Re: [orca-list] Trying Quantal Quetsal Alpha 3

[Kyle <kyle4jesus gmail com>]

According to Albert Sten-Clanton:
> It occurs to me that too much standardization (however much you may think
> that is) can take much of the freedom out of free software.  Closed source
> may not be the issue, but narrowing too much the the space within which to
> change source code very well could be.  Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but
> it looks to me as if a high level of standardization will give a great deal
> of power to a single entity or group, and the rest of us will be left mostly
> out in the cold void of space unless we go along with that entity's changing
> notions, accessibility usually dragging behind.


Open standards are normally a good thing, but yes, too much 
standardization can indeed cause a single entity to gain too much 
control of the specification. Standardization is good as long as no 
single body has control of the standard.

> (I'll have to do it when I move to Fedora 17 and a new box, but I'm sure not looking forward to
> relearning gnome, as it seems I must.)

GNOME isn't a difficult environment to learn. I am using it now from a 
flash drive on a low-memory box. I am glad to move my e-mail off the 
phone sometimes and read it on the little old box we still have around 
here, and I'm very happy to be able to use the Linux environment I am 
most comfortable with rather than the Windows XP that is the only other 
OS that will run on this box.

Maybe it would be better for a dozen new screen readers to develop, each
especially suited for a particular application or group of applications,
than to try to get one screen reader to work with everything, which I
suspect is difficult or impossible.  Be clear that this is not a comment on
Orca itself, and especially not on the great amount of work that has gone
into it and continues to.  It's a tentative comment on the nature of the
software beast.  I welcome any thoughts on that.

Thanks to AT-SPI2 and DBus, this problem is a bit less impossible than 
it originally seemed. KDE accessibility will improve greatly over the 
next year, and LXDE and I believe XFCE also have been able to benefit 
from this. However, as choice is *always* good, multiple screen readers 
could be beneficial. With the AT-SPI developments and accessibility 
plugins for QT and possibly other graphical toolkits moving forward, I'm 
not sure that specialization is necessary, but just as a larger 
community of Orca users and developers make it better and easier to use, 
multiple screen readers along with their developers and user communities 
may be able to benefit from each other. I can see where a specific 
screen reader for each desktop environment that doesn't have to depend 
on the complexities of AT-SPI and DBus could be good, but I can also see 
the advantages of making everything work together, not the least of 
which is our ability to run QT applications on GNOME, and in the future, 
being able to run GTK-based applications in KDE without having to drag 
in a whole new set of dependencies only related to accessibility.
~Kyle