Melissa Draper wrote:
I originally posted the text below to the community chat yesterday, and
UbuWu directed me to post it here as well...so I am.
Hi Melissa,
Thank you for speaking up on this issue. I've posted a reply in the
forums (perhaps we should move the discussion there, to involve
ourselves more in the wider community :) )
--- Post in Ubuntu forums at:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=132335
---
- Henrik
OK, I've looked at these conversations, and I think this particular
instance of a) someone being a bit impatient and unfocused due to being
tipsy on a saturday night, b) the common problem of it not always being
easy to know where to turn with questions and requests within the Ubuntu
community. Turning up in ubuntu-devel drunk on a Saturday night
demanding a new feature when most devs are away is probably not going to
yield the best result.
AFAICT good advice was already given in #ubuntu, namely to try the nano
editor. It's very simple, has a large cursor and with the preferences
for the terminal you can set the font size as large as you want.
But there is a wider question here, which we should probably discuss
more seriously: the lack of visibility of the accessibility team. One
reason for this is that the AT (assistive technology) features in in
Ubuntu really haven't been much to shout about so far. With the versions
we have released do date, I would not go around evangelising the Ubuntu
platform to visually impaired computer users (except for the few who are
interested in development on the bleeding edge). I would be doing them a
disservice; IMO they were better off staying with Windows or MacOSX.
However, with the release of 6.04 (dapper), this is about to change. We
will have the key AT features like screen readers and magnifiers
installed by default and even running as an option on the live CD. At
that point we should start promoting Ubuntu more widely to the disabled
community and get feedback from them on how well it's meeting their needs.
If we get an influx of new users with the need for these technologies it
would also be helpful to have better sources of documentation and
sources of support. WRT documentation, we are working on two documents
that will be included on the CD itself and on help.ubuntu.com. First
there is a brief introduction to the available features and a more
extensive user guide. (both need work, help is appreciated)
As for support, we have the ubuntu-accessibility mailing list and a
separate #ubuntu-accessibility IRC channel. Both of these have a fairly
low level of activity though, mainly because our accessibility team is
just quite small still. And also, those may not be everyone's preferred
mode of communication.
I think a special Assistive Technology sub-forum section would be very
useful at this point, as a first point of call for new users with
questions about what the possibilities are with the current software. It
would be even better if a few members of the existing forum community
could help out by answering basic questions. It should only take a few
minutes to check out some of our existing AT applications, just to have
a rough familiarity with them, and be able to help answer questions. We
should also set up a FAQ in the wiki for this purpose.
I agree that we in the accessibility team are something of a 'hidden
force' as you put it, but this is mainly due to our own limited
capacity. The core team of active contributors is small, at 5-6 people
perhaps, and we are focusing our energy on getting the features to
actually work. We would love to see more involvement from the wider
community. Much can be done with, testing, documentation writing and
user support. We need more champions in the Forums and elsewhere
--
Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
