I don't see how it's so hard, or detramental to your points to remove the shiny
stuff line from a comment is hard, or in anyway takes away from the force of
what you are saying; butt burnout is burnout.
I wouldn't have even written to say that. I will say that you have just
discovered or admitted or something what many, probably most people feel
regarding accessible-web-browsing. For me, nvda&firefox is the current gold
standard for web-browsing with a screenreader. Chrome is certainly usable with
nvda as well, and chromevox adds another option although keystroke conflicts
make that a harder than it should be. And yes, nvda works very well with ie as
well and will get you access to some pages and content that don't work with
other browsers in an accessible way. From what this non-coder understands there
are basic accessibility infrastructure reasons that some things are easier to
do under windows than under Linux, but no matter what NVDA is an impressive,
I'd even say amazing, (awesome...lol.) program/project!
The beauty of Linux, its flexibilitly/range of choice, specifically multiple
desktop environments, means that for the blind person to have anywhere near the
range of options that a sighted person has developers of multiple projects must
think about accessibility. This means that the devs' hearts and minds must be
in the right place as I doubt there's enough economic incentive to go around to
be had from the blind-user market.
OK, so it's unlikely that all the major desktops will be recoded so that
accessibility is given a high priority, but it's ashamed that Mozilla and Orca
can't or don't work together more; enough to give us a high quality experience
navigating the range of websites that we are likely to encounter day in and day
out.
If web-browsing was all I did with my computer then no matter that my heart is
with Linux I'd not be able to justify using GNU-Linux as my primary OS.
Honestly, the browsing-experience on Linux is just not in the same league with
what's available on Windows. On Windows I can do almost everything with
Firefox, or IE if that was what I wanted to use, and seldom need to change
browsers or screenreaders. I could get at almost everything I want to between
these two browsers, and with one or two aditional browsers can get at a few of
the bits that don't currently work with NVDA. Using Linux, as I do, as my
primary OS I need to use a combination of Lynx and Firefox and for a few sites
chrome/chromevox to approach the browsing efficiency i'D have if I used
Windows. This means I need to know where I'm going when I start a browsing
session so that I can pick the best browser or perhaps have to copy an url and
switch browsers. Also it requires practice to have a decent experience with
firefox. Some things I can do and not have any problem on a windows box are a
mess with firefox/Orca such as using up and down arrows to get somewhere on a a
webpage. If I press the arrow a bit to long and go past my goal I havwe to wait
till Orca catches up and speech stops before changing direction. Even pressing
the arrow too long can mean getting text repeated and again having to wait till
things settle down to get an idea as to where I am. I could go in to much more
detail and explain several similar problem s that make the learning curve much
steeper for the blind-Linux-using web-browserk, not to mention many sites that
just don't work, or don't give access to important content that's no problem
under Windows. Even after over two years using Linux %95 of the time I still
find myself clicking on the wrong link or button because I've not waited long
enough for Orca to finish speaking or sometimes because it doesn't speak what's
in focus. I'm taking a look at ELinks now as it has some java script support
and other options that may mean I can do more browsing from the command line.
Some of this would not be so troublesome on more powerful computers, but I
don't know just how much difference a faster box with more cores and RAM would
make. I'm also using older Ubuntu with gnome2 which means I'm not using the
latest Orca as the xdesktop branch is no longer developed, but I've not heard
many people say that their firefox experience is much better with latest Orca.
I use Linux in spite of the browsing experience because I like most everything
about it much better than Windows. There are notable accessibility issues
besides browsing, and there are bright spots even with browsing such as surfraw
and googleizer. Chromevox has a lot of potential. Someone who's not a tinkerer
or not comfortable on the command line should probably not consider Linux as
their primary OS at this point unfortunately.
This post has been mostly about web-browsing. I don't think this is something
that Ubuntu devs can do much about how firefox or other browsers work with
Orca, so I really will stop going down this discussion path this time. To make
one on-topic point it is certainnly important for Canonical to keep
accessibility well integrated with Unity as this is their baby. I would hope
that all aspects of the OS itself could be used with a screenreader whether GUI
or CLI.
The fact that we are still waiting for audio issues to be fully sorted out so
that a blind person can switch between the commandline and the GUI with out
hassles more than half a year after the last LTS was released shows clearly
that Canonical has not dedicated enough resources to accessibility. Fortunately
another project is working on this, and if I understand things we are likely to
see it pushed upstream to Ubuntu in the future.
I will wind up by saying that even if you think we should have more than I'm
asking for right now that there's plenty that we agree on that needs to be
done. No one has time to do everything that needs to be done, but I also hope
that besides telling Canonical that they need to keep their committment to
accessibility that we can find the way to find the support that Orca needs and
get browser devs, most notably Mozilla to get that side of things together.
Even if Ubuntu is everything it should be re access it is unlikely to be the OS
of choice for most blind users until the browsing experience is more in line
with what's available under Windows. I'm not going away,at least not anytime
soon, but I can't honestly tell the majority of blind people that Linux is for
them yet. It'd be great if mobile Ubuntu were to become a great option for
blind folk. It's certainly worth telling Canonical that this is important to
us, and could be beneficial to them, maybe even to their bottom line.Got that
all said, so I'm out. Next posts will go somewhere where I hope those who
direct Canonical policy will be likely to read.
Regards,
--
B.H.
On Sun, Jan 06, 2013 at 08:21:00PM -0600, 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/
>
>
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