Re: question about gnome

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On 2 Jan 2009, at 16:30, jonathan wrote:

> I am new to the list. I am a blind linux user and was wondering with
> gnome and the orca screen reader I have noticed with diffrent distro's
> that they will have orca set up to work and some distro's do not have
> orca setup. could gnome make sure that the orca screen reader is  
> working
> before diffrent distro's package gnome for their distro?

That's really up to individual distros, each of whom are entirely  
responsible for deciding whether to enable accessibility features in a  
default installation.  You'd have to ask each one individually about  
their decision.

(As I'm sure you're aware, though, many of the major distros do have a  
variant available that's tailored to accessible installation and  
usage, so things are somewhat better than they used to be.)

> if not could some one tell me if i could take the latest build of  
> gnome and make sure
> that orca is working and take out some of the programs that a blind  
> user
> would not need and then package it for diffrent distro's. thankyou for
> your time and help.

We've certainly discussed enabling accessibility features by default  
in stable GNOME releases, and I don't think anyone really disagrees  
that it's something we should aim for.  Unfortunately, certain  
accessibility features do cause some notable performance issues for  
people who don't use them, and until those are addressed, it's always  
been decided to make accessibility an opt-in rather than an opt-out  
feature by default.  Not ideal I know, but that's why things are the  
way they are today-- the good news is that GNOME accessibility seems  
to be attracting more attention (and developers) than ever these days,  
so people are working on those issues.

Cheeri,
Calum.

--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems