Re: Gnome and support for the visually impaired

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Samuel Thibault wrote:

> ...
>
>
> They say "open source is not accessible", which is wrong, but what is
> true is "open source is not yet really accessible". 
I do not agree with this assessment. 

The vast majority of problems which have been raised on this list has 
undergone a shift in recent months; most problems are now configuration 
related problems.  This indicates a lack of testing by integrators and 
distros.  The Sun internal Linux builds are consistently passing a 
battery of sanity tests now, so there is no fundamental reason why other 
distros cannot have a reasonable level of base accessibility now.  
However this requires committment to testing, education of testers and 
integrators.  It also may mean integrating a Sun-mozilla instead of, or 
alongside, Firefox, etc.  To say that this cannot be done today is wrong 
in my view.  It is true that the end user experience may not be as good 
as JAWS+Windows for many users, but it is now possible to get useful 
work done on the accessible free desktop, once the pieces are properly 
strung together.

regards

Bill

> What we can yet
> point out is that "open source cannot but get more and more accessible,
> even more than proprietary software".
>
> But immediate switching every administrative employee to open source
> is not possible right now. Is there a precise expected date for their
> migration?
>
> Regards,
> Samuel