On Fri, Nov 8, 2019, at 3:21 AM, Devin Prater wrote:
> I would definitely recommend the Mac. You’ll still be able to run free
> software, in an environment like Unix. Optionally, if you use the command
> line, check out https://github.com/tspivey/tdsr
>
> It isn’t as powerful as Fenrir or Speak, but it gets the job done well. Also,
> the graphical utilities that come with the Mac, Safari, Mail, text-edit, are
> great also. There is spell checking, autocorrect, text replacement, and
> AppleScripting and Automation, all configurable, throughout the system, not
> just in your word processor, all accessible with VoiceOver.
>
> Of course, there are current bugs. In Safari, you hear “insertion point at
> (nil)” at the end of every paragraph unless you use the arrow keys, and not
> VoiceOver navigation, to read. These bugs are usually fixed within the year
> of a version release, and the releases are often much better than the public
> beta versions.
>
> I seriously hope that Linux stays accessible, because I’d hate to see free
> software let us down so majorly. But, volunteers are not held to a standard
> of accessibility, so I will not be shocked if all we have left in Linux is
> the command line.
This is all helpful information. I did some research after I wrote this and
found that these are not volunteers at all. All pushing against our patches are
individuals working for IBM to ship a commercial Linux desktop and are actually
being paid by them to work on these things. I think it is honestly quite
shameful to see representatives of such a prominant tech company behave in this
way. If it were just ignoring patches it would be one thing, however, many of
these individuals are also actually fighting against the patches and making
discriminatory comments along the way. You have small groups of individuals
(Hypra and Igalia) who have 0 the budgets of IBM when rounding to integers
trying to improve things, yet IBM are impeding progress. Also, completely
volunteer groups of individuals like Debian manage to ship an accessible
desktop, yet IBM can't be bothered to do the same and have now gone a step
further by attacking those who try to do so. It all just sounds really screwed
up to me. These people come from places with oodles of money and tell us we
need a new way of doing things yet they won't pony up the money to accomplish
anything that they ask for.
>> On Nov 7, 2019, at 6:21 PM, thom...@fastmail.cn wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>> I have followed the discussion on the orca list lately and the conflicts
>> around GTK 4 accessibility. I guess without getting into the drama of it
>> all, I would just like to ask those who are knowledgeable if they think we
>> will have Linux accessibility going into the future. I guess the issue seems
>> to be that patches are being created for what upstream thinks is a broken
>> system in some ways and it sounds like things like keyboard snooping could
>> cause problems in the future. I honestly don't know enough to understand
>> whether its broken from a design standpoint, however, it at least lets me
>> use the computer.
>> I am not a skilled enough developer to understand all this yet but I rely on
>> accessibility software for my job. I guess I would just like as honest as an
>> answer as possible. If people think accessibility is going to be removed or
>> key parts of the needed infrastructure, I see no other option than to buy a
>> Mac now so that I can continue to operate the computer in the future. I did
>> notice some comments that proposed removing ATK entirely which obviously
>> would leave me dead in the water.. Ultimately, if the end is approaching, I
>> would like to purchase a Mac as soon as possible since I will have to
>> relearn the computer and a new screen reader (VoiceOver and would like as
>> smooth a transition as possible.
>> I love using free software and hope to continue doing so, however, I
>> ultimately have to do what is necessary to keep my job so I can support
>> myself.
>> Thanks for any information and i hope those here can understand my concerns
>> and honestly just not knowing what to do based on not having the technical
>> knowledge to understand entirely what is happening in the different upstream
>> packages.
