Thanks so much for this information. I did have the impression that volunteers work on this, I should have done more research. Also, thanks Jean-Philippe for the much easier ways of contributing to all this than the knee-jerk reaction of some people of “Well if you don’t like it then make it yourself and stop complaining because Linux is good the way it is,” sort of thing. I’ve already submitted issues to Github projects, mostly emulators because game accessibility is important to me, but yes, accessibility to a whole operating system is quite a bit more so, and activism of this type sometimes does work out well. At the very least, developers see this, it is an open issue that they can’t easily ignore unless they close it—and even then it is still there so one could reference it on conversations—and at most issues get fixed, or features are implemented.
On Fri, Nov 8, 2019, at 3:21 AM, Devin Prater wrote:I would definitely recommend the Mac. You’ll still be able to run free software, in an environment like Unix. Optionally, if you use the command line, check out https://github.com/tspivey/tdsr
It isn’t as powerful as Fenrir or Speak, but it gets the job done well. Also, the graphical utilities that come with the Mac, Safari, Mail, text-edit, are great also. There is spell checking, autocorrect, text replacement, and AppleScripting and Automation, all configurable, throughout the system, not just in your word processor, all accessible with VoiceOver.
Of course, there are current bugs. In Safari, you hear “insertion point at (nil)” at the end of every paragraph unless you use the arrow keys, and not VoiceOver navigation, to read. These bugs are usually fixed within the year of a version release, and the releases are often much better than the public beta versions.
I seriously hope that Linux stays accessible, because I’d hate to see free software let us down so majorly. But, volunteers are not held to a standard of accessibility, so I will not be shocked if all we have left in Linux is the command line.
This is all helpful information. I did some research after I wrote this and found that these are not volunteers at all. All pushing against our patches are individuals working for IBM to ship a commercial Linux desktop and are actually being paid by them to work on these things. I think it is honestly quite shameful to see representatives of such a prominant tech company behave in this way. If it were just ignoring patches it would be one thing, however, many of these individuals are also actually fighting against the patches and making discriminatory comments along the way. You have small groups of individuals (Hypra and Igalia) who have 0 the budgets of IBM when rounding to integers trying to improve things, yet IBM are impeding progress. Also, completely volunteer groups of individuals like Debian manage to ship an accessible desktop, yet IBM can't be bothered to do the same and have now gone a step further by attacking those who try to do so. It all just sounds really screwed up to me. These people come from places with oodles of money and tell us we need a new way of doing things yet they won't pony up the money to accomplish anything that they ask for.On Nov 7, 2019, at 6:21 PM, thomasw@fastmail.cn wrote:
Hi,
I have followed the discussion on the orca list lately and the conflicts around GTK 4 accessibility. I guess without getting into the drama of it all, I would just like to ask those who are knowledgeable if they think we will have Linux accessibility going into the future. I guess the issue seems to be that patches are being created for what upstream thinks is a broken system in some ways and it sounds like things like keyboard snooping could cause problems in the future. I honestly don't know enough to understand whether its broken from a design standpoint, however, it at least lets me use the computer.
I am not a skilled enough developer to understand all this yet but I rely on accessibility software for my job. I guess I would just like as honest as an answer as possible. If people think accessibility is going to be removed or key parts of the needed infrastructure, I see no other option than to buy a Mac now so that I can continue to operate the computer in the future. I did notice some comments that proposed removing ATK entirely which obviously would leave me dead in the water.. Ultimately, if the end is approaching, I would like to purchase a Mac as soon as possible since I will have to relearn the computer and a new screen reader (VoiceOver and would like as smooth a transition as possible.
I love using free software and hope to continue doing so, however, I ultimately have to do what is necessary to keep my job so I can support myself.
Thanks for any information and i hope those here can understand my concerns and honestly just not knowing what to do based on not having the technical knowledge to understand entirely what is happening in the different upstream packages.
|