Re: [orca-list] Problems with GNOME and admin applications

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Orca is indeed a screen reader for GNOME.  We GNOME folks try to ensure 
that the out-of-the-box experience for GNOME is compelling for 
accessibility.

GNOME is large, however, and there can be integration problems that are 
not caught soon enough.  There were some unfortunate changes that snuck 
into the GNOME 2.24 release very late in the cycle that broke a11y for 
example.  I suspect I was less pleased about this than most folks were. 
 I've also been working hard to try to make these things easier to 
catch, and the creation of the GNOME testing project is evidence of that.

In addition, once the GNOME source code leaves the hands of GNOME, it 
goes to the hands of the operating system distributions.  The process of 
developing a distribution often includes what we call "downstream 
changes", which is where the operating system distribution makes changes 
to the code and/or integrating things in a special way.  These are out 
of our control.  If distributions do not test accessibility integration 
with the same diligence as we do with OpenSolaris, they may 
inadvertently break accessibility.  Even with constant testing, things 
can break in development releases.  With OpenSolaris, however, we view 
accessibility breakage as a show stopper regression that needs to be 
fixed as soon as possible.

The Orca team is a small team, and we need to use our resources 
efficiently.  Part of this efficiency involves making the choice to not 
serve as the accessibility integrator for every possible operating 
system distribution on the planet.  In my opinion, proper accessibility 
integration is the responsibility of the operating system distribution. 
 With my GNOME accessibility lead hat on, I'm happy to help 
distributions if they have questions and demonstrate they are acting 
responsibly. I'm not going to do their work for them, however, nor am I 
going to babysit, test, and debug every development release they spit 
out.  That doesn't scale well.  Instead, my top three priorities are: 1) 
GNOME accessibility works from the GNOME perspective, 2) non-GNOME 
things like Firefox and OpenOffice work with GNOME accessibility, and 3) 
OpenSolaris accessibility works.  My employer, Sun Microsystems, 
sponsors OpenSolaris and GNOME accessibility and is the bulk of the 
reason open source accessibility solutions are available for free.

Finally, it is your choice whether or not you want to work with a 
distribution that is responsive to your needs and behaves responsibly. 
It is also your choice to work with development releases or stick to 
stable releases. Having said that, we greatly appreciate the patience 
demonstrated by people who understand that development releases are 
development releases.  We also appreciate that they take the time to 
write constructive and informative bug reports when they discover 
issues.  It's very helpful and allows us to catch things before they are 
officially released.  With this, they become part of the solution, and 
that's how open source works.

I hope this clarifies things,

Will

Hermann wrote:
> am Di 17. Mär 2009 um 20:13:17 schrieb Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>:
> [...]
> > What I meant to write was that it works fine for me on OpenSolaris  
> > 2008.11.  We test this stuff and work to get it right.
> >
> > So, it might be an integration issue with GRML.  I'd recommend that if  
> > one cares about a11y integration, they work with a distribution that  
> > cares about getting it right.  But, if they are stuck with GRML for some  
> > reason or another, then they might need to spend their energy providing  
> > constructive, polite, and helpful feedback to the GRML folks.
> The guy who confirmed my observations does notuse GRML. So it must be
> a Gnome problem.
> And BTW: Which OS' integrate a11y right besides Ubuntu?
> I always thought that Orca's a screen reader for Gnome, not for Ubuntu
> only.
> One difference to Ubuntu is the fact that you don't need that "sudo"
> workaround, because GRML (and I think Lenny too) asks you to set up a
> root account during installation.
> So I open a Gnome terminal and type:
> su
> After providing my root password, I can use root admin tools without
> the need of the sudo command. And this used to work after the first
> install of the Gnome-desktop-environment; so something must have gone
> wrong while upgrading to Gnome 2.24. But this is speculation.
> Hermann