Re: Metapackages for accessibility
Mario Lang, le Tue 20 Jul 2010 21:29:34 +0200, a écrit :
> * "console-screen-reader" has several solutions which
> the user is not likely to use at once. More likely is that
> they pick one and use it. But installing all of them might
> lead to conflicts maybe?
We talked a bit more with Mario on IRC. In a lot of cases, it indeed
doesn't make sense to run several screen readers at the same time. It
would then make sense to not start them by default. But then it's a pain
for people who'd just expect apt-get install brltty to be enough to get
started. This looks to me similar to the xdm vs gdm vs kdm issue: only
one gets started, according to the user preference. I'm not sure whether
we really want to go into that complexity, however.
Now, what such package would be useful for? Mario thinks that a pitfall
would be to make people believe that merely installing those will be
sufficient to be accessible, which is clearly not the case: making a
workstation accessible means starting and configuring a precise set of
tools that the user will be able to use and combine, as well as
configuring some system parameters, etc. A mere meta-package doesn't
help at all here, but might even hurt in that people would think it's
sufficient.
Actually, I'd tend to think that it raises the question I've discussed a
bit in LSM 2010's OS session: ideally, somebody with disability should
be able to go to a public box, plug some USB stuff or press some
shortcut, and get accessibility tools to let him use the box. This might
sound as a too idealistic example, but that's what should really ideally
happen. And that's what should happen for accessible liveCDs (be it a
standard system, or some teaching material, etc.).
So maybe instead of these meta-package there should be some packages
which provide tools that have these dependencies, and provide some tools
to choose and configure accessibility tools. Like a control panel,
shortcuts, etc.
> * "gnome" looks neat but the problem is already solved in a better way.
> GNOME actually considers accessibility a core part of its
> infrastructure which means that pkg-gnome is already pulling most of the
> required stuff at least via Recommends. I consider this a great
> thing and the way to go, thanks GNOME!
I think it's probably better to let gnome do its own integration rather
than trying to follow what's happening in the gnome world.
> * Most of what is in "speech-synthesis" is going to be pulled via Depends.
> I am not sure how useful it is to just install everything there is.
It might make sense in the same way as locales-all is used for: just
provide speech synthesis for as many languages as possible, served via
speech-dispatcher. Ideally that should be available on all liveCDs, but
there's still the same issue: it should probably not be started by
default due to its heaviness?
> > I would consider it as a good idea to do so because this might enable
> > pointing to the Debian Accessibility project in the release notes for
> > Squeeze which will probably increase the popularity of the Debian
> > Accessibility project amongst Debian users and makes Debian more
> > attractive in this field.
>
> Well, we can already point at these nice webpages, can't we?
That's already a good point, yes.
I'd even say Meta-packages are not so much useful compared to that.
Samuel
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