Re: [orca-list] Accessibility of apps

[kendell clark <coffeekingms gmail com>]

hi
Just my personal opinion, but the linux blind community as a whole needs
to step up and be proud of the software they use. Too many times on hear
I'll see new users join who have used other platforms, and when they run
into a problem the answer they too often get is, shrug, not my problem,
go file a bug. That's all well and good for seasoned open source users,
but to a new user you might as well say go learn Greek. It's why I've
taken on, or tried to, the task of filing the accessibility bugs against
gnome, mate, cinnamon, and ... I think those are it. What I've observed
is that the gnome people know there are accessibility bugs, but still
fall back on the "sorry, we don't know how to fix it" response so many
others do. There are exceptions of course, like joanmeri, mathias
claison, but for the most part that's what I've gotten. Bugs do get
fixed of course, but it needs the blind community to step up and
complain loudly that these bugs get fixed. Otherwise the bugs may linger
because the gnome people are going to think that not enough people are
impacted by a bug to bother fixing it. In the mate and cinnamon
communities, they do care about accessibility, but they don't know how
the accessibility stack works. I've found some documentation on this,
but it seems geared towards people who already know gtk, c++, and the
like. No beginner documentation at all. This needs to change. And it
can, if we all work together. I don't think it will take lidigation to
drumb up support, it just takes the people who use linux to be as
passionate about their software as a windows or mac user would. The
government situation doesn't help. I don't know how much influence
organizations like the nfb, afb, etc have, but if they pushed linux as a
viable option, as they should, that would automatically get interest
from people who would otherwise disregard it. I'm not sure what can be
done about that, I'm no political person and I'm not the best one to be
diplomatic, lol.
Just my two scents
Kendell Clark


Krishnakant wrote:
> Audacity is a great choice.
> Lot of Blind people may be interested in professional sound editing,
> and Audacity is very popular just like VLC and Firefox is popular.
> Secondly I can hardly understage the importance of accessibility of
> PDF, Libre office Calc and Impress.
> Most importantly, some bugs in the gnome shell itself needs urgent
> attention.
> Like I had reported some time back, the Wifi strength is not reported,
> Many notifications such as mobile broadband and Wifi activation is not
> announced.
> This brings us to the debate of who's responsibility it is.
> We can observe that the Orca devs have always done a great job, mostly
> taking it on themselves and hacking around an existing problem.
> But that is not a very practical way always.
> For example we may work around a bug in Libre Office Calc because the
> developers of Calc did not give enough time on a bug report.
> But then some day they do pay attention and fix the bug.
> Needless to say that the hack done before by Orca devs obviously has a
> possibility of breaking.
> Being a programmer myself, I know how it feels when you take hard work
> to retro fit a software to work with another component and then that
> another component fixes some bugs and our work breaks.
> So a coordinated strategy is needed.
> Happy hacking.
> Krishnakant.
>
> On Monday 22 February 2016 02:19 AM, B. Henry wrote:
> > BTW, I like the idea of fixing audacity, and linphone.
> > I mostly use the cli interface to linphone, but have had to write
> > scripts to improve it/no accessability issues there though. The GTK
> > linphone interface
> > is so close/would love to see it get where it should be.
> > Rhythmbox some times seems hard to move around in, but I can't put
> > exact issues in to words off the top of my head as I don't use it
> > much because of the
> > issues I can't pstate very clearly at the moment.
> > Gpodder: a fine program, under steady development/lead dev sounds
> > like a nice guy. I wonder if there could be an easy fix to the
> > constant reporting of
> > download progress that makes using the program once d-loads have
> > started a pain, a few other things could be done to improve its
> > usability with Orca as
> > well, but would need to spend some time with a sighted person wtching
> > the screen to know how much can and can't be accessed with a mouse at
> > certain
> > times as the interface is reported differently depending on whether
> > or not updates have been just done or if one has downloaded or
> > otherwise interacted
> > since last update check.
> >     
>
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> GNOME Universal Access guide:
> https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/a11y.html
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