Re: getting orca included in gnome 2.16

[Henrik Nilsen Omma <henrik ubuntu com>]

Peter Korn wrote:
> It has proven very useful to the GNOME accessibility project - and to 
> advancing the support for assistive technologies and the 
> implementation of ATK and AT-SPI - to have a screen reader, screen 
> magnifier, and on-screen keyboard included as a formal part of GNOME.  
> By 'blessing' AT in these categories, it has brought far greater 
> awareness of AT to GNOME developers & UNIX distributions, and has led 
> to a lot of compatibility testing, bug finding, and bug fixing.
We have seen the effects of this esp. in the last release cycle when we 
have now managed to get a range of accessibility tools into the default 
install and running from the Live CD. Other developers, such as those 
specialising in the Live CD, the installer and the Gnome desktop have 
taken an interest and are helping us solve the problems. For our next 
development cycle we now have several specifications on the main 
development track (see: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility/Specs)

I think custom distributions like Oralux can focus on adding as much 
assistive technology as possible to a single CD and let the user explore 
it all. For a main stream distro though, I think we need to make choices 
about what we consider to be most suitable at this time, and leave the 
rest as options. Picking favourites is actually an important part of 
what we do because it allows us to focus our efforts better on providing 
support and fixes on those packages.

- Henrik