Whether you advocate for greater accessibility in Ubuntu or not is a
decision only you can make. I would not interpret the responses of two
or three people though to be "all this talk of diplomacy and catching
more flies with honey is what people want". First, two or three people
is not all of this talk or what people want, it's just the opinions of
two or three people on a relatively low traffic list. Don't blow it out
of proportion.
For my part, the only point I made was that I don't consider Unity or
Ubuntu Phone to be trivial or flashy. I think these were hard efforts
involving quite a few people in an effort to make Ubuntu more popular,
running on more devices and in the hands of more people. I know people
have criticized Unity for being dumbed down, but I don't know what that
means, and I'm not sure why it's a bad thing to make Ubuntu more popular
and get it used by more people. Obviously, if you want to use the
argument that Canonical is spending resources on bright new shiny things
instead of accessibility then that will strike a chord with some Ubuntu
and Unity critics, but I'm not sure it'll sway the decision makers at
Canonical.
I also wouldn't be too worried about what I or are other people think.
The goal here is to get Ubuntu more accessible in all of it's releases
and on all of the platforms where it's supported. If that means using
honey then that's what should be done, if it means using vinegar then
that's the way to go. I prefer honey myself, but I know there's a need
for vinegar too. If you're not comfortable being diplomatic, political
or tactful, but you want to fight for more accessibility in Ubuntu then
do what you're comfortable with.
At my previous employer, I got into quite a few debates with another
blind person. I thought he was a bit hysterical at times and made
outlandish claims. We debated quite a bit on our internal mailing list.
I was surprised though when I found out how much he was appreciated by
those working on accessibility within the company. I thought my more
balanced and reasonable approach would have been more appreciated, but I
found out that in the accessibility community you need the radicals,
those calling out to man the barricades and the squeaky wheels.
For my part, I hope you take up the fight, and I hope you don't take the
fact that I'm a different person with a different approach as a reason
not to take up the fight yourself.
On 01/06/2013 08:21 PM, Nolan Darilek wrote:
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/
--
Christopher (CJ)
chaltain at Gmail
preportion.
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