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 quit 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 accessibility 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
Linux, 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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