How's Karmic these days?

[Nolan Darilek]

Hi Luke and all.

Thanks for the work on Ubuntu accessibility. I know that it isn't easy, 
and it's something I'd like to chip in and help with. I'm a bit short on 
computing resources at the moment (using a netbook full time since 
February, and apparently the desktop I got just a week ago has hardware 
issues so it's retired for now) but I do hope to get involved when I can.

Two  points. First, if you're the only Canonical employee doing 
accessibility work, I think that should be fixed. I know that they're 
not a profitable company at the moment (do correct me if I'm wrong) but 
this is important, and you shouldn't be alone. If funds can be spared 
for Iatana(SP?) then it seems like accessibility should be a bit more 
prioritized. Is there any way we as a community can make that happen? I 
can't necessarily fix bugs, but if it's just a matter of voicing these 
concerns to the right person, I'm happy to help with that. If Ubuntu 
aims to ship a UI experience on par with that of OS X, as I think I've 
read before, then solid accessibility needs to be a part of that, and 
that's a lot for one pair of shoulders.

Second, I've been using Orca/SD for the past year or so, and must admit 
to being a bit disappointed by the idea that it's shipping as the 
default setup in Ubuntu, particularly as it sounds like the crashing 
issue isn't going to be fixed. It seems a bit hasty to make such grand 
experiments if there's not some degree of certainty that a shipping 
default will be stable. And yes, I know that there are things that can 
make the situation less painful. I'm running xbindkeys and have 
restarted SD at least a dozen times during the course of typing this, 
using the hotkey I've set up for that purpose. Mind you, I've chosen 
this setup because ALSA alone has issues on this netbook, but will any 
new user know that xbindkeys is available? And will Karmic ship with a 
major subsystem crrasher which we'll have to wait for Lucid, or Lucid+X, 
to see fixed?

Hopefully my view on the state of things is overly negative, but the 
"userbase as experimental subjects" model of Ubuntu (first with PA and 
now with SD) worries me.

Thanks again for the hard work, even if I worry about its direction at 
times.

On 10/21/2009 04:59 PM, Luke Yelavich wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 08:46:26AM EST, Bill Cox wrote:
>    
>> Sorry guys, I know there's some of you out there who actually work on
>> Ubuntu accessibility, but the current state sucks.  I certainly hope
>> Ubuntu decides at some point to make accessibility a priority.
>>      
> I can understand why, as a user, you feel that way. Unfortunately I am the only one so far as I know of, actively working on improving Ubuntu's accessibility, and while I do as much as I can to make things work as well as they can, I have other matters that I need to attend to, due to working for Canonical and being responsible for other parts of the desktop as well, so I can only do so much in the time I allocate for accessibility work.
>
> Unfortunately the speech-dispatcher crasher is at the moment, somewhat beyond my current skills to debug, although learning valgrind will likely help me get better with sed debugging, and hopefully get rid of the speech-dispatcher crash.
>
> So if you really want Ubuntu's accessibility to get better, I urge you to consider helping out in whatever way you can, even if its only filing and triaging bugs, thats something. The more bugs that are in a triaged state, the less work I have to do, and the more bugs I can attempt to fix.
>
> I hope you all understand, and will do what you can to help.
>
> Regards
> Luke
>
>    


-- 
Nolan Darilek
http://thewordnerd.info