Re: [orca-list] FW: Orca - suggestions for the future!

["David E. Price" <deprice cs utah edu>]

Hi,

Just a couple of thoughts about contacting companies/software 
development groups regarding accessibility.

First and foremost, make it easy for them. If you are writing to someone 
requesting that they make their 
software/hardware/components/tools/widgets/etc. more accessible, you 
should provide them with links to information that they can use to learn 
how to make their product more accessible. I believe it was within the 
last year that Will posted a list of these links to this mailing list. I 
have a bunch of code to get working by Monday night, so I don't have 
time at the moment to dig through the archives to find the list of 
links. But, if no one can get it done by Tuesday, I'll take a look then.

The specifics of this second point are related to the U.S., but there 
may be similar laws in other countries. If you are requesting that an 
organization make access a priority, and that organization produces 
something that might be used/purchased by the U.S. government, then 
there is a provision in U.S. law that can be used as an incentive. It is 
known colloquially as Section 508. Section 508 requires that any IT 
software or equipment purchased by or used by the U.S. government be 
accessible (http://www.section508.gov). I strongly recommend that you 
not use Section 508 as a threat--use it as an incentive. If you bring up 
Section 508 in a message you are sending, explain that you are 
requesting that they make their product accessible and here is another 
good reason they do so--making it accessible allows their product to be 
acquired/used by the U.S. government. Companies love to get contracts 
with the U.S. government and people who work on open source projects 
like to see their work utilized. Discarding the potential market/user 
population of the hundreds of thousands of U.S. government employees is 
something most organizations don't want to contemplate.

Admittedly, the U.S. government enforces Section 508 at its convenience. 
For instance, the U.S. government has been purchasing vast numbers of 
Blackberries over the years, and they have been inaccessible until very 
recently. So, the cynic in me believes that this law was never enforced 
in this case because those who were to enforce it didn't want to give up 
their Blackberries.

While I believe that those who worked for Sun Microsystems on Orca truly 
believed in an open-source screen reader (certainly Will has been 
developing access technology for decades), the cynic in me believes that 
Sun invested the money in the Orca project because they needed to make 
Solaris accessible and Gnopernicus failed to be completely developed. 
(Will, I apologize if this offends you, but it is what I believe, given 
conversations I had with folks from Sun back when they were relying on 
Gnopernicus for access.) I cite this case because it shows, I believe, 
the power of incentive that Section 508 can bring to the situation.

I need to get back to work, but I just wanted to throw these ideas into 
the discussion.

dave


On 02/06/2010 03:57 PM, Jason White wrote:
> Anthony Sales<tony sales rncb ac uk>  wrote:
>    
> > This is what I am going to do:
> >      
> [...]
>    
> > Contact Canonical and inform them of Willie's availablility  and skills
> >      
> Anyone with contacts in Red Hat, Novell, the Linux Foundation or other
> relevant organizations might wish to raise the matter of supporting
> accessibility and Orca as well by funding development and, especially,
> employing developers to work on it.
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
> The manual is at http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
> The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
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>