Re: [orca-list] Accessibility of apps

[Luke Yelavich <luke yelavich canonical com>]

Before I continue, I would like to stress that the opinion expressed here are mine alone, and not those of my 
employer Canonical Ltd.

On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 05:42:24AM AEDT, Jason White wrote:
> 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 totally agree with this. I'd add that this extends to any extra frameworks
required by the assistive technology, such as Speech Dispatcher and
BrlTTY. Those frameworks work well enough now, but there is much that
could be done to both to make the experience much better for users.

> 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.

I fear this also. Linux/FOSS accessibility is only going to get better
if there is significant funding behind it. Yes, those of us who know how
things work could be paid to work on things, but there are only a few of
us, and to make significant progress, we would need to bring in developers
and teach them how things work, and this would likely require financial
insentive for them to work on something they otherwise may not be interested
in working on. My first thought would be other GNOME developers, since
they have a good understanding of GObject, and given good documentation,
would then be able to contribute good accessibility fixes. There is also
Qt, and the relatively young Linux accessibility support there, which also
needs work, which could be best solved by those who are most familiar with
Qt and its inner workings, given it has to provide accessibility support
for 5 platforms.

Luke