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Re: To all candidates: Debian and people with disabilities



Thanks. I tried to think of good, useful questions to spark discussion, but I don't know much about the structure of Debian or its project leaders. I do think, though, that if the project leader keeps accessibility in mind, this will filter down throughout Debian as a whole.

As far as backports, my problem is enabling it. Normal desktop users probably won't even know what that is, and the syntax is rather ugly, to me at least. I'd personally like to see accessibility on the same level as security or very important bug fix updates, because sometimes they are, especially when something like the Terminal bug happened with Orca, where Orca couldn't read the Mate Terminal. Another thing is braille support. BRLTTY, the package for driving Braille displays, gets updated like once every three months or so with support for new Braille displays.

This isn't to say that Debian's accessibility is awful; it's one of the best among all Linux distributions, because the user is guided from installation to first system boot. It's nice. I know the project leader can't be everything to all people, and there are legal, security, and other community issues, but it would be nice if whoever is elected to remember us, and setting aside a day to work on accessibility issues would be an amazing start. And since Debian is the root of a lot of other distributions, and even the default container in Google's Crostini Linux thing, we can show both other FOSS projects, and big corporations (corpses) that FOSS doesn't have to only be for people who are privileged enough to have all senses and use of their bodies and minds.


On Mon, Mar 21, 2022 at 5:46 PM Samuel Thibault <sthibault@debian.org> wrote:
Hello,

Devin, thanks for bringing accessibility questions in :)

Jean-Philippe MENGUAL, le lun. 21 mars 2022 23:37:03 +0100, a ecrit:
> Again, not sur the DPL can have a crucial role about this,
> unfortunately.

I agree, a DPL cannot make current maintainers magically find time to
work on issues :)

> Perhaps, however, in order to give more visibility to the topic, he
> may ping them more frequently during his public statements (Debconf,
> bits, debian-news) so make them talk about their work progress.

Agreed as well: advertising the will of Debian to progress on this
front, and that help is welcome, *can* make new maintainers come up.

Samuel


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