How's Karmic these days?

Fri Oct 23 07:43:46 BST 2009

Hello 

I know that this is already old news but perhaps to keep it all in
perspective, I have started to use 9.04 recently and impressed by the
progress since 8.10 which I used before.  OK it did not work for me out of
the box (using wubi) but with a number of simple configurations everything
is well and speech is responsive and reasonably reliable.
The reality is that accessibility in the big world is not a priority if we
like it or not; I am personally happy to wait for the new version of the
distro to settle down - 9.04 is probably the first distro where I feel that
I can do some real work with (not using the command line which I used in the
good old days and do not wish to use but for backup and some admin tasks
again).

On a related point in reply to the previous message, Vinux has its place
especially for new users where everything is pre configured and in my small
way I fully support what Tony is doing.  At the same time there is a place
for Main distro which are ideally accessible out of the box or with minimal
configuration where perhaps more settings are required but one can take
advantage of the latest technology and what the main stream are using.

Thanks to Luke, Will, Tony  and all others including those who are happy to
be at the bleeding edge who contribute to accessible technology.

Regards
Isaac

-----Original Message-----
From: ubuntu-accessibility-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com
[mailto:ubuntu-accessibility-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com] On Behalf Of Anthony
Sales
Sent: 22 October 2009 20:13
To: Ubuntu-accessibility at lists.ubuntu.com
Subject: RE: How's Karmic these days?

Hi everyone, I think everyone appreciates what Willie and Luke are doing,
without them LInux would be a whole lot less accessible and they are doing a
great job in the circumstances. However they are up against the same problem
as every other VI user, in that although companies acknowledge the need for
accessibility it isn't very high on their priorities list and this is
reflected on the fact that Luke and Willie seem to be the only people who
are allowed to work on these projects by their employers. If they were
serious their would be a team of people working on accessibility, and it
wouldn't be an afterthought but a fundamental element of all applications.
The reality is that the VI are but one minority group amongst many, they
aren't a big enough user group to generate billions of dollars, and thus
they are catered for by smaller companies who can charge an arm and a leg
for software many people can't survive without. I think mainstream Linux
accessibility will gradually g  et better, but just like with Windows, it
will always be an afterthought or add on, it is unlikely that any major
distributer will produce a fully accessible OS optimised for the VI. This is
why I started making Vinux, and I don't want to start any new arguments
about mainstream v specialist accesibility software, but just imagine if
Willie and Luke where actually working on an Orca distro rather than on the
software itself, instead of trying to get it to work with Ubuntu's latest
cutting edge technology. Then they would be able to make whatever changes
were necessary to get the system fully accessible and include all the best
accessible software. That is what I am trying to do with Vinux, but I simply
don't have the technical skills and knowledge that Luke and Willie have, and
like me they have to earn a living and it isn't likely to come from
producing open-source accessibility software unless a government or large
charity get involved. I still think it would be great if a  ll of the
developers interested in VI issues could pool their resources into one
distro to rule them all, and this is not an attempt to devalue their work,
what they are doing is great, but I sometimes feel that we are all swimming
against the tide of the needs of the sighted majority and we are always
going to be little fish. Keep up the good work, I am following in your wake,
and without the work you do the Vinux project would not have been possible
at all!

drbongo

___________________________________
From: ubuntu-accessibility-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com
[ubuntu-accessibility-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com] On Behalf Of Willie Walker
[William.Walker at Sun.COM]
Sent: 22 October 2009 19:26
To: Bill Cox
Cc: ubuntu-accessibility at lists.ubuntu.com
Subject: Re: How's Karmic these days?

Hi All:

 From a stability standpoint, I can share what I'm planning for GNOME 2.30,
which I suspect is likely to be what Lucid Lynx will be based upon.

The main goal for GNOME 2.30 (which you'll see developed via the GNOME
2.29.x development releases) is that we're retooling the entire
accessibility infrastructure to shed the Bonobo/CORBA dependency.  This
includes the AT-SPI infrastructure, speech, and magnification:

http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/BonoboDeprecation

At the same time, we have some big technologies coming down the pipe that
will need accessibility support: WebKit and GNOME Shell.  GDM 2.28 also has
some accessibility issues that need addressing.  It's a lot of work and
we're going to do our best to make sure the changes are positive changes for
GNOME 2.30.  But, there will be instability for a period of time during the
GNOME 2.29 development cycle.

So...what this means is that I am going to keep Orca development down to a
minimum during the 2.29.x/2.30 cycle.  I plan only to fix high priority bugs
in Orca and will work to make sure these bug fixes are backported to GNOME
2.28.

For the near future, people needing stability should stick with GNOME
2.28 and Karmic.  While Karmic may have some issues now, I think the users
on this list need to get behind it, test it, and get constructive feedback
and patches back to the Ubuntu team.

BTW, I fully sympathize with Luke -- I've been doing a11y work for nearly 20
years and you are constantly between a rock and a hard place.
  Some of the users constantly spit and yell at you and your bosses keep
stripping you down to barely enough to survive.  The one thing that keeps
you going are the successes of users where the difference between having the
solution and not having the solution can mean having a job or not having a
job, being able to communicate with others or not being able to communicate
with others, etc.

Will
(GNOME Accessibility Lead)

Bill Cox wrote:
> Hi, Luke.
>
> Thanks for working on accessibility.  I feel really rotten about 
> complaining about the bugs without putting in effort into debugging.
> However, my boss is all over me at the moment to get another project 
> back on schedule.  I'm sure you know what that's like.
>
> However, over the next year, I promise to find some time to nail a bug 
> or two, like the crash in speech dispatcher.  In the meantime, we 
> should probably set expectations for users, and let them know it will 
> be a while before Orca is working in a stable manner in the latest 
> Ubuntu.  It's an unfortunate situation, but blind users are simply not 
> able to chip in and fix things when accessibility is broken, so it 
> will be up to the very few of us interested in accessibility who still 
> have decent vision to pull it off.
>
> Best regards,
> Bill
>
> On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 5:59 PM, Luke Yelavich <themuso at ubuntu.com> 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
>>
>> --
>> Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list
>> Ubuntu-accessibility at lists.ubuntu.com
>> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
>>
>

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