Re: [orca-list] Orca out of the box

["Isaac Porat" <isaac porat me uk>]

Hello Arki and all

 

As this issue is related to Orca I reply to this thread but as the mailing list  is dedicated mainly to Orca will not follow this further beyond  this message.

 

Firstly Arki, I am not criticizing yourself or Luke I am sure you both are committed to the accessibility cause.

Unfortunately, anybody who follows the accessibility scene will be aware that accessibility within Ubuntu is only a part time effort and resulted now with completely speech broken Karmic distro certainly for the typical  user who just want Orca and accessibility  to work rather than struggle with configuration files, it does not work reliably for most geeks either.

Accessibility is not a glamorous field for developers to work in for free.  We have seen on this list a number of offers over time as far as I am aware very few have gone beyond good intentions; sadly this situation is not likely to change.

 

Orca made huge steps forward in recent times but this progress is held now in this case by poor audio and speech infrastructure downstream. Canonical made fantastic job in making Linux for the first time accessible to the masses on their desktop by making everything working out of the box with minimal configuration and having to understand the nuts and bolts of Linux,

unfortunately this does not extend to accessibility with Karmic (the underlying problems are there since the switch to PulseAudio  over a year ago so it is not simply regression) and until Management are committed to follow their bold accessibility statement on the web with action I am afraid nothing will happen. 

   I know that there are geeks on this list who can build their system from scratch and optimize it to work with Orca and the best that accessibility has to offer but this will not bring free accessibility to the masses. 

 

Regards

Isaac