--------------------------------------------------------------------------- jude <[email protected]> Avoid the Gates Of Hell, use Linux!
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2013 18:16:39 From: Alex Midence <[email protected]> To: 'Jude DaShiell' <[email protected]>, [email protected] Subject: RE: [orca-list] Accessibility as a reason to switch to XFCE? (fwd) Man, I hope they don't do that. They ought to just go up to Gnome 3.10. It's miles and miles ahead of 3.4 with stuff like pdf accessibility and all the other improvements to Orca that are about to start coming out. Unless you need to run a light desktop system, I see no reason for anyone to switch to XFCE over Gnome. Alex M -----Original Message----- From: orca-list [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jude DaShiell Sent: Tuesday, November 05, 2013 5:00 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [orca-list] Accessibility as a reason to switch to XFCE? (fwd) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- jude <[email protected]> Avoid the Gates Of Hell, use Linux! ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2013 12:38:49 From: Pi?eiro <[email protected]> To: [email protected], [email protected] Subject: Accessibility as a reason to switch to XFCE? Resent-Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2013 17:39:08 +0000 (UTC) Resent-From: [email protected] Hi everybody, I'm Alejandro Pi?eiro, maintainer of ATK (accessibility toolkit), implementor of the ATK support for Clutter/GNOME-shell, and one of the coordinators of GNOME Accessibility team. Some people pointed out a recent commit in Debian [1] and asked me some questions. As probably it is worth having this discussion publicly, I'm sending this email. > This will be re-evaluated before jessie is frozen. The evaluation will > start around the point of DebConf (August 2014). If at that point > gnome looks like a better choice, it'll go back as the default. > Some criteria for that choice will include: > * The state of accessability support, particularly for the blind. Taking into account that the previous default desktop was GNOME (so GNOME Shell), this seems to suggest that GNOME accessibility support is broken. Probably some people think that because they are testing the accessibility support with the current Debian stable which still uses GNOME 3.4. This release was accessible enough for testing, getting feedback and solving bugs, but it is true that GNOME 3.4 was not end-user ready as far as accessibility support is concerned. But 3.4 was released one year and a half ago, and the situation has improved a lot since then. Right now the feedback from the Orca screen reader users' list with regards to the accessibility of GNOME Shell is positive. That was true in 2012 with GNOME 3.6 [2], and it remains true to this day. In fact, Jonathan Nadeau, a developer who is blind and is maintaining a distro for users that are blind, ships GNOME 3.8 as the default desktop environment [3]. And AFAIK, they will move to GNOME 3.10. In any case, some people could argue that although those releases are better, it is not worth it to upgrade from GNOME 3.4 if XFCE has proper accessibility support now. But, the problem is that XFCE accessibility development has been on hold. Right now I would classify XFCE's accessibility support as no better than that of GNOME 3.4's accessibility support. It is good enough for testing, getting feedback and solving bugs. But it is not end-user ready. What's missing? As you can see on XFCE roadmap about accessibility [4]: * Accessibility is not enabled by default, nor is it always on. It's enabled by default and always on in GNOME starting with GNOME 3.6. * The Thunar file manager fails to emit accessible events when the selection changes. This means that as Orca users arrow among files, Orca cannot tell them what file they just moved to. Similar problems are also present for Xfdesktop. * The Xfce4-panel has a number of accessibility issues that make it hard to use by users who are blind. So, there may be reasons for Debian to switch to XFCE. But IMHO, accessibility is not one of them. Best regards [1] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=tasksel/tasksel.git;a=commitdiff;h=dfca4 06eb694e0ac00ea04b12fc912237e01c9b5 [2] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2012-October/msg00202.html [3] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2013-May/msg00171.html [4] http://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.10/roadmap/accessibility ---- Alejandro Pi?eiro -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] _______________________________________________ orca-list mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca. The manual is at http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
