[orca-list] VINUX-SUPPORT: RE: Ubuntu Unity Desktop to go to Mir and QT

[Luke Yelavich]

On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 01:33:34PM EST, Alex Midence wrote:
> Also, for the record, I fully recognize and appreciate all the hard
> work of the developers of the Ubuntu community who freely give of
> their time to make things accessible.  However, it was disappointing
> to finally have gotten a very accessible port of Unity in 12.04 only
> to be told that we were back to poor a11y in other versions of the
> distro for at the very least 2 full years.

For the record, I was disappointed as well. I expressed my desire for Unity to stick with using Qt at the time, given the accessibility advantages it brought for one, and the fact that it would have made maintaining unity easier as the nux GUI toolkit wouldn't also need to be maintained, and Qt is well established etc.

I am the only developer working for Canonical who spends at least some of the time working on accessibility issues. I say some of the time, because I do have other duties, in fact the primary reason why I was hired was not to work exclusively on accessibility, although the powers that be are ok with me doing so.

Having said that, my big focus for the next 10-12 months will almost exclusively be getting Qt5, Mir, and Unity as accessible an environment as one person can possibly manage. Qt5 helps somewhat, but the specific parts of Qt that are being used for the new Unity still have some rough spots when it comes to accessibility, and there is also the changing graphics stack and everythign that goes with it to deal with.

Given these changes, and given I am the only person who is likely going to be working on all of this, I cannot really promise anything, given the work that is required, and given the time and resources, or possibly lack there of, available to do so. I do really appreciate that you all want regularly updated, accessible distro releases that have the latest accessibility crack, but please keep in mind just how many of us in the wider *nix accessibility community there are, and also keep in mind how many of us are involved with some form of active development in the area, and if you want to dig deeper, think about the number of us working on GUI desktop accessibility of some kind.

I try to take the approach of under promising, and at least delivering, and if I can over deliver, than thats great.

In the meantime, there is the Ubuntu GNOME remix, with GNOME shell, wich does work quite well these days. I'll do my best to try and fix any issues people may notice with that release, given the accessibility tools and infrastructure are shared with GNOME and Unity.

Thanks, and I really appreciate your understanding, and support.

Luke