Excitement related to Purism LibreM5 phone lacks accessibility awareness

[Peter Vágner <pvdeejay gmail com>]

Hello,

After Nokia's Meego, Ubuntu's phone, Mozilla's FirefoxOS there is yet another similar global story taking place these moments.

Yes, I'm talking about Purism LibreM5 secure linux based phone.

What is so special about it that made me post this message into the Gnome Accessibility community is the fact Purism have partnered with Gnome foundation as an addition to other partnership. Read the press release at: https://puri.sm/posts/gnome-foundation-partners-with-purism-to-support-its-efforts-to-build-the-librem-5-smartphone/

None of the previous attempts at a linux based phone mentioned accessibility. It took Apple several years to bring accessibility support to their IOS. It took Google even longer to add accessibility into Android.

Accessibility on linux is something Gnome has pioneered in with most notable contributions from Sun microsystems and Igalia and Rethat.

The accessibility stack is not rapidly evolving nowadays, however this is the opportunity the whole Gnome Accessibility community and the Linux Accessibility community has earned with the mentioned partnership.

Don't you feel ashamed that no accessibility related work is being considered as coming out of this partnership?

How many years do we have to wait in order to make yet another upcoming mobile platform accessible?

Are some accessibility related discussions taking place that are not known to the general public yet?

Can Gnome foundation consider putting some resources to this goal?

If done right what we need is touch input support made accessible for the desktop and for the mobile. Purism have used Gnome and KDE as the platforms fueling their device. They have not partnered with Samsung to reuse EFL, other smaller communities to choose their UI paradigms and graphical enviromment as the building block. They have chosen Gnome technologies.

So please I do really feel kicked out no accessibility related work is known to have slipped to the public through this colaboration. Is there way to influence this somehow? Can we poor individuals relying on the accessibility support do something at this point? Not only we do need accessible devices because of law regulations and strong enterprise policies, we do also have hobbies, our personal lives and even dreams. I would say such a platform with accessibility support is not on the bottom of visually impaired individuals and people with other health impairments. wishlists.

Thanks to everyone for at least reading my message.

Greetings

Peter