Re: To all candidates: Debian and people with disabilities
Hi Devin
On 2022/03/20 19:09, Devin Prater wrote:
* Have you heard of the Debian Accessibility group?
I have indeed.
* If so, have you worked with them in the past, or are you currently
working with them?
I haven't directly worked with them directly, but I have been on the
receiving end of criticism (and it was completely valuable and useful
and valid feedback) on things that I did.
Most notably, I received some very angry emails when I added the
Calamares installer to our Debian live images. It introduced some
horrible accessibility bugs because Orca couldn't see the Calamares
window (iirc it was some combination also of Calamares being a Qt app
and apps under Wayland not being able to peek at other windows), which
made it quite useless for people who are blind. The situation has gotten
a bit better, but it's still terrible.
I also have lots of ideas I'd like to implement for accessibility,
specifically in installers, but that's also a rabbit hole that doesn't
quite address your questions at this point.
We also have a few other DDs who are blind or visually impaired to some
degree which brought some more attention to things that I've implemented
that are terrible in terms of accessibility.
I installed a Jitsi server for Debian (it's a system for making group
video calls), and was really proud that we had this... until we had some
blind people join some calls and learned how utterly inaccessible it is.
For example, you can toggle your mic or camera (there's no way to set it
as either on or off explicitly) and then you have to be able to see the
mic or camera icon on your screen in order to tell whether those are
enabled or not. I think in our case our DDs went ahead and checked the
status in the javascript debug console to find the variables and their
values... and I'm proud of them for being so resourceful, but totally
embarrassed that we needed them to do that in the first place. On the
bright side, video chat software has been good at raising funding during
covid, and these issues are filed upstream, so I hope that jitsi gets a
lot better and makes it a lot easier for people with visual disabilities
to join video calls and participate in our community in the future.
* Currently, Debian backports is how people with disabilities can get
the most up-to-date accessibility fixes and improvements while remaining
on a stable base system. For example, the newest version of the Orca
screen reader, with all of its fixes, and newest version of ATSPI, the
thing that makes Orca able to talk to applications. Would you be willing
to entertain the idea of moving those updates directly to Debian stable?
To be fair, it seems like a very valid use of backports. Is the main
issue more about the hurdle of enabling the backports repository, or
about issues like the level of security fixes available for backported
packages?
* How would you present Debian to a group of people with disabilities?
What reasons would you give them for why they should consider Debian
I would present it to them warts and all. I'd cover why I believe Debian
is important, explain our problems, and explain how we want to be
better. Some people in such a group might decide "nah, it's not worth
the effort", but some might decide that it's at least worth while to try
out it out, even if only in a VM, and might have the skills to submit
bug reports or even get involved. Some things that seemed like tiny bits
of feedback have made some important changes in the past (like losing a
beep on live media when we use GRUB (for UEFI) instead of isolinux). I
believe we can benefit from a lot more feedback, but it's also a
question of priority in the project when it comes to dealing with such
feedback.
* In many desktop environments, a user cannot use their assistive
technologies effectively unless they find and check a box enabling the
use of assistive technologies. Do you think that this is good and fair
to users?
At DebConf15, I attended this talk from Samuel Thibault:
https://peertube.debian.social/w/9hoptcMQiPsmJrb2fbRvxW
Even though it's now a few years old, I can recommend that to anyone
reading here who aren't very familiar with accessibility issues in Debian.
The way he describes Debian as being in the stone age compared to Apple
in terms of accessibility (where accessibility is always just a few
buttons away) has convinced me that users should only have to do the
bare minimum of effort to ever enable an assistive technology.
-Jonathan
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