Hi Guru,
Logic you put forth is perfect and I have been propagating this for last
4 or 5 years.
I led the execution of projects such as Insight in Space Kerala and True
Vision for Electronic Corporation of Tamilnadu (ELCOT).
But such small projects serve only drops of ocean.
We need more and more such drops to really make it an ocean and also a
wave to carry this all over the place.
So since enough has been said about all this, it needs some major
execution plan.
What we could do is to create such a project/ program.
Currently orca is really state-of-the-art screen reader and d we need to
propagate this into education to start with.
There are some people (blind and sighted alike) who don't want this to
specially happen in India. i have personally met such people.
fortunately they currently have a say in the policy making for such issues.
They promote proprietory brands such as jaws in the education and
accessibility to the extent that even the government led accessibility
standard specifications carry these names.
We must take some serious steps to stop this.
On the development ground, you are absolutely right that we must talk to
organisations like SPI, or perhaps write to funding agencies like NLNet.
Happy hacking.
Krishnakant.
Happy hacking.
Krishnakant.
On Sunday 28 February 2010 11:45 AM, Guru गुरु wrote:
Krishnakant Mane wrote:
On Wednesday 10 February 2010 06:00 PM, Dipendra Manocha wrote:
This is indeed a cause of bug worry. This was the real hope and the
project
which was bringing confidence of persons with blindness or low
vision in the
open source software.
Thanks
Dipendra
We can still do this.
may be if representatives of other organisations such as redhat or
canonical are reading this, they can step in and save the project.
May be SPI (Software for Public Interest) can be intimated about this
issue.
A massive letter signing campain from visually disabled people or
related organisations can also be taken up to make oracle realise
this problem.
Happy hacking.
Krishnakant.
Dear friends,
sorry for a delayed response on an important issue ...
For a visually impaired person, a screen reader is the basic
requirement to access and participate in the 'information
society'/digital society. Such a basic need has to be seen as an
'entitlement' or a right which society needs to provide for, just as
society provides for education for all (free and compulsory education
is now a law in India), and not as a charity or result of someones
benevolence.
When something becomes an entitlement, it also means that society
(including, though not exclusively, through its main 'development
agency', the Government) has to make provision to fulfill the
entitlement. Just as public schools are setup/funded to ensure that
all children can indeed exercise their right to education, 'public
software' needs to be created and maintained, to ensure that visually
impaired can access computers/internet. Public Software thus means
that government has a special responsibility in its provisioning - it
could of course pay technology enterprises to develop it or develop it
in-house. Of course by its very definition, public software needs to
be freely shareable (this freedom is essential for universal access)
and open to customization / participation by citizens as developers,
designers, testers, users etc (since citizen/community participation
is an essential component of democracy). The four FOSS freedoms are
thus conceptually inherent in public software.
Public Software can thus be seen as a concept to extend FOSS, (at
least that part of FOSS that is seen as essential to society), and
make it a public (especially Governmental) responsibility. This can
help us get out of the situation where we need to request Oracle (a
private for profit company) to support Orca development and get into
business model debates. Anything that is a basic entitlement has to be
based on more *'funded' models* (where public funding takes care of
the costs and profit margins) and not purely on *revenue models*
(where the producer expects to recover costs/make profit through
individual sales), for it to be universally accessible. Operating
systems and basic editors of text, numbers, images, audio-visual
documents etc also need to be seen as public software, that need to be
universally accesible. This way, the government is not allowed to get
away by endorsing proprietary software such as JAWS in its policy
documents; developing and making public software like Orca universally
accessible is its own responsibility. FOSS communities of course need
to also have an important role in this development and provisioning
and people who are not technically skilled to develop software also
have important roles in the software development/maintenance processes
as users, designers, testers etc.
Recently UNESCO/ICTD Solution Exchange community, ITfC and couple of
departments within Government of Karnataka organized a workshop on
“Software Principles for the Public Sector, with focus on Public
Education” recently in Bangalore, which discussed this concept and
implications. Many FOSSCOMM members also participated. The workshop
report (as also the concept note, other resources such as case
studies, presentations, synopses etc etc) are available on
www.Public-Software.in website. We also had a 'Public Software for the
Social Sector' workshop in Jaipur on 25th, that Digantar, Digital
Empowerment Foundation, UNESCO/ICTD Solution Exchange community,
Knowledge Commons and ITfC organized. Look forward to comments on this
concept and if we could use its logic in our current issue on Orca.
regards,
Guru
_______________________________________________
network mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in
_______________________________________________
network mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in
