Re: [Kenny Hitt] Re: Is Debian appropriate for accessibility?
On Fri, Feb 02, 2007 at 05:02:26AM -0600, kenny@hittsjunk.net wrote:
>
> It's good that you can install Debian using the official installer.
I have done this and it worked reliably. It even detected my USB-connected
braille display entirely automatically when the installer started. This is one
of the main reasons why I chose to install Debian rather than Ubuntu on my
laptop. However, this functionality will most likely propagate to the Ubuntu
alternate installation image, as this uses the Debian text-based installer.
> Unfortunately, I can't do the same. Until me or someone else modifies
> the official installer to include speakup I can't do a Debian install.
> There was a time when speakup was available in a Debian installer, but
> it was a special kernel package and the Debian kernel developers didn't
> maintain it.
Speakup has existed for a long time, but for whatever reason, it has never
been integrated into the mainline kernel. If the Speakup maintainers and the
kernel developers could work together to have some version of it integrated,
then it would almost as a matter of course be picked up by more distributions
than those few which support it now.
I agree with Mario's comment on the importance of cooperation between Debian
and Ubuntu developers regarding accessibility. It is even more important that
improvements go upstream so that everyone ultimately benefits, and
distributions don't have to maintain unnecessary patches. In the case of
gnome-speech, since the Ubuntu developers and the Gnome accessibility
developers are working collaboratively, I am confident that the bug fixes will
move upstream eventually - but Debian users shouldn't have to wait for that.
Gnome-speech is only one example, of course.
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