Re: accessible distros

[Thomas Ward <tward1978 earthlink net>]

Hi.
Jason White wrote:

As long as the access software you need has been packaged for your chosen
distribution, it doesn't matter much which you select from the point of view
of accessibility.


That is true, but right now it seams Fedora Core 5 and Ubuntu 6.06 are on the leading edge of accesssibility features and software. Both come with Gnome 2.14, and other distributions seam to be gnome 2.12 or less.

Also, the Debian
packaging system (used in both Debian and Ubuntu) allows you to make major
upgrades without re-installing the operating system, which is a real advantage
over, for example, Fedora Core.

Yes, apt is a powerful upgrade and removal tool. Coming from a Fedora/Red Hat background apt-get and synaptic were a nice suprise. It makes getting updates for accessibility quick and easy. 
It is very user friendly, and does a nice job of getting just what you need and not anything you don't.

(As I understand it, Fedora systems can be
upgraded without a re-install but it isn't officially supported, unless that
has changed recently).

Well, there is yum in Fedora which is something like apt-get. It will do about the same thing, but I have no idea if it is officially supported or not.

There are more packages available, at better quality, in Ubuntu and Debian as
well.

I'm not sure I can fully agree with that statement. Fedora has a huge range of packages which work well together out of the box. It's gnome accessibility is pretty good as it stands now in 5.