Omer Zak wrote:
Chiming in the discussion, my 7 agorot (2 cents) are as follows.The mindset of the Openmoko developers seems to me to be anti-accessibility. It stands to reason that they'll turn down requests to provide for accessibility to people with disabilities. The devices are probably inherently unusable by blind people (like music for deaf people). However, deaf people can be victimized by software, which beeps without visual indication. Color-blind people can be victimized by software UI design, which relies too much on color cues, and which does not provide for ability to change colors. Epileptic people can be victimized by software, which insists upon blinking. Nevertheless, the percentage of those people in the general population is small enough for the Openmoko to make a case for ignoring their needs, much the same way they make a case for ignoring the needs of RTL people. --- Omer
You are confusing two completely different things. It is one thing to claim "adding accessibility support to the product will increase its cost, and not increase its market share enough, to make the product non-commercially viable". This claim, essentially, says "it's not a choice between accessible and an inaccessible software, it's a choice between inaccessible software and no software at all". Under those circumstances, I can understand the trade off. Neither you, I, nor anyone else have the right to tell someone to do what THEY do our way.
However, at least in my eyes, that was not the discussion on the openmoko community list. Christen definitely thought that was what I asked (and who knows, maybe it was and I wasn't aware of it), but at least to me what I asked that accessibility (or, in this case, RTL support) be *considered* when technologies are evaluated.
There is a major problem between someone making an deaf inaccessible MP3 player and someone making a deaf inaccessible shoot them up. In the former case, the cost of trying to make it accessible is a major part of the development cost. In the later, merely keeping in mind that deaf people would also be playing this is all it really takes.
Part of the problem, and this is not the first time I see this happening, is that free software developers think that because things are free, it means they do not need to be accountable. There is some measure of truth to that line of thinking when things are completely transparent. If the decision to dump GTK and go ETK were held on an open mailing list where everyone had a chance to voice their opinions then I would certainly understand why someone coming in late in the game and saying "you have to change your already arrived at decision" would be disregarded. This was not the case here, however.
What happened here is that the decision was taken as it is with proprietary software companies - one day we wake up and we find the decision has already been taken, and the only one around to explain it is the same person who wrote ETK, and is as open to criticism about it as a mother is to criticism about her child. In my eyes, the less transparent you are about your decision making process, the more accountable you are about the end result. THIS is my main criticism about this process. It is entirely possible that moving to ETK was the right move, unfortunate BiDi state and all. Without knowing the reasoning, I have no way to tell.
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