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Re: [orca-list] An Open Letter to Oracle on the Topic Of Accessibility

I have to say, in some ways regretfully, I am drawing the same conclusion. I say regretfully because with all the work done on opensolaris to make it accessible (I think Will did much of that from what I read), it was one of the best gnome systems for accessibility. 

Here are a few things leading to my conclusion:
* Some time ago I had reason to contact oracle about a piece of software from them. In that contact I commented on what accessibility issues I encountered and what could be done to make it a bit better for accessibility. The response wasn't great, the software in question was an opensource package (sqldeveloper) and for this reason it did not fall under the same support for accessibility as other oracle products. May be Orca is seen the same way, I tried to put this behind me when considering the orca decision though. * I personally wrote to oracle on the Monday following Joanie's original open letter. My contact mainly voiced concerns for how this will impact on unix accessibility in general, but pointing out that it could impact negatively on the accessibility of solaris (it is worth considering what might the business reasons be for doing something). I asked for some clarification on how oracle intends to proceed with the accessibility of solaris as I was considering learning more about it but not wanting to learn something which may become inaccessible to me. At this point I have received no response. This seems bad and I intend to chase them up on this in a week or so if I don't here anything. We may not get responses we want to hear but that would be better than no response. * As most of my learning of the solaris way would be done on opensolaris, I decided to post a question on both the indiana-discuss and accessibility-discuss lists asking if anyone knew what the future is. I had one response, I am not sure that it represented the actual intent on oracle and was probably a personal view, but no other response giving any clear idea where it may go.
As Joanie said in her open letter, you would hope oracle cares about its users, at the moment I feel they don't care about making there system usable by me, for that reason I will try and avoid their products where ever possible now, unless they prove my current feelings are wrong. What a contrast to the view I took on Sun's accessibility, which thanks to much of the gnome accessibility work, I approached with a favourable view. 

Michael Whapples
On 01/-10/-28163 08:59 PM, hackingKK wrote:

I have given up on Oracle.
They don't think blind people deserve an opportunity to use computers for their daily work. For them blind people (and perhaps other disabled people ) don't need any improvement in their employability or standard of life. Let's try and find out alternative options which can keep orca alive and going on. 

Happy hacking.
Krishnakant.

On Tuesday 23 February 2010 10:36 PM, Aaruni wrote:

Hi Joani, could you please give the url for the petitions?
Thanks,
Aruni.

On 08/02/2010, Steve Holmes<steve holmes88 gmail com>  wrote:

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This is an excellent open letter.  I could have never written anything
as elegant as this.  I've been away from my system since last night so
have a bit of catching up to do.  I have a blog that has been pretty
much dormant til now so this will give me some ideas to post about:).

On Sun, Feb 07, 2010 at 03:05:25PM -0500, Joanmarie Diggs wrote:

Hey again.

I wanted to thank those of you who left comments on my blog on this
topic, and I'd encourage those of you who have not but who care about
the future of GNOME accessibility in general, and Orca in particular, do 
the same. After all, I guarantee you that Oracle could care less about
me; it is my sincerest hope that they care about you, the user.

Also, for those of you with your own blogs who have written similar
entries on this topic, please do not be shy about "shameless self
promotion" in the form of adding a link to your entry in the comments of my blog. Alternatively, send me a link to what you've written so that I 
can point to it within my entry.
My hope is that what remains of this weekend continues to see voices of concern, in writing, in blogs and in comments. The next step would be to 
ensure that our collective voices get noticed by those who need to
notice them. :-)

Thanks again guys. Hopefully soon we'll be able to get back to the
business of actually working on accessibility, rather than trying to
prevent its demise.

--joanie

On Sun, 2010-02-07 at 11:14 -0500, Joanmarie Diggs wrote:

Hey guys.
For what it's worth, I just wrote a blog entry on Oracle's decision. "An 
Open Letter to Oracle on the Topic Of Accessibility" can be found at:
http://bit.ly/oracle-a11y

For the sake of convenience, here is the text of that entry:

Dear Oracle:
You don't know me, so please permit me a brief introduction: I'm Joanie. By day, I'm an assistive technology specialist working with individuals who are blind or visually impaired. By night, weekend, and holiday for almost four years now, I've been a GNOME community contributor working 
primarily on the Orca screen reader, a project led by Sun's
Accessibility Program Office.
Working with the engineers at Sun, both inside and outside of the APO, 
has been an honor for a variety of reasons, not least of which is our
shared common belief: Access isn't a privilege; it's a right. Towards
that end, Sun Microsystems strived to ensure that ALL users have access 
to software and information.

Does Oracle plan to do the same?
Sun Microsystems believed that these things shouldn't be denied to those 
who aren't employed, or who don't live in the "right" country, or who
don't speak the "right" language, or who cannot afford to purchase
thousands of dollars' worth of access technology.

What does Oracle believe?
Through its significant, ongoing contributions to the GNOME desktop, Sun Microsystems has made computer access possible for many individuals with 
disabilities, from all walks of life, all over the world.

Will Oracle embrace the opportunity to continue this important work?
My assumption was yes. In fact, I was feeling quite hopeful. After all, 
the past few years have been hard on Sun. But with Larry Ellison's
promise of increased investment in the Sun brand, and Oracle's strong
commitment to accessibility, things would finally be turning around: If one under-funded APO could accomplish everything that it has, what could 
the two combined and properly-funded APOs achieve? At the very least
we'd be able to finally get a handle on all of the accessibility
challenges facing GNOME 3.

I was wrong. :-(
Last week, Oracle laid off two more members of Sun's already-decimated APO. One of those let go happened to be both the Orca project lead and the GNOME Accessibility project lead, Willie Walker. I truly hope this was an oversight on Oracle's part, and one that will be rectified very 
soon. Because if it is not, and if no other company steps forward to
continue this work, the accessibility of the GNOME desktop will become the open source equivalent of an unfunded mandate, doomed ultimately to 
fail.
Oracle's decision threatens to leave many individuals with disabilities around the world without access to a modern desktop environment. I find 
that tragic.



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_______________________________________________
Orca-list mailing list
Orca-list gnome org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Netiquette Guidelines are at
http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions/NetiquetteGuidelines 
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org


_______________________________________________
Orca-list mailing list
Orca-list gnome org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html 
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Netiquette Guidelines are at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions/NetiquetteGuidelines 
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
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