Re: [orca-list] Feedback for Microsoft [was "Re: favorite linux distros."]

[Krishnakant Mane <krmane gmail com>]

My take on this is simple.
When there is freedom, it is just the mindset that matters when it comes 
to contributing code, documentation, testing or even training.
I am happy to run an organization which does at laest training and testing.
And as far as insentives are concerned, there are a lot at least here in 
India, our state governments fund such initiatives with no second thought.
The issue however is that given this digital freedom, people some times 
tend to fork and work differently, so the necessary synergy we need to 
attain critical mass is not acieved.
However I would still go with some degree of sacrifise, given the 
advantages of GNU/Linux over proprietary software.
There is always this potential of growth and I see it has gathered 
momentum off late.
Orca seems to be at it's best so far and gnome 3.14 is doing great in 
accessibility.
So it is hardly unusable, except some issues we have to grapple with 
some times.
Happy hacking.
Krishnakant.
On 12/26/2014 04:38 AM, Jason White wrote:
> Alex Midence <alex midence gmail com> wrote:
> > Don't sweat it. It certainly didn't bother me. It is absolutely not the very
> > first and probably will not be the very last off-topic message to be posted
> > to this list.
> True. Having now used Linux (console, GNOME etc.), Microsoft Winodws 7 with
> MS-Office, OS X 10.10, Android 4.3 and iOS 8, in other words most of the major
> operating systems currently in use, I am in  a position to make comparisons.
>
> I think GNOME 3 accessibility (and, in addition, Firefox accessibility with
> Orca, thanks to Joanie's excellent work) have imrpoved considerably in the
> past year. Still needed, though, is rigorous quality control before releases -
> the bug count remains unacceptably high, and proprietary operating systems
> have the edge in relation to GUI accessibility. Linux is unsurpassed at the
> console, however, and in environments such as Emacs. If several large Linux
> distributions were to commit resources and funding to accessibility-related
> work, I think we could see the rough edges smoothed rather rapidly.
> Unfortunately, regulations in this area don't seem to be creating an incentive
> for them to combine and devote larger resources to this area. Alternatively,
> if we had a sizable community of people who found bugs, fixed them and
> submitted patches, improvements would occur more rapidly, but again there
> would be the problem of quality control prior to release. Users don't welcome
> regressions.
>
> Resources aren't always decisive, of course. I expected Microsoft Winodws to
> be much more reliable than it has so far proven to be, given the large amounts
> of money involved and the influence of regulations in a number of countries,
> quite aside from Microsoft's long-standing involvement in accessibility. I may
> simply have been unlucky enough to encounter certain bugs, but on the other
> hand, I haven't done anything out of the ordinary in that environment.
>
> Apple Accessibility tends to be reliably and consistently implemented, for the
> most part, but for various reasons I'm not gravitating to a Mac as my primary
> enviornment at home or at work.
>
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