awesome
my fear was that orca was going to die
and I don't want to see that it has come a long way
----- Original Message -----
From: Chris Hofstader
To: [email protected]
Sent: Saturday, August 29, 2009 5:30 AM
Subject: Re: why is openoffice accessible and neoofficeenot
Hank asked: does that mean orca will die in linux to?
cdh replies:
The beauty of free software like orca versus proprietary software like JAWS
(for instance) is that although Sun Microsystems has led the orca development,
virtually any hacker or group thereof can take the source and continue the
project. The nation of Brazil has elected to standardize all of its government
owned and operated computing devices on free, GNU/Linux operating systems.
They have two major reasons: the first, they fear that Apple and/or Microsoft
may have built in some code into Windows and OSX to spy for the American
government. Given the human rights record demonstrated by Yahoo and others
spying for the Chinese government, why not think that the two biggest OS
vendors may be helping out Uncle Sam?
With the GNU/Linux OS, they have every line of source code and their own
security personnel can go through one line at a time and make sure no such code
exists before the Brazilian secrets show up at Fort Mead.
The second reason is price. A GNU/Linux distribution will run pretty nicely
on a clunky, single core, 32 bit used Dell; Snow Leopard and Windows 7 require
pretty hefty hardware to be used effectively.
The orca question comes in as Brazil has laws regarding people with
disabilities that are far stronger than our wimpy ADA and their laws include
explicit language about technology. So, while Sun is organizing the project,
Brazil and other nations are contributing hackers to the project to help keep
it moving forward.
There are a number of other governments making similar decisions for similar
reasons - after our government got caught spying on Americans, all credibility
that we were not spying on everyone else flew out the window and closed and
complicated technology is in the James Bond book of tricks.
Those of us who get to use Macintosh and even Windows with our screen reader
of choice really need to realize just how fortunate we are. I spend a fair
amount of time in Ubuntu with orca and, often, emacspeak. The latter is highly
stable and crusty old farts like me still remember a large portion of the
complex emacs keystroke catalogue. Orca does a not bad job in a few high
profile programs but, because few developers are coding to the gnome standard
and, therefore, few programs support the excellent gnome accessibility API,
orca gets a lot less "for free" than Macintosh or Windows.
For we who write programs or test systems on GNU/Linux platforms, it is
pretty good as it has fully accessible tools fart in excess of anything Mac or
Windows offer. For most others who need orca, though, it is a bit clunky and
often unstable.
I'd love to suggest that we all walk away from the world of proprietary
software but, developing for niche audiences like us blinks fails to meet the
critical mass necessary to sustain a world of free software hackers like the
server tools, Apache, etc.
So, while we love to praise Apple and boo Microsoft, they are really the only
alternatives for blinks who don't want to spend a whole lot of time fixing
their environment.
cdh
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