[Accessibility] getting orca included in gnome 2.16

[Peter Korn]

Greetings,

To toss my $0.02 into this discussion...

It has proven very useful to the GNOME accessibility project - and to 
advancing the support for assistive technologies and the implementation 
of ATK and AT-SPI - to have a screen reader, screen magnifier, and 
on-screen keyboard included as a formal part of GNOME.  By 'blessing' AT 
in these categories, it has brought far greater awareness of AT to GNOME 
developers & UNIX distributions, and has led to a lot of compatibility 
testing, bug finding, and bug fixing.

Given that it is general GNOME policy to make one product in any given 
category the 'default' product that a formal part of the GNOME desktop, 
I am personally delighted that they have chosen to create such a 
category for screen reader, screen magnifier, on-screen keyboard, and 
text-input alternative (Dasher).


Regards,

Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

> On Sat, Jun 10, 2006 at 08:01:00PM +0100, Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote:
>   
>> Janina Sajka wrote:
>>     
>>> Mike Pedersen writes:
>>>       
>>>> We have been informed, however, that there can be only one screen
>>>> reader/magnifier in the GNOME desktop.
>>>>    
>>>>         
>>> That's a rather outrageous attitude. Who made that decision?
>>>
>>> Are they also prepared to have only one web browser? ONly one media
>>> player? ONly one word processor? Only one email client application?
>>>  
>>>       
>> I think you may have misinterpreted this slightly. The idea is that 
>> there will only be one official screen reader in Gnome, as there indeed 
>> is only one email client (Evolution), one browser (Epiphany), one office 
>> suite (gnome office, using abiword and gnumeric). Distributions can, and 
>> do, change these defaults and users can install a whole range of options.
>>     
>
> Not to start a holy war, but a reasonable part of the audience that believes in
> an alternative to Microsoft Windows also supports the notion of *not* including
> various other applications and suites.  While Gnome is surely not an OS, it
> seems rather weird (and potentially dangerous) to me to end up with a situation
> where Gnome has an official screen reader, an official mail client, etc...
> By including specific official applications and suites in Gnome, you're bound
> to get into a situation where a large group of people will end up simply
> sticking to the officially included applications and suites, either by choice
> (easier) or as mandated by an IT department that takes the "we only run the
> officially included stuff" approach (all too comon).
>
> And in the end... why not simply leave Gnome to be the desktop environment it
> is, and let users choose what they want?  Why does there need to be one
> official choice, and optional alternatives?  I can see where the general public
> falls for this, and how from a "let's pretend the user is stupid" perspective
> this can be considered "user-friendly", but I would hope that we (as a special
> interest group) can express a genuine concern about this type of policy to
> the powers that be (and that make this type of policy).
>
> 	Kris
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