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

Yes, I aplaud India for several iniciatives and programs I've read about.
There should probably be some mechanism built in to funding that rewards success and colaboration, and avoids 
wasting too many resources on redundent 
projects. I certainly do not have the exact answers as to what that could all look like, and what ever can be 
done will need tweaking and fine tuning 
based on experiences with and the results of existing programs.
India is a world leader in some good and interesting ways when it comes to technology. I'm not so sure about 
some of the other tech powers  however, 
China and the U.S .come to mind...lol
  That being said, even in the states there has been some contribution and buy-in from the gov in to FOS 
software.
I do also agree with you that there has been good and important work done of late in the realm of linux 
accessibility, but I'm not sure if there's much 
going on re the specific areas I mentioned in my last post.
There are certainly bright spots, e.g. a continued committment to providing an accessible product on the part 
of gnome, the last major Mate release
that gave the average user another solid accessible GUI desktop alternative, 
and of course the game changing improvement to firefox support in Orca that Joani
put so much work in to this summer.
Other promising areas have stalled completely, e.g. XFCE where there's no work at all being done to address 
the most important issues for screenreader 
users. That being said, I think that magnification options have received a bit of love there of late.
I think that the raspberryPI has also done a lot to raise general interest in Linux and a number of FOS 
projects, and this is true among the VI  techy 
folks as much as anyone else.

-- 
     B.H.
   Registerd Linux User 521886


  Krishnakant Mane wrote:
Fri, Dec 26, 2014 at 01:09:53PM +0530


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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_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
https://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
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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