Omer Zak wrote:
Chiming in the discussion, my 7 agorot (2 cents) are as follows.
The mindset of the Openmoko developers seems to me to be
anti-accessibility.
It stands to reason that they'll turn down requests to provide for
accessibility to people with disabilities. The devices are probably
inherently unusable by blind people (like music for deaf people).
However, deaf people can be victimized by software, which beeps without
visual indication. Color-blind people can be victimized by software UI
design, which relies too much on color cues, and which does not provide
for ability to change colors. Epileptic people can be victimized by
software, which insists upon blinking.
Nevertheless, the percentage of those people in the general population
is small enough for the Openmoko to make a case for ignoring their
needs, much the same way they make a case for ignoring the needs of RTL
people.
--- Omer
You are confusing two completely different things. It is one thing to
claim "adding accessibility support to the product will increase its
cost, and not increase its market share enough, to make the product
non-commercially viable". This claim, essentially, says "it's not a
choice between accessible and an inaccessible software, it's a choice
between inaccessible software and no software at all". Under those
circumstances, I can understand the trade off. Neither you, I, nor
anyone else have the right to tell someone to do what THEY do our way.
However, at least in my eyes, that was not the discussion on the
openmoko community list. Christen definitely thought that was what I
asked (and who knows, maybe it was and I wasn't aware of it), but at
least to me what I asked that accessibility (or, in this case, RTL
support) be *considered* when technologies are evaluated.
There is a major problem between someone making an deaf inaccessible MP3
player and someone making a deaf inaccessible shoot them up. In the
former case, the cost of trying to make it accessible is a major part of
the development cost. In the later, merely keeping in mind that deaf
people would also be playing this is all it really takes.
Part of the problem, and this is not the first time I see this
happening, is that free software developers think that because things
are free, it means they do not need to be accountable. There is some
measure of truth to that line of thinking when things are completely
transparent. If the decision to dump GTK and go ETK were held on an open
mailing list where everyone had a chance to voice their opinions then I
would certainly understand why someone coming in late in the game and
saying "you have to change your already arrived at decision" would be
disregarded. This was not the case here, however.
What happened here is that the decision was taken as it is with
proprietary software companies - one day we wake up and we find the
decision has already been taken, and the only one around to explain it
is the same person who wrote ETK, and is as open to criticism about it
as a mother is to criticism about her child. In my eyes, the less
transparent you are about your decision making process, the more
accountable you are about the end result. THIS is my main criticism
about this process. It is entirely possible that moving to ETK was the
right move, unfortunate BiDi state and all. Without knowing the
reasoning, I have no way to tell.
Shachar
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