(In)Accessibility of Unity in current Precise

[Nolan Darilek]

On 03/06/2012 09:50 AM, Charlie Kravetz wrote:
> Much as I hate to say it, this is what I have fought for at UDS for 
> quite a while now. Every 6 months, the rhetoric is the same. 
> "Accessibility is very important. We will make sure it can be tested 
> during the Alpha testing stages! We can not have a11y broken for the 
> cycle, and expect it to work at release." Unfortunately, talk is still 
> much cheaper than action.


This is why I'm *angry*. Not just annoyed, but seriously angry. I see 
this from Google, Microsoft, Canonical and to a lesser extent Apple.

So how do we change this? I'd have hoped that posting to this list would 
be enough, but it seems like it's the place where accessibility issues 
go to die, ignored by the mainstream community.

Think I might try posting something in the brainstorm question-asking 
system, whatever it's called. Then change.org. This is so incredibly 
disappointing and unfortunate.

Also unfortunate is how halfway through every do-release-upgrade I've 
ever done, speech changes from English to some non-English language, and 
even though the computer is still running, I can't finish the upgrade. I 
have a screen session running and an ssh server up, but my access point 
seems to be flaking out and I can't connect to finish the upgrade--that, 
or something in the upgrade broke wifi. I might be more forgiving of 
that if I was upgrading to a working system, but it looks like I won't be.

I get that for some this is a passionate volunteer effort, but I am a 
developer who uses his Ubuntu system exclusively for work and play. This 
is not just an annoyance. Rather, it is the system I use to have fun and 
pay my bills slipping further and further out-of-date with the 
mainstream. I am very seriously wondering if Windows or OS X might 
represent the only upgrade path I'll ever have available to me. At the 
very least, I could be productively receiving accessibility upgrades at 
a pace equivalent to what I do on Ubuntu, once every year or year and a 
half.