Willie Walker <William.Walker@Sun.COM> writes:
Yes, I know this, but we were actually talking about
accessibility support in the Debian Installer. There is a difference
between a full-blown desktop system that a user wants to
use to get work done, and the system that is used to install
the operating system. I still doubt it is very
useful for blind people to use a graphical installer. Especially
because of all the needless overhead.
From the orca-users list and from private e-mail, what I've seen is
that this basically comes down to a user preference. Users will
choose the distribution that suits their skill set, temperament, and
philosophical points of view. From a high level, it's great that
people have a choice.
Sure, I am not objecting to try and squeeze orca into
the graphical debian installer. I just think we should
add the ability to use speech feedback into the textual
installer *as well* since:
* Both require the same thing, a working soundcard autoconfiguration and
some software speech synthesis package.
* The typical "old-school" blind linux user would expect the
textual installer to work for them.
Keep in mind that blind access is only one facet of the problem, and
other disabilities are important, too. For example, magnifier users,
people with physical impairments, etc., also need access.
Yes, I know, and in fact, that is what I tried to say in my
first reply when I mentioned it would be useful for the graphical
installer to add magnification functionality. I am not familiar
with Orca's magnification control functionality tough.
Much of the accessibility work these days lives in the graphical
space, as do many of the assistive technologies.
I know, however, from a technical standpoint, I still think
there is a fundamental difference between a installer system, and
the system that is going to be used as as desktop OS on daily
basis. Accessibility in the graphical area mainly
exists to support document editing and browsing the web.
And for that, I think it is going to be very useful, but if I
do a simple task that can be easily managed by a console
application, I highly prefer to be able to use that, from the
standpoint of a blind linux user. The inefficiency involed
in having my computer draw something that I will never see
just makes me itchy. But if someone for some reason has to
use the graphical installer (low vision, alternative input hardware...),
they of course should be able to do so.
I'd just find it a little unelegant if using the graphical installer + orca
would get the default (and only way) to make the installer accessible to
speech only users.