Oh sorry, didn't finish that last thought. At Microsoft they have the
resources to handle the long documentation phases and come up with a good
product, but in open source, if you have a very small group represented,
you have to get your hands dirty first in order to sufficiently understand
the situation well enough to come up with good system specifications and a
reasonable roadmap in a reasonable time frame. So, what we were doing in
discussing details and wanting to actually test a few things was just
that and what you originally were complaining about. Assessing the
situation would allow us to know what we can take from Ubuntu's road map
and what has to be adjusted.
On Fri, 27 May 2011, Pia wrote:
On Fri, 27 May 2011, Alan Bell wrote:
It is made up of people, all of whom are normal, some of whom have a
specific impairment. People are motivated to work on accessibility topics
for a variety of reasons.
My intent is not to start a flame war or argue about ideology. I did not
mean normal in the social sense but in the technical sense. If using closed
captioning, screen reading software, alternative input devices such as
onscreen keyboard and sticky keys or dictation, braille, or other
accessibility technology were the norm, they would be included by default and
no distro would be released without them. As is, monitor keyboard and mouse
are the norm. So, yes, all of us who are disabled do not represent the
typical use case for software. Forgive me, political correctness drives me
nuts, but I certainly don't want to offend anyone or be insensitive.
Sometimes I have to admit, I think a lot of people have a difficult time not
painting over reality that needs to be addressed if we are to make an
effective solution to this problem. The issue I think is that in open
source, we are a largely social community, which is wonderful, but one
advantage the corporation has is that they are logistical at least internally
rather than political. So, even if they don't come out and say it publicly,
they will hire disabled beta testers and even coders if they can to work on
this software. In the cases where a user base has such specialized needs
(disabled people is not the only situation that fits this, but any
specialized user base that is sufficiently small) I find the best approach is
an agile programming design approach rather than the more traditional system
development models, because the users and coders really have to work closely
together for the coders to understand what is actually functional. You won't
get the realistic road map you want, I wouldn't think, without understanding
the problem better which requires a grass roots effort to try things first.
So, John, this explains my rationale. Maybe at a place like
Microsoft or Freedom Scientific, they have the resources to employ a more
traditional model (I do know that both of those companies hire some
individuals who do need the technology at the developer and coder level
though so that they are inherently implementing some of the agile programming
model even without explicitly doing so. Since they are the use case).
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