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Re: [orca-list] Possibly Forking Gnome 2

Hi Alex,

That's my concern as well. While I could in theory contact whoever is
in charge of Mate I just don't know how receptive they'd be to
maintaining accessibility long term. Especially, the kind of
commitment and long term development I have in mind in terms of
getting 100% access to all apps, features, and adding other assistive
technologies to the desktop like voice recognition for those with
motor impairments. In my experience most sighted developers just don't
understand what we need in terms of accessibility. Most are of the
opinion they can just patch it and forget it, but true accessibility
doesn't work that way. Accessibility has to be in the design from the
very beginning and it has to be a primary design goal, or it just
doesn't achieve 100% access. Sadly though we have seen all too many
times how mainstream developers handle accessibility. As soon as
Oricle took over Sun they canned Willy Walker who was a primary
contributer to Gnome and Orca accessibility. It was a pretty clear
statement to me what their intentions are in continuing funding and
supporting the future of Gnome accessibility. I think we need is a new
project leader who can't be canned, and someone who knows exactly what
accessibility means to blind and other disabled computer users. That's
why I am thinking of appointing myself that position.

I'm totally blind, and have been using assistive technologies for
roughly 15 years. I am a skilled C/C++ developer, and have experience
with open source development tools. About the only thing I don't know,
which I can learn, is all the ins and outs of the Gnome source, and
haven't explored the relationship between the assistive APIs and
Gnome. So certainly if I do this I'd have to read quite a few design
docs and API documentation before forking the Gnome desktop, but it
certainly could be done. I certainly have the time and programming
experience to do something like this though.

Cheers!




On 9/5/11, Alex H. <linuxx64 bashsh gmail com> wrote:

Hi,

While I can see contacting whoever's in charge of Mate and seeing if
they'll care more about a11y, they might not be willing/understand
thoroughly what the deal is. At this point, I say if you've got the
resources and can devote some time to it, Do it. Others may jump on
board and finally, we'd have a up-to-date, streamlined and fully
accessible desktop. Still, it wouldn't hurt to contact the Mate devs
and see what they have planned, maybe you won't have to double the
effort and possibly risk getting tired of developing your own fork.
This is usually what happens to good forks, people get sick of working
on them for whatever reason, and they die. I just hope whatever
happens, it's not that. I really don't like GNOME3 either, and Unity
is just a mess IMHO. GNOME2 worked fine, but they went and fixed it
anyway.

Alex

On 9/5/11, Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com> wrote:

Hi Storm,

Yeah, I heard something about the Mate fork, but I've got personal
reasons of my own for creating my own fork of Gnome 2. For one thing I
feel if I personally take charge of a new fork I can insure and
maintain maximum accessibility as that will be first and foremost on
my list of things to do where a sighted dev might not be too concerned
about that. The other reason is that I personally have some creative
ideas where to take the Gnome desktop, ideas for a new sweet of
accessible apps, and want to give the Gnome 2 desktop a personal make
over. In other words I want to do more than just fork it I want to use
Gnome 2 as the basis of a new desktop that will compete with Gnome 3
and KDE. This is the power of an open source project like Gnome in the
first place.

I can take a stable desktop environment like Gnome 2, fork it, and
then modify it to suit my needs. I can rename it, add new features,
improve accessibility, customize it, and release my desktop
environment as an alternative to the existing desktops. In short, the
power of open source is the freedom to customize an existing software
product and rerelease it to the open source community as a new
software product. I think that's worth doing with Gnome 2. Especially,
if I actually carry out some of my ideas for the make over.

Cheers!


On 9/5/11, Storm Dragon <stormdragon2976 gmail com> wrote:

Hi,
Gnome2 has already been forked. The project is called gnome mate. It
would be cool if someone got in to it in the early days and kept up with
the accessibility side of things. So this might be exactly what you are
looking for.
HTH
Storm
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DragonForce



On Mon, 2011-09-05 at 15:57 -0400, Thomas Ward wrote:


Hi everyone,

I thought I'd write the list, and see what your opinions are regarding
an idea I've had for a while now. Also I'd like to get some input from
the Orca dev's themselves as long term this would effect Orca and
desktop accessibility if I decided to go through with it.

Basically, it goes like this. Recently I installed Arch Linux on a
test computer, got Gnome 3 up and running, and to be honest about it
I'm very disappointed in the direction Gnome is going. I really don't
like Gnome 3 at all, and it feels like a lot of things that were
working just fine in Gnome 2 is now broken or changed in Gnome 3. From
what I have read on list I gather I'm not the only one who is less
than satisfied with the way the Gnome project is headed in 3.x.

The problem is, for a blind Linux user like myself, there really isn't
any good alternatives. KDE access is still rather up in the air at the
moment and Xfce is slowly getting there. However, there is no single
desktop out there that compares with Gnome 2 in my opinion. For that
reason I've been strongly considering just doing what open source is
good for and fork the project.

I could in theory just grab the latest Gnome 2.32 source, officially
fork it into an alternative to Gnome 3, customize it, and release it
as a new desktop environment, and then upgrade it manually from there.
However, before I do something that major I'd like to see what issues
there might be with Orca compatibility. I realise that Orca is
officially a part of the Gnome project, and therefore I would expect
development to follow the main branch of the desktop. Although, there
is an xdesktop version now would that continue for some time to come,
or would I also have to fork Orca in order to maintain backwards
compatibility with essentially a custom Gnome 2.x desktop environment?
Any thoughts, suggestions, or comments?

Thanks.
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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
Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp
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