication issue? Are we failing to communicate with our users? Originally, the plan was to create a mailing list so that accessibility specific topics could be discussed there. We have that now since 3 years or so, and it has helped IMO. Should we be doing more? What can we do to close the gap between the user experience and the developers? Maybe we should update http://debian.org/devel/debian-accessibility/ with some more user-centric info? What could be useful to be added to this page? Anything else we are missing? Would a "accessibility" pseudo-package for the BTS be useful, so that users with problems can assign their bug reports to this pseudo-package in orrder to have it reassigned to the apropriate package by someone with more insight later on? Oh, and the for me right now most important question: What did we do to leave the impression that "Debian is a distribution that does not consider accessibility important." Any comments are really welcome.
--- Begin Message ---Hi. Debian can be accessible, but I found I had to build packages from source to get things working. What I found was either badly out dated packages for some things needed for accessibility, or main stream Debian simply doesn't have a package for a needed lib or app. I've had problems getting Orca to work in Main stream Debian, but it just works in Debian based distros like Ubuntu. Also, due to Debian's long release cycles, you end up with outdated software even if you run Debian unstable. Unstable is still at Gnome 2.14. Unfortunately, there are accessibility bugs that make Gnome 2.14 not very usable. The bugs are fixed in Gnome 2.16. Probably the most important reason I don't spend much time lately trying to get my main stream Debian box running the latest Gnome and orca is that attitude I noticed from the main stream Debian developers. They don't seem to consider accessibility bugs as important as the Ubuntu developers. Since access to my system requires a screen reader, I prefer to spend my time and effort on a Linux distro that considers accessibility important. Kenny On Mon, Dec 18, 2006 at 08:39:16AM +0100, Jan Buchal wrote: > Hello, > > I would like briefly reply to frequent notice about Debian and > Accessibility. > > The core idea in these notes was that most problems with Accessibility > (orca, gnomespeech...) is in Debian and that will be better if users > will use another Linux distribution. > > That's sure not true. :-) Debian and other distribution not response for > quality of separate application. That gnomespeech has not any effective > log mechanism for example or that orca not works and shows some python > traceback only. It is nothing opposite to orca but I would like show > that problems are elsewhere. > > On Debian works many developers who works in their free time for others. > Sure all is not perfect in Debian as well as in another distributions. > Additional, many distributions are based on Debian. > > I would like please all for understanding and accuracy. > > Have you nice day > > -- > > Jan Buchal > Tel: (00420) 24 24 86 008 > Mob: (00420) 608023021 > > _______________________________________________ > gnome-accessibility-list mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list _______________________________________________ gnome-accessibility-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
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