Re: [orca-list] Orca 2.22.0 a bad regression

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 07:55:20AM -0700, Steve Holmes wrote:
> One thing I might add in support of attending conferences, conventions
> and the like, is this is yet another opportunity for evangelizing the
> product.  We so often hear the complaint that not many blind folks use
> Linux and they just glum on to Windows and the expensive screen
> readers because they don't know, nor they willing to learn the
> alternatives such as linux and now some gnome accessibility.  

I agree that lack of awareness is a major problem. If I hadn't received a Unix
shell account as a first-year university student who was trying to access the
Internet, I might never have discovered Unix, then later moved on to Linux
after realizing how good the technology was in comparison with the
alternatives.

Equally though, I think many in the free and open-source software community
are unaware, in any detail, of how speech and braille interfaces to Linux
work, and what software is available. Samuel Thibault recently gave a
presentation at the European free software developers' conference, audio of
which is available for download to those of us who weren't able to attend. In
January, I gave a presentation describing refreshable braille, speech
synthesis and the various access solutions available for Linux at the
Linux.conf.au 2008 conference; audio and video of the presentation are
available at http://linux.conf.au/ linked to the conference program.

The real benefit of attending these conferences, though, lies not only in the
presentations (which were excellent at Linux.conf.au) but also in the time
spent in discussions with highly creative contributors to the Linux and free
software community.

As the number of tracking bugs shows, it is important that those writing the
components with which we interact be aware of the issues so that proper
development and testing practices can be put into place. Evidently, in the
Gnome community, this process is already underway, and the same holds for
Mozilla, OO.O and other projects.