Re: Debian specific accessibility issues

[Jason White <jasonw ariel its unimelb edu au>]

On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Bill Haneman wrote:

>
> I'd be grateful for anything that distros or other maintainers can do to
> help expedite getting these patches into gnome cvs.

This raises the question of what projects such as Gnome should be doing to
ensure that accessibility-related improvements are expeditiously and
properly maintained and integrated. I'm not acquainted with the
organizational structure of the Gnome project, but I assume there is a
process whereby code is reviewed before it is committed to cvs.

Perhaps someone involved with accessibility should be given cvs write
access and authority to review and commit accessibility-related changes.

Failing this, would there be a straightforward way of generating patches
that just contain the accessibility-related changes, which distributors
could be encouraged to apply? The ideal would be to use a revision control
system that tracks Gnome cvs, contains the accessibility-relevant fixes
and can generate patches without manual intervention. Another project I am
familiar with, namely the xfs file system for Linux, effectively did this
for quite a long time by maintaining a kernel tree in cvs and regularly
generating patches that were uploaded to an ftp server. The problem was
that some manual effort was needed to create the patch sets, and of course
we want developers to concentrate on getting work done rather than
having to compensate for delays in the process attributable to project
organization.

Also, I hope the OpenSolaris project, which is now reportedly in the
process of defining its organizational structure, leads by example in
according priority to accessibility and internationalization, while
establishing a government model which enables improvements to be properly
reviewed and efficiently integrated.