I'm a bit confused by your message. You say that Vinux is lacking a lot
of useful features. You point out the large software repository
available to Ubuntu. vinux is based on Ubuntu, so everything you get
with Ubuntu you get with Vinux.
On 16/03/17 14:42, Eric Oyen wrote:
well,
emotionalism aside, a lot of what you have to say appears based in the
realistic fact that we, as a community, don't have an actual unified distro to
call our own. Sure, Vinux is a decent distro, but it's lacking a lot of useful
features outside of accessibility.
I, myself, use Ubuntu primarily because of the larger software repository. I
have also had to help out my room mate (who is definitely a Linux NewB) and
Ubuntu was the easiest to use.
Now, as for Fedora, it is not accessible out of the box by default. THis
provides some rather hard to tackle problems when it comes to properly
installing or configuring the OS. I know, I tried 2 nights ago and got so
frustrated that I ended up shelving that project until I could get sighted
assistance.
Oh yeah, btw, if you think that We, the blind, are being ignored in the Linux
community, you haven't seen the level of ignorance and disdain we see in the
BSD ecology. Want an accessible install image? good luck, it's not supported.
Want an accessible OS after you have installed it? again, not supported.
so, you think we, as a community, have it bad in linux? Not as bad as in other
places.
Oh yes, you are also correct at the level of ignorance out there on the net. I
get asked continually how I, as a blind person, can even use a computer. I get
so tired of explaining, ad nausium, that there is technology that allows me to
do this. I get the usual platitudes and then they go right on being as stupid
and ignorant as before. It's like beating your head against a brick wall.
Lastly, like you suggested, I would support a kick starter project dedicated to
making a truly blind accessible OS in linux as its own distribution. What would
help, is getting Linus Torvalds on board with this. A word or two from the big
guy on this would certainly lend a lot more support to us.
-eric
from the central office of the Technomage Guild, access technology division 6
On Mar 16, 2017, at 5:53 AM, Tony Baechler wrote:
Be warned that my comments are most likely unpopular and controversial. See
below. I'm not really interested in discussing this further, so don't expect a
response.
On 3/15/2017 3:30 AM, Kyle wrote:
Sonar merges with the Vinux Project.
Well, this is indeed unfortunate. First, it was never said what "common goals"
were discussed. Granted I don't closely follow either project, but I'm disappointed and
surprised to see Vinux heading towards a Fedora base. Red Hat has stated many, even
numerous times, both in their inaction and in published docs on their sites, that they
have no or very little interest in core accessibility. Yes, I realize this list is hosted
by Red Hat, but honestly, anyone can host a mailing list nowadays, so to me, that doesn't
count. Look at groups.io, Yahoo Groups, etc. Unlike Debian, Ubuntu and Slackware, to the
best of my knowledge, Fedora has never made their installer accessible out of the box. I
understand that now their installer talks with Orca, but I think that's more by accident
than anything. Fedora does claim to have accessibility with the Gnome desktop though, but
I don't think one can easily use Speakup and a text console to do the install. I could
very well be wrong on this as I q
u
it following Fedora years ago for the above reasons. There were projects like
Speakup Modified (now dead I think), but they were community projects with no
support from Fedora developers. Presumably, since Sonar is being folded in,
they will use a distro other than Fedora. In the long term, I think Fedora
would be a very bad idea for many reasons which I won't go into here.
I think it's a great idea for there to be an a11y, or even blindness-specific
nonprofit to be formed. I would even say it's very long overdue. If Apache,
Mozilla, the Linux kernel and many others can do it, there is no reason why the
blind community can't. I would even suggest moving this and other Linux lists
to that organization. Yes, I realize that nonprofit and not-for-profit are
different. I would push to make it a U.S based nonprofit. Start a Kickstarter
or other fundraising compaign. I would donate to it. As much as Facebook
doesn't support accessibility and generally is against the open source spirit,
a page on there, Twitter, Tumblr, etc would be a very good idea. There needs to
be a strong publicity team to write articles for both the blindness magazines
(ACB Braille Forum, etc) and the mainstream Linux magazines like LWN.
