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

[Alex Midence <alex midence gmail com>]

One thing that would help drive more attention from the American front in the way of grants and other funding 
is a stronger focus on improving accessibility with a goal to assist with using Linux in a gainful employment 
setting.   There are a few aplicaitons with are in use in enterprise environments that might do with some 
touching up.  Charitable and philanthropic organizations might be interested in funding their a11y 
development.  I am referring to such applications as Impress, Evolution and Evince to give some examples.  
They address situations encountered in an office environment.

Impress lets you create presentations without the need to learn any markup.  It also lets you show material 
created in other industry standard packages like Powerpoint.  Evolution works well with stuff like Microsoft 
exchange and other groupware packages which are not uncommon in the enterprise and, unlike thunderbird, is 
still under active development.  Thunderbird isn't comparable to Outlook in its set of features without going 
out and hunting down a bunch of plugins.  It doesn't even come with a built-in calendar, something 
indispensable in a business setting.  Evince has come a long way but still needs work to come up to the level 
of accessibility of pdf documents found in Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader.  This is a worldwide industry 
standard in document format which is in wide use in many organizations.  

These are just three areas in which I think accessibility could use some advancement in Linux.  There are 
lots more, I'm sure.  The KDE desktop could use lots of TLC, for instance.  It's fairly popular as a desktop 
in use in corporations that use Linux.  All of this requires lots of work, man hours and probably a ton of 
money to bring about.  It's a pity there isn't an organization out there, not affiliated with any particular 
distribution or desktop but, rather, exclusively dedicated to the furtherance of accessible access to Linux 
for blind and VI users.  This organization could be involved in fund raising and coordinating these issues.  

Just my two cents.  

Alex M


-----Original Message-----
From: orca-list [mailto:orca-list-bounces gnome org] On Behalf Of Krishnakant Mane
Sent: Friday, December 26, 2014 1:40 AM
To: orca-list gnome org
Subject: Re: [orca-list] Feedback for Microsoft [was "Re: favorite linux distros."]

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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> 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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The manual is at http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
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Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org Find out how to help at 
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