Great ideas and thoughts here, folks.
To put my words in context, I've used Linux since Slackware '96 which,
as its name implies, was released in 1996. I started using GNOME
accessibility in the Gnopernicus days, and at the moment it is my
full-time operating system of choice.
However, my experience under Windows and NVDA is making me sit up and
take notice. Firefox works very well. Similarly, I can run Chrome and,
gods forbid, IE reasonably well. I have a level of choice that I don't
seem to under Linux, and there are other areas in which Windows is
excelling for me. I'm not saying that it's the best choice, or the right
choice for everyone. I'm just starting to give it a serious look,
because the latest state of having to reboot multiple times per day
under Ubuntu because accessibility is behaving oddly is starting to get
to me.
I hope that this discussion leads to someone taking up this cause. I did
some soul-searching over the last two days, and am not the one to take
this up--if all this talk of diplomacy and catching more flies with
honey is what people want, that is. Having pushed and advocated and
developed for Android for the past few years, I'm burned out on the
access fight, and no longer have much diplomacy left in me. Best of luck.
On 01/05/2013 06:12 PM, Kyle wrote:
The spam system is completely automated and Akismet has been known to
mark quite a large number of false positives, so having a comment of
any kind marked by Akismet as spam is not at all uncommon. Having said
this, I'm not sure where the perception comes in that non-free
operating systems provide a better accessibility experience, or how
that perception will help further our cause. I have been using
GNOME+Orca+free GNU/Linux operating systems exclusively since 2009,
and I can't say that my experience with accessibility has been even
close to unfavorable, and it has improved quite rapidly just over the
past year, since I now have a level of access to qt applications that
I never even dreamed possible just 2 years ago, and that level of qt
accessibility far surpasses the level of qt accessibility on Apple
computers and devices, not to mention the fact that Firefox can't be
made to work with VoiceOver on a Mac, which is a state I find
extremely sad, albeit typical, from a company who continually receives
the highest praise for its lackluster accessibility performance. On
the Microsoft side, accessibility is also taking backsteps, as Windows
8 is a nightmare, and is in fact seen by many Windows users, as a
complete joke as relating to accessibility, as well as many other
aspects of the OS.
Does Canonical need to devote more resources to the expansion of the
accessibility team and the improvement of the accessibility stac?
Absolutely. Does accessibility need to be a primary concern for any OS
or desktop or smart phone environment? No question. But the best way
to make it known that this is a requirement is not by telling
developers and companies that it's sad that their competitor does abc
better when in fact, their competitor has bigger problems with xyz.
Rather, the best way to raise awareness of what we need in an
accessibility stack and a team of developers working on it is simply
letting them know that accessibility is a major requirement for any OS
or interface, letting them know what improvements are needed that
would help us to be able to use the OS or interface better, and
contributing to development of the codebase if possible, which is
something that can *never* happen on a non-free operating system where
even error reports fall on deaf ears.
~Kyle
http://kyle.tk/
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