Hello I know that this is already old news but perhaps to keep it all in perspective, I have started to use 9.04 recently and impressed by the progress since 8.10 which I used before. OK it did not work for me out of the box (using wubi) but with a number of simple configurations everything is well and speech is responsive and reasonably reliable. The reality is that accessibility in the big world is not a priority if we like it or not; I am personally happy to wait for the new version of the distro to settle down - 9.04 is probably the first distro where I feel that I can do some real work with (not using the command line which I used in the good old days and do not wish to use but for backup and some admin tasks again).
On a related point in reply to the previous message, Vinux has its place especially for new users where everything is pre configured and in my small way I fully support what Tony is doing. At the same time there is a place for Main distro which are ideally accessible out of the box or with minimal configuration where perhaps more settings are required but one can take advantage of the latest technology and what the main stream are using. Thanks to Luke, Will, Tony and all others including those who are happy to be at the bleeding edge who contribute to accessible technology. Regards Isaac -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Anthony Sales Sent: 22 October 2009 20:13 To: [email protected] Subject: RE: How's Karmic these days? Hi everyone, I think everyone appreciates what Willie and Luke are doing, without them LInux would be a whole lot less accessible and they are doing a great job in the circumstances. However they are up against the same problem as every other VI user, in that although companies acknowledge the need for accessibility it isn't very high on their priorities list and this is reflected on the fact that Luke and Willie seem to be the only people who are allowed to work on these projects by their employers. If they were serious their would be a team of people working on accessibility, and it wouldn't be an afterthought but a fundamental element of all applications. The reality is that the VI are but one minority group amongst many, they aren't a big enough user group to generate billions of dollars, and thus they are catered for by smaller companies who can charge an arm and a leg for software many people can't survive without. I think mainstream Linux accessibility will gradually g et better, but just like with Windows, it will always be an afterthought or add on, it is unlikely that any major distributer will produce a fully accessible OS optimised for the VI. This is why I started making Vinux, and I don't want to start any new arguments about mainstream v specialist accesibility software, but just imagine if Willie and Luke where actually working on an Orca distro rather than on the software itself, instead of trying to get it to work with Ubuntu's latest cutting edge technology. Then they would be able to make whatever changes were necessary to get the system fully accessible and include all the best accessible software. That is what I am trying to do with Vinux, but I simply don't have the technical skills and knowledge that Luke and Willie have, and like me they have to earn a living and it isn't likely to come from producing open-source accessibility software unless a government or large charity get involved. I still think it would be great if a ll of the developers interested in VI issues could pool their resources into one distro to rule them all, and this is not an attempt to devalue their work, what they are doing is great, but I sometimes feel that we are all swimming against the tide of the needs of the sighted majority and we are always going to be little fish. Keep up the good work, I am following in your wake, and without the work you do the Vinux project would not have been possible at all! drbongo ___________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Willie Walker [[email protected]] Sent: 22 October 2009 19:26 To: Bill Cox Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: How's Karmic these days? Hi All: From a stability standpoint, I can share what I'm planning for GNOME 2.30, which I suspect is likely to be what Lucid Lynx will be based upon. The main goal for GNOME 2.30 (which you'll see developed via the GNOME 2.29.x development releases) is that we're retooling the entire accessibility infrastructure to shed the Bonobo/CORBA dependency. This includes the AT-SPI infrastructure, speech, and magnification: http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/BonoboDeprecation At the same time, we have some big technologies coming down the pipe that will need accessibility support: WebKit and GNOME Shell. GDM 2.28 also has some accessibility issues that need addressing. It's a lot of work and we're going to do our best to make sure the changes are positive changes for GNOME 2.30. But, there will be instability for a period of time during the GNOME 2.29 development cycle. So...what this means is that I am going to keep Orca development down to a minimum during the 2.29.x/2.30 cycle. I plan only to fix high priority bugs in Orca and will work to make sure these bug fixes are backported to GNOME 2.28. For the near future, people needing stability should stick with GNOME 2.28 and Karmic. While Karmic may have some issues now, I think the users on this list need to get behind it, test it, and get constructive feedback and patches back to the Ubuntu team. BTW, I fully sympathize with Luke -- I've been doing a11y work for nearly 20 years and you are constantly between a rock and a hard place. Some of the users constantly spit and yell at you and your bosses keep stripping you down to barely enough to survive. The one thing that keeps you going are the successes of users where the difference between having the solution and not having the solution can mean having a job or not having a job, being able to communicate with others or not being able to communicate with others, etc. Will (GNOME Accessibility Lead) Bill Cox wrote: > Hi, Luke. > > Thanks for working on accessibility. I feel really rotten about > complaining about the bugs without putting in effort into debugging. > However, my boss is all over me at the moment to get another project > back on schedule. I'm sure you know what that's like. > > However, over the next year, I promise to find some time to nail a bug > or two, like the crash in speech dispatcher. In the meantime, we > should probably set expectations for users, and let them know it will > be a while before Orca is working in a stable manner in the latest > Ubuntu. It's an unfortunate situation, but blind users are simply not > able to chip in and fix things when accessibility is broken, so it > will be up to the very few of us interested in accessibility who still > have decent vision to pull it off. > > Best regards, > Bill > > On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 5:59 PM, Luke Yelavich <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 08:46:26AM EST, Bill Cox wrote: >>> Sorry guys, I know there's some of you out there who actually work >>> on Ubuntu accessibility, but the current state sucks. I certainly >>> hope Ubuntu decides at some point to make accessibility a priority. >> I can understand why, as a user, you feel that way. Unfortunately I am the only one so far as I know of, actively working on improving Ubuntu's accessibility, and while I do as much as I can to make things work as well as they can, I have other matters that I need to attend to, due to working for Canonical and being responsible for other parts of the desktop as well, so I can only do so much in the time I allocate for accessibility work. >> >> Unfortunately the speech-dispatcher crasher is at the moment, somewhat beyond my current skills to debug, although learning valgrind will likely help me get better with sed debugging, and hopefully get rid of the speech-dispatcher crash. >> >> So if you really want Ubuntu's accessibility to get better, I urge you to consider helping out in whatever way you can, even if its only filing and triaging bugs, thats something. The more bugs that are in a triaged state, the less work I have to do, and the more bugs I can attempt to fix. >> >> I hope you all understand, and will do what you can to help. >> >> Regards >> Luke >> >> -- >> Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility >> > -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
