Tony,
I said absolutely nothing of Red Hat hosting Orca. I said they ship it
with the distribution, which they are not at all obligated to do, as
proven by the fact that Linux Mint didn't come with Orca in the live
environment for a very long time. As for Speakup, it has never been
fully ready for prime time up to now, and there are very good reasons
why it is still stuck in the staging tree. If you want to talk about
too little too late, then I would talk of Speakup, which is only
recently getting its act together enough to hopefully make it out of
staging and into the stable kernel tree, maybe in the next couple of
years if we're lucky. Meanwhile, we have a very nice package called
Fenrir, which has taken the screen reader completely out of the
kernel, putting it fully in userspace where it belongs. Perhaps this
will address the issue of speech from a text only environment much
better than Speakup ever could, as it can not only work on kernels
without staging enabled, but it will also eventually be far more
portable to things like FreeBSD, which has never had even a proof of
concept kernel-based screen reader, and has up to now required ssh in
order to get it to do anything for those of us who need speech output.
Regarding installer accessibility, I have used quite a few installers,
and Red Hat was one of the first major vendors to ship an installer
that while not accessible by direct methods e.g. via speech on the
machine where the OS was to be installed, did come with a method of
gaining access to the installation terminal via telnet, and also had
kickstart files that could be used in place of the on-screen system.
Of course Speakup had to be used via Speakup Modified, and before
that, the kernel had to be patched, but I wouldn't call that not
caring by any stretch. Once the graphical environment started becoming
usable, Red Hat, now called Fedora, was already shipping Orca in its
repositories, and they were one of the first to include the quite new
at the time Espeak, which was far more responsive than Festival, and
all the other distros soon followed. I'm not sure where in the world
you have come to the conclusion that Red Hat simply doesn't care about
accessibility. Is it because your beloved Speakup, which is stuck in
the staging tree for more than 3 years now still isn't enabled in the
Fedora kernel? Sorry, but it's way past time to look elsewhere for
text mode screen reading to something that isn't locked into a kernel.
No other screen reader is bound to a kernel, and there are excellent
reasons that go far deeper than accessibility for disabling staging in
a vendor kernel. Rather than complaining that a distro vendor doesn't
enable a potentially insecure and/or unstable part of its kernel so
that we can have a screen reader in text mode, those who use text mode
on a regular basis and need a screen reader for it need to either
learn how to muck about in the Linux kernel itself so that the screen
reader can get out of staging and into the kernel proper, or better
yet, contribute to Fenrir development, where everything goes on in
userspace and the screen reader only relies on interfaces to stable
and well-tested parts of the kernel that are never disabled in any
distro or vendor kernel. If Red Hat decides not to accept a Fenrir
package, then and only then can we begin to arrive at the conclusion
that maybe perhaps they don't give a care for accessibility.
~Kyle
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