Re: progress of Gnopernicus

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Hi Kenny, and all.

We know there are problems with gnopernicus - but that doesn't mean we 
know what they all are, or which ones are the most important to users.  
Also, not all bugs are present in the versions that we (gnopernicus and 
accessibility teams) are testing.

Bear in mind that gnopernicus hasn't actually ever "officially released" 
a version - you are using software that's under active development, on 
an unstable branch.  So it's really a very different situation from 
commercial offerings with supported releases - we're just not there 
yet.  But we really need good quality feedback from early adopters and 
testers like yourself - and that's the very important role you are 
playing now.

When you build software from CVS HEAD, particularly when you are on an 
"unstable branch" of GNOME, things do break, sometimes badly.  If you 
want software that's stable, you'll need to stick to stable branches.  
However, at the moment the previous 'stable' branch of GNOME and 
gnopernicus are substantially less that what you'd need to get work done 
as a user.  We do think that the GNOME 2.6 release of gnopernicus and 
GNOME itself will be substantially better than 2.4 from an accessibility 
standpoint, but I suspect that "version 1.0" of gnopernicus (that is, 
the first version which the gnopernicus team feels is ready to announce 
as an 'official release') will be a little further down the road from 
there (2.6 release of GNOME is scheduled for March 8).

Also, note that the currently available versions of Mozilla are lacking 
significant support, as some users have already noted.  We are trying to 
work closely with the Mozilla folks to get the accessibility features 
out there, but again, things are still in the development and test phase 
at the moment and no claims are being made about "product readiness" of 
the currently existing builds.

I do sincerely appreciate the tremendous effort that many of you on the 
list continue to make in order to help us achieve a fully accessible, 
freely available desktop.  I hope you'll hang in there for the coming 
months as we continue to improve, and keep us posted on both problems 
and solutions as you find them.  As for bugzilla, we rely very heavily 
on it; basically if a bug isn't in bugzilla, it isn't being worked on.  
Perhaps those on the list who are able to use bugzilla fairly 
effectively can post a textual bug form so that we can integrate bug 
information from those without good access to bugzilla. 

best regards,

Bill

> Hi.  I don't have bug numbers.  Just the fact you guys were willing to
> release a version of Gnopernicus with broken flat review.  Gnopernicus
> is the only access technology 	I've found that realeases a new version
> that gives less access than the previous one.
> In case you've forgoten, flat review is the only chance you have to get
> anything useful from the help system of Gnome applications.  That
> includes Gnopernicus.  How do you expect to get feedback from blind
> people when there is no way to find out how to use the apps?
>
>          Kenny