Re: Bug#1007106: reportbug: please make the meaning of the a11y tag clearer

[Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org>]

On Mon, 14 Mar 2022 at 09:38:36 -0400, Sandro Tosi wrote:
[ Simon McVittie wrote: ]
> > My understanding is that the a11y tag is intended to be for bugs that
> > harm Debian's usefulness for people who rely on assistive technologies
> > (screen readers, high contrast themes, etc.), and more generally, people
> > who are not well-served by typical application developer assumptions as
> > a result of disabilities or similar factors. The debian-accessibility
> > mailing list is described on https://lists.debian.org/devel.html as
> > "Making Debian more accessible to people with disabilities", and the
> > a11y tag is shown on bugs.debian.org as a wheelchair symbol emoji,
> > which supports that interpretation.
> >
> > However, reportbug describes the tag as:
> >
> > > 1 a11y      This bug is relevant to the accessibility of the package.
> >
> > and I think a lot of non-technical users are interpreting this as "this
> > bug makes it hard for *me personally* to use this package" - but if
> > we used that interpretation, then it would apply to a lot of medium to
> > high severity bugs in user-facing components like desktop environments,
> > and the bugs that are particularly relevant to debian-accessibility
> > subscribers would be lost in the noise.
> 
> I sympathize with your request, but please first address the rewording
> the the authoritative source of tags descriptions:
> https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#tags

Please could the BTS owners provide or approve a clearer wording for this,
if they are the "owners" of the tag definition?

In https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1007106#10,
Samuel Thibault suggested
    "This bug is relevant to the accessibility of the package for disabled users."
or
    "This bug affects disabled users."

and in https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1007106#20,
Cindy Sue Causey suggested
    "... affects people with disabilities."
or
    "... affects users with disabilities."

I would personally say
    "This bug particularly affects users with disabilities"
if we're using a form of wording similar to that, because what we're
interested in is whether a bug is *particularly* significant for users
of accessibility technologies etc., rather than just any random bug that
happens to have been encountered by a user with a disability.

Thanks,
    smcv