In general India has been one of the leaders in promoting FOS, and this will bare more fruit Internationally,
and you are correct about NFB also.
That being said there is a lot of room for groups like the NFB to partialy change their stance, i.e. many
blind people do not need access to the
proprietary software that too often only JFW and perhaps other commercial windows screenreaders can access.
These people need to know that they have choices, and even if the powers that be at NFB and in many gov
"services" don't understand the fundamental
importance and current viability not to mention future potential of FOS software they should care about blind
people having as many choices as possible.
We need to encourage change with in these groups where possible, but with out legislation it is unlikely that
we will see enough change and serious
mainstream promotion of accessible FOS.
Sadly in the U.S., and in many other countries pollitics isnot promoting pragmatic government. The only place
where pragmatism rules is in saying and
doing what politicians feel will get them elected.
We need a break, i.e. some one or some organization with moneydeciding to invest in FOS accessability in a
sustainable way. The investment would be
tiny compared with that needed to show significant longterm results dealing with most other issues that come
to my mind.
Without getting such a break the way forward will have to include much more individual effort if we are going
to see improvement accelerate. Lots of
small eforts with some luck and adhoc organization
could be enough, but I think we are talking a magnitude increase in participation in development,
documentation and promotion to get things done that
way.
A ten foldgrowth in participation is not going to happen you say?, OK, probably not, but lets try doubling
our involvement. I'mtalking new people
stepping up. If you are already working to improve Linux accessibility then thank you. If you can comfortably
do more then go for it, but this is not a
sprint so do not burn yourself out. AIf you have friends who can code, ask them for help. I know some people
have partners or family members who don't
know much about the tech side of things but have helped clean up documentation. The pont is a lot of rain
drops will fill up a bucket as wil a a few
seconds with a firehose.
--
B.H.
Registerd Linux User 521886
Krishnakant wrote:
Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 06:19:07PM +0530
+1 Kendell, Just to add, 1, there are government decisions which have impacted Accessibility and acceptance of free software. The southern state of Kerala in India where I stay is one such example where free software is mandatory in all schools and most organizations use it. As a result the need is felt and there are hackers like Nalin who are on this list who actively work for Linux accessibility. 2, Organizations like NFB will only promote some thing which is really production ready in their view and for that accessibility development must step up. But for accessibility to take serious consideration, such organizations must promote what ever is already accessible. So this is a vicious circle. Happy hacking. Krishnakant. On Monday 22 February 2016 11:08 AM, kendell clark wrote:hi Just my personal opinion, but the linux blind community as a whole needs to step up and be proud of the software they use. Too many times on hear I'll see new users join who have used other platforms, and when they run into a problem the answer they too often get is, shrug, not my problem, go file a bug. That's all well and good for seasoned open source users, but to a new user you might as well say go learn Greek. It's why I've taken on, or tried to, the task of filing the accessibility bugs against gnome, mate, cinnamon, and ... I think those are it. What I've observed is that the gnome people know there are accessibility bugs, but still fall back on the "sorry, we don't know how to fix it" response so many others do. There are exceptions of course, like joanmeri, mathias claison, but for the most part that's what I've gotten. Bugs do get fixed of course, but it needs the blind community to step up and complain loudly that these bugs get fixed. Otherwise the bugs may linger because the gnome people are going to think that not enough people are impacted by a bug to bother fixing it. In the mate and cinnamon communities, they do care about accessibility, but they don't know how the accessibility stack works. I've found some documentation on this, but it seems geared towards people who already know gtk, c++, and the like. No beginner documentation at all. This needs to change. And it can, if we all work together. I don't think it will take lidigation to drumb up support, it just takes the people who use linux to be as passionate about their software as a windows or mac user would. The government situation doesn't help. I don't know how much influence organizations like the nfb, afb, etc have, but if they pushed linux as a viable option, as they should, that would automatically get interest from people who would otherwise disregard it. I'm not sure what can be done about that, I'm no political person and I'm not the best one to be diplomatic, lol. Just my two scents Kendell Clark Krishnakant wrote:Audacity is a great choice. Lot of Blind people may be interested in professional sound editing, and Audacity is very popular just like VLC and Firefox is popular. Secondly I can hardly understage the importance of accessibility of PDF, Libre office Calc and Impress. Most importantly, some bugs in the gnome shell itself needs urgent attention. Like I had reported some time back, the Wifi strength is not reported, Many notifications such as mobile broadband and Wifi activation is not announced. This brings us to the debate of who's responsibility it is. We can observe that the Orca devs have always done a great job, mostly taking it on themselves and hacking around an existing problem. But that is not a very practical way always. For example we may work around a bug in Libre Office Calc because the developers of Calc did not give enough time on a bug report. But then some day they do pay attention and fix the bug. Needless to say that the hack done before by Orca devs obviously has a possibility of breaking. Being a programmer myself, I know how it feels when you take hard work to retro fit a software to work with another component and then that another component fixes some bugs and our work breaks. So a coordinated strategy is needed. Happy hacking. Krishnakant. On Monday 22 February 2016 02:19 AM, B. Henry wrote:BTW, I like the idea of fixing audacity, and linphone. I mostly use the cli interface to linphone, but have had to write scripts to improve it/no accessability issues there though. The GTK linphone interface is so close/would love to see it get where it should be. Rhythmbox some times seems hard to move around in, but I can't put exact issues in to words off the top of my head as I don't use it much because of the issues I can't pstate very clearly at the moment. Gpodder: a fine program, under steady development/lead dev sounds like a nice guy. I wonder if there could be an easy fix to the constant reporting of download progress that makes using the program once d-loads have started a pain, a few other things could be done to improve its usability with Orca as well, but would need to spend some time with a sighted person wtching the screen to know how much can and can't be accessed with a mouse at certain times as the interface is reported differently depending on whether or not updates have been just done or if one has downloaded or otherwise interacted since last update check._______________________________________________ orca-list mailing list orca-list gnome org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list Orca wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Orca Orca documentation: https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/ GNOME Universal Access guide: https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/a11y.html Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
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