Hi,
What motivated their choice of Fedora over, sayy, Ubuntu? What was it's
selling points for the devs?
On Thu, 16 Mar 2017, 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 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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