Re: gnome, orca and enterprise linux

[Peter Korn <Peter Korn Sun COM>]

Hi Don,

> Hi all,
>
> I have posted much of this to the orca-list so my appologies for the cross-posting.
>
> My situation is that I am needing to run oracle enterprise linus 5.0.01 (a derrivative of rhel 5.0).
> It coms with orca-1.0-2.fc6, and associated packages.
>
> All was fine when I installed the o/s. However, I wanted to make a couple of small changes like adding braille support, and adding the ttsynth speech synthesizer.
>
> ...  
>
> My desire is to get an environment stable enough to perform accessibility testing of Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle database management tools.  Oracle would prefer that I use enterprise linux rather than one of the more "accessible" flavors like ubuntu, fedora, or debian.
>
> Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Separate from any specific suggestions you may get as to the minimum set 
of packages to update to make this all work, I'd like to share with you 
a basic observation - one we've struggled with at Sun in our decisions 
about when and how to fold things like Orca into our Solaris releases.

Accessibility improvements are happening at a *very* rapid pace, and 
they are doing so in the latest GNOME releases, on the latest OS 
releases (on top of the latest Linux kernels, latest Solaris builds).  
Insisting on using the latest in accessibility on top of a slow-moving, 
conservative "enterprise" edition is always going to be a huge pain, and 
always going to involve hard-to-track-down bugs.

My strong recommendation is to test your apps for full accessibility 
with the full support for the latest accessibility features on the 
non-enterprise editions of UNIX variants - e.g. on Ubuntu or Fedora or 
OpenSolaris (and perhaps best, a bit on all three).  Then go back and 
make sure that the accessibility support (whatever it is) in the 
"slow-moving and conservative" enterprise editions also work, so you 
know you are supporting the less functional accessibility that is being 
sold in the enterprise variants.  In that way, you will know that you 
will work with what is supported today in the enterprise (with it's less 
feature-full accessibility), as well as the latest in accessibility that 
will become part of tomorrow's enterprise UNIX OS releases.

Perhaps this is an error on my part, but I frankly think an organization 
is more likely to give a user with a disability a copy of 
Ubuntu/Fedora/OpenSolaris rather than attempt to support some odd 
mixture of old and new platform libraries in an edition of an 
"enterprise" UNIX.  It'll be much less headache and hassle.  And of 
course, for users who don't need the newer features (e.g .a user for 
whom a large print theme is all they need for their vision impairment), 
enterprise editions are largely there and can be used "directly, out of 
the box".


Regards,

Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.