Re: [orca-list] Accessibility of apps

["B. Henry" <burt1iband gmail com>]

Who's making all this money from linux? 
Server admins, cloud service providers, and all the businesses that use their servers and cloud services to 
make big bucks.
Who's not making moneyu on Linux for the most part are the people designing graphical desktops, maintainers 
of major distros, and especially not those 
who develp a bit of FOS software in their spare time or as part of their job.
Red  Hat has made money for years, but not tons of it. Last I checked Canonical has never turned in a 
profitable year, and not sure about the Suse 
folks.
The people who need to make things accessible are for the most part not getting rich from Linux, and I hardly 
think that some how obliging Google to 
send in hit squads  to try and patch up programs after their release is ideal.
Actually I do agree that some kind of accessibility hit squads can do a lot of good here and there, but 
Google for instance can argue that for several 
years they've made an effort to make their products accesible. 
They were not efficient in doing this, took a long time to get off the ground in most cases, but finally have 
made some serious progress. 
The major distro companies should do more and better, but the way Linux and FOS in general at times works is 
folks use other people's work, and the bits 
that are inaccessible or badly lacking in accesability in many cases are not under direct control of any 
particulary distro. 
So while I agree that something needs to be done, I can only think of a few cases where a major company 
makiing money has control over inaccessible 
software. 
Notable exceptions are Oracle and Dropbox. Dropbox mostly works well, but the installer for Llinux has been 
broken for a long time when it comes to 
working with orca.
There are also many Windows and Mac programs that are not accessible being written everyday. 
I think most of the change needs to come from much better education regarding universal accessability where 
ever any kind of programming or I.T. 
develompent is taught.
I just don't see how you can try, much less succeed in obligating people who often develop software with 0 
expectation of making money from it to do 
right if they do not want to.
Again, I'm all for working on multiple fronts, and a Linux industry organization dedicated to improving 
accessibility  is a good idea. 
Just how you can legislate this is another thing entirely I think.
        


-- 
     B.H.
   Registerd Linux User 521886


  Jason White wrote:
Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 01:42:24PM -0500

> MENGUAL Jean-Philippe <jmengual linuxfromscratch org> wrote:
> > It's a common assessement: if free software isn't accessible, it's not a
> > screen reader problem, but the app which doesn't send good info to at-spi.
> >
> > ok. How to fix this? Explaining, bug reporting, etc. 
>
>
> I think it will require a dedicated group of people who are comfortable with
> accessibility APIs and who can look at a project's source code, identify the
> cause of a bug and fix it quicker than the project's own developers can. A bug
> report can then be submitted with a patch that fixes it. The project's
> maintainers can help to improve the patch, but the point is to provide a patch
> which has been tested as a starting point, not just a bug report.
>
> I think there's more than enough money being made from Linux to finance what
> I've just described, and there might also be willing volunteers who can
> assist. I would have expected the regulatory situation to have prompted Linux
> distributors to pool their resources in this area and to dedicate effort to
> it, but it hasn't happened yet, presumably because we haven't seen any
> litigation yet. Is that what it's going to take? I hope not, but I fear it
> might be.
>
> The second aspect to this is automatic regression testing and much more
> rigorous testing in general before projects are released.
>
> The third component involves documenting the accessibility APIs more
> effectively for developers and publicizing them.
>
> I'm sure there are people who have better ideas than I do - consider the above
> as opening a conversation.
>
> Lastly, be aware that there are accessibility bugs and regressions on every
> operating system. The proprietary software world has more resources, including
> more resources to dedicate to accessibility, but nobody, so far, has
> consistently mastered the art of bringing the quality of the experience for
> screen reader users even close to the quality of the experience enjoyed by
> users of the visual interface. I've used every major platform over the last
> several years, a number of them for work purposes, and it's the same familiar
> story of accessibility bugs to a greater or lesser extent across all of them.
> The Linux console is the only environment I am aware of in which a screen
> reader user can install an application and be very confident that it will be
> accessible - not completely confident, of course, but highly so. That's
> entirely due to its being a text-based environment. The same issues apply to
> Web applications as well.
>
> A lot of attention has been given to accessibility APIs, but the software
> engineering problems of implementing them correctly and consistently haven't
> been addressed yet.
>
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