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Re: Installing accessibility packages by default?



Andreas Tille, le Thu 05 Mar 2009 13:16:22 +0100, a écrit :
> On Thu, 5 Mar 2009, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> >It has been suggested a few times (471410, 511329, 516723) to
> >add an "accessibility" item to tasksel, which would e.g. install
> >gnome-accessibility.  The task would be automatically selected when
> >accessibility features was used during d-i itself.
> 
> I wonder whether this effort might profit from maintaining metapackages
> for accessibility as it is done in the blends effort.  The blends-dev
> has tasksel support as well - so it is easily possible to include
> accessibility related packages into tasksel.  The extra profit would
> be that you can provide an easy overview about accesibility related
> programs in Debian - the only way I know is
> 
>    $ apt-cache search accessibility
> 
> which is quite weak.

Tags FTW.  Look for Accessibility tags and you'll find a lot of
packages.

> Thinks of alternatives like
> 
>    http://blends.alioth.debian.org/science/tasks/
>    http://blends.alioth.debian.org/science/bugs/

Let me point out something which I think is important (even if I think
that's not what you meant): accessibility is not a task. It's like i18n,
it's orthogonal to tasks: for all the tasks above you actually need
accessibility support.

I do not mean that the tool itself shouldn't be used of course.

> >`What if, for example, you walk up to a friend/coworker and talk about
> >some issue.  You end up wanting to show them something, so you'd
> >actually like to login on tehir Linux machine with accessibility enabled
> >so that you can work together on the project.  However, since nobody
> >thought their machine would ever be used by a disabled person, the
> >necessary software would not be installed.'
> 
> The problem is that the typical admin does not have the specific
> knowledge what actually is needed.

The admin, no, but you (the disabled person) do know and just ask your
friend/coworker to run e.g. orca (already installed by default). With
USB braille devices, it would even be possible to automatically start
it, no even need to sudo.

> The idea to iron out this knowledge inside the tasks files to enable
> admins who have not enough specific knowledge about the needs of their
> users is one means to help in this issue.

Yes, we definitely need to have some sort of database that allows people
to know the name of the tools they can try to use to help them anyway.

> I assume there are
> most probably urgently needed packages who should be installed per
> default and others which are just Recommended and Suggested.

Possibly, yes.

> So IMHO it makes sense to have a accessibility-gnome /
> accessibility-kde (perhaps accessibility-desktop) metapackages which
> are part of a default installation.

Which can Depend/Recommend/Suggest depending on the criticity of the
help provided by various packages:
- can't use the computer without it (e.g. screen reader for blind people).
- hard for me to use the computer without it (e.g. color scheme).
- makes me more efficient (e.g. dasher).

> The advantage of using accessibility-gnome / accessibility-kde
> metapackages is that you can perfectly handle the dependencies inside
> the accessibility project because there will be no need to change d-i
> or the Gnome / KDE tasks.

Yes, I also think that'd be better.

> >So, I'm asking: would it seem reasonable to ask tasksel to install
> >accessibility packages along desktop packages?
> 
> IMHO yes - but in the way I suggested above and not by using explicite
> package names.

Sure. We don't want to have to bother d-i each time new accessibility
packages get added :)

Samuel


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