Amazingly, there has been almost no mention of Speakup in the mainstream Linux
community at all. I think a fair number of companies and developers don
'
t take us seriously because they don't know we exist and that blind people not
only can and do use computers but in fact can and do use Linux on a regular
basis. I just got an email from someone asking if I'm blind, how do I read and
write? There is still a huge amount of ignorance out there. I realize this
isn't strictly a Linux accessibility issue, but what leads to the next great
breakthrough might be started by a developer seeing that blind people want an
accessible desktop like everyone else. With an actual organization, KDE could
be pushed for accessibility and developers from the organization could help. In
other words, not only does it need to be a nonprofit a11y organization who
works with other developers and develops software, but it also needs to be an
advocacy and lobbyist group to demand big and small companies make their
software accessible.
However, I see a huge flaw in the merger. I think we're going down the same
path as Windows screen readers. I'm not saying that Vinux would go commercial.
What I'm saying is I fear they would end up like a big company who shall remain
nameless. There are other screen readers out there such as NVDA, but very few
people take them seriously because this big company has almost a monopoly.
Granted, Linux is still far from having a huge share of the market, but if it
should reach the 90% or even 50% point some day, it would be very unfortunate
for rehab agencies and employers to force people to use Vinux because that's
the only specialized distro for the blind. What would be much better is to work
with the mainstream distros like Debian and Ubuntu to fix accessibility
problems. Ubuntu is the most popular distro on the desktop. While accessibility
is good, it has problems. When 16.04 came out, Orca was broken. I believe there
are only a small number (no more than a few) people on the acc
e
ssibility team. Debian could also desperately use help. It would look much better for the blind
community if an organization donated their time and talents to auditing the packages in Debian and
either fixing those with accessibility bugs which could easily be fixed or working with the
upstream developers, providing patches and consulting with them to make their packages more
accessible. To me, it seems like a huge waste of time to put a ton of energy into beating Fedora,
Ubuntu or whatever distro into submission and slapping a "Vinux" or "Sonar"
label on it when that same upstream distro with very few tweaks could be made that way out of the
box. If you absolutely must modify packages, desktop settings, etc from the upstream defaults, such
as for low vision users, create a Vinux repository instead or work with the Ubuntu community to
create an official Ubuntu flavor called Ubuntu VI or something. There is already a Ubuntu MATE
flavor, so why not work with them directly? While we'
re
at it, what about Orca? I see only one main paid developer working on it. I'm
sure she could use some help, not to mention thorough testing. Getting back to
the Windows screen readers, I fear that blind people will not be given the
choice of what distro they want and will be locked out of mainstream use
because there is primarily one Vinux to rule them all.
In conclusion, I will continue not recommending any specialized distro to my
clients and other people. I think they are almost always a mistake. As we have
seen yet again, it does lead to fragmentation and generally bad luck for all
concerned. I couldn't get any of them (Sonar, Vinux or Talking Arch) to work
reliably on my 2009 machine which runs XP great and has a very old,
well-supported standard sound card. I had to invent my own live / rescue CD
because there wasn't anything reliable. Hopefully the official Debian rescue CD
will have reliable speech soon. Something like a Vinux rescue CD would be a
great idea, but not a live system with an unreliable graphical desktop,
horrible speech (ESpeak) and an unreliable infrastructure which crashes for no
obvious reason while the mainstream Debian and Ubuntu distros don't. All of
that said, I wish both teams the best of luck and I guess we'll see what
happens. I would only add that if you haven't taken the plunge and actually
tried Lin
u
x, give Ubuntu MATE a try. It's fast, works well and can be installed
independently by the blind in about an hour. It does, unfortunately, still use
ESpeak. Getting a commercial company to release a decent synth as open source
would be a great thing for a nonprofit to do, even if it required buying the
rights.
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Christopher (CJ)
chaltain at Gmail
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