Re: Proposal to add Orca to GNOME 2.16

["Luis Villa" <luis villa gmail com>]

On 4/10/06, Willie Walker <William Walker sun com> wrote:
> Hi Luis:
>
> As with gpdf/evince and galeon/epiphany and others, Orca and Gnopernicus
> provide the same high level reason for being, and you typically would
> use one or the other.  As the lead for Orca and friends of the
> Gnopernicus team, however, it find it hard for me to make an unbiased
> comparison between Orca and Gnopernicus.  What I would feel very
> comfortable saying is that two approaches to screen reading are
> different, and giving people with disabilities a choice of which to use
> is a good thing.

So, in those cases, we have tended to prefer that the experts involved
pick one, so that (for example) the translation teams and QA teams
spend their time and effort improving the 'best of breed' app, instead
of doing both. You'll note that is what we did with gpdf/evince (the
lead gpdf hacker now hacks on evince, I believe) and what we did with
galeon/epiphany (galeon is now folding itself into epiphany, though I
have no idea how far along this is.)

This is not necessarily the best procedure- it certainly means we have
to pick a winner/loser (which sucks), and means we typically have to
do it prematurely (even worse.) And I'm sure in the a11y case, this is
even worse, since most feature needs are non-negotiable. But this
approach does reduce duplication of effort from outsiders (good for
us), focuses core developers on one tool (usually good for us), and
gives clear signals to our users about what they should typically use
(which is good for them).

So... dunno. We've always made it a fairly strict rule to keep apps
that have substantial duplication out of the desktop. This might be
the right time to break that rule, or throw it out altogether and
consider alternatives, like certification. I think on balance, though,
there are some very good reasons for it and we'd do well not to toss
it lightly just because we're faced with a difficult choice that the
experts appear reluctant to do for us.

Luis

> On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 16:10 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> > Willie-
> > This sounds awesome. How does it fit with gnopernicus? Should we
> > retire gnopernicus from the release, or do they play nicely together,
> > or...? (Forgive me if this has been discussed before and I missed it.)
> >
> > Luis
> >
> > On 4/10/06, Willie Walker <William Walker sun com> wrote:
> > > Hi:
> > >
> > > I'm writing this to propose that Orca becomes an official module of
> > > GNOME 2.16.
> > >
> > > Orca is a scriptable, extensible, AT-SPI-based screen reader that
> > > provides access to the graphical desktop for people with visual
> > > impairments.  Orca has been part of the GNOME CVS repository for over
> > > two years, and has undergone a substantial overhaul in the past 10
> > > months, with blind people being involved in the design each step of the
> > > way.
> > >
> > > The Orca team recently "outed" Orca at CSUN '06, which is the California
> > > State University Northridge, Center on Disabilities, Annual
> > > International Conference on Technology and Persons with Disabilities.
> > > The response to Orca at CSUN was outstanding, and the activity and
> > > comments on the orca-list gnome org (archives at
> > > http://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/) have been very positive.
> > >
> > > More information on Orca can be found here:
> > >
> > > http://www.gnome.org/projects/orca/
> > > http://live.gnome.org/Orca
> > >
> > > Sincerely,
> > >
> > > Willie Walker,
> > > Project Lead, Orca
> > >
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > desktop-devel-list mailing list
> > > desktop-devel-list gnome org
> > > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
> > >
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