Wait, you mean there's *this much breakage* in a *beta*? I thought that
betas were supposed to be more stable than less, but what you've just
described is a fucking accessibility nightmare. I don't use that sort of
language lightly on public mailing lists, but it's absolutely
infuriating how Linux for human beings is only for those humans
fortunate enough to see. The rest of us can just go away.
CCing the Unity list myself. It looks as if, should I choose to stay
with Ubuntu, I will be stuck on 11.04 again unless some major fixes land
in the 12.04 timeframe. This, of course, assumes that 12.10 won't be
just as broken for accessibility as was 12.04 and 11.10 before it. I'm
stuck on an ancient at-spi that is getting no accessibility fixes that I
know of. New Firefox versions are breaking things that worked for years,
and I doubt I'll see any fixes. At this point I'm very seriously
switching back to OS X after years of Ubuntu use. Don't get me wrong, I
love Linux and really don't like how Apple treats their developers and
users. I feel, though, that I've been patient enough for Canonical to
get it, and if free software can't meet my needs then proprietary
already does. Also, wasn't 12.04 supposed to be an LTS release? Do blind
and other disabled users not get the benefits of that?
This email brought to you by my netbook upgrade, which I guess will be
hosed. I was really hoping to discover that things more or less worked
and I could upgrade my main machine, particularly as there's a Firefox
accessibility hang that locks up my system so tight that nothing short
of a full reboot can get things back. Restarting gdm isn't even
sufficient anymore. In other words, 11.04 is no longer stable for me.
Arrowing through webpages causes focus to stick, and my machine now
hangs regularly. This is not a hardware issue, as I've seen these hangs
in the a11y subsystem for years, but I can't upgrade to the newest
at-spi and get any fixes for a problem that grows worse and worse. Even
a less stable beta would be a relief if the other non-a11y issues were
slated to be fixed before or shortly after release.
On 03/06/2012 08:33 AM, Alan Bell wrote:
totally agree, and sharing this with the unity-design list so more
people can see it. 12.04 had been pretty decent compared to other
development cycles up to a few weeks ago, then it all went wrong. I am
not happy about some of the stuff that landed this cycle with zero
design consideration for accessibility. Stuff like the shortcuts
overlay on long hold of the super key is quite literally broken by
design. The HUD landed in 3d and now Unity2d with no functionality for
screen reader users (silent in 3d all suggestions are "push button" in
2d), currently the global menu and indicators are almost entirely
broken, probably due to the same thing that broke the menus. I know
there have been improvements, tedg has done an improvement to the
menus by applying role hints to stop everything being a checkbox menu
item (caused by the global menu using a check box menu item for
everything irrespective of whether it is semantically a checkbox item
just because they *look* the same). Menus are currently silent except
for reading out the hint (checkbox or radio button) and the shortcuts.
I think some of the indicators were briefly not called "image", but
right now they all appear to be called "window". I want to start doing
some documentation and screencasts and filing of small bugs and fixing
strings, but I can't do any polishing because it is all broken. I do
know that Unity was supposed to not land broken this cycle, but I
can't imagine that orca or onboard feature in the pre-landing test
scripts. Are these scripts published?
Alan.
On 06/03/12 14:04, Nolan Darilek wrote:
Ugh! We get to this point in every release, where there are patches
for a whole bunch of issues that take forever to land. Meanwhile,
testers can't examine the new release to see what new issues were
revealed after the fixing of the old. So there's no accessibility
*test* cycle, just a bunch of bugs that go away after it's too late
to address the newly-revealed ones. Meanwhile, accessibility users
aren't confident in the newer betas, as even the final release can
contain major issues that block productive use.
This isn't a slam on Luke, but on Canonical. If Canonical is pushing
out Ubuntu for Android, surely they can put more accessibility people
on the Ubuntu project, especially as it rolls out everywhere. It's
going to be *more* important to have a highly accessible Ubuntu if it
runs on my phone, tablet and TV. Canonical is in an awesome position
to fix this once and have it run across the board, yet I only see
Luke addressing patches and other volunteers occasionally popping in
to remark on things.
Seems I've asked this before, but whom do we have to ask to get
Canonical to put more people on the accessibility team as they surely
are doing so for mobile/TV development? Is there some process other
than posting to this list again to better let our voices be heard?
When folks patch these accessibility issues, those patches should
land in a short timeframe. As of now I'm on 11.04 because 11.10 had
accessibility issues I couldn't live with, and 12.04 is shaping up to
be the same. Unfortunately, Firefox is moving on, and I'm
experiencing focus stickage/accessibility hangs that aren't likely to
be fixed because I'm on GNOME 2.32, and I can't see things getting
better as Firefox rockets onward, either.
If I don't get feedback on how to approach Canonical, I'll put up and
promote a change.org petition before the week is out. We need to get
more people helping Luke ASAP, especially as I for one don't want to
get left behind when Ubuntu lands on Android.
Canonical, please stop deprioritizing accessibility. 11.10 was a
transitional release that was highly broken in many respects. Blind
users at least can't wait until 12.10 for an Ubuntu with speaking
menus, speaking notifications and access to content in Ubuntu's
default mail client.
On 03/06/2012 04:39 AM, Boris Dušek wrote:
Hello,
my colleague is using current Precise with Orca and Unity 2D and is
encountering the following problems:
1. In 2D, if you open the menu using Alt+letter (e.g. Alt+S for
"&Soubor" in Czech,
could be Alt+F for "&File" in English), it does not announce
menu item names
when navigating left/right and up/down.
2. In 3D, neither Dash (Alt+F2) nor Launcher (Alt+F1) are accessible
(you can
navigate them, but no speech)
Luke mentioned for some of these problems that "patch exists" or is
even
coming some time ago (approx. half of February), but the problems
above still persist.
Can I find some of those patches anywhere so that I can make a
patched version of Unity?
Or better, are those patches coming in some updated unity package
for Precise?
Thanks and best regards,
Boris Dušek
BRAILCOM,o.p.s.
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