Re: "Accessibility in Fedora Workstation" (fwd)

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there are people using Linux in the console daily who deserve equal access. Second, this individual's job is to make this platform accessible...which has never meant blindness exclusively. Further this individual is no volunteer, he is being paid to have up to date information, not just about fedora, but for screen readers he did not even reference like Fenial <spelling> He is a single individual, That he has not seen a hardware synthesizer, due to age does not mean they do not exist.
 Is he correct that speakup default installs to a hardware synthesizer?
I cannot imagine that being true given the work on the program.
What bothers me most are his lack of actual qualifications, and absolute dismissal of what he has not experienced..as if he defines Linux usage for everyone. That attitude is dangerous, because he is educating those outside of the accessibility experiences, who will believe his ignorance is factual.
he has to be expert, it is his job.



On Fri, 12 Aug 2022, Matt Campbell wrote:

Hi Karen,

I carefully read and fact-checked what Lukas wrote about Speakup. He was incorrect to say that Fedora doesn't include the Speakup kernel module; the stock Fedora kernel has included it for a couple of years now. However, Fedora doesn't include espeakup, speechd-up, or the Speakup user-space tools (e.g. speakupconf and talkwith). I also couldn't find up-to-date documentation on how to use Speakup with Fedora, whether during installation or afterward. Such documentation is readily available for Arch Linux, on the Arch wiki. So practically speaking, his contrast between Speakup support in Fedora and Arch is valid. It also doesn't surprise me that a blind person who started using computers as a teenager in 2009 has never used a hardware speech synthesizer, and it's undeniable that these devices are now rarely used. So I don't believe he said anything that could be considered slander. At worst, his knowledge about the status of Speakup in the Fedora kernel configuration was out-of-date, and I'm inclined to let that go, because we can't all be up-to-date about everything, especially when giving off-the-cuff answers during an interview.

More importantly, I see no reason to doubt Lukas's qualifications for the job he was hired for, much less to conclude that he's merely a token blind person. His personal open-source projects are available on his GitHub profile <https://github.com/tyrylu?tab=repositories>. Most notably, his feel-the-streets <https://github.com/tyrylu/feel-the-streets> project is an accessible interface to OpenStreetMap. That project's combination of Python and Rust, and its ability to run on both Windows and Linux, demonstrate the tolerance for complexity that programmers have to have to make progress on non-trivial real-world projects. I would want to hire him if I could. His atspi2_utils <https://github.com/tyrylu/atspi2_utils> repository also demonstrates familiarity with AT-SPI, the protocol that enables GUI accessibility on Linux. So he seems well qualified for this job, and obviously he took the initiative to get the job. I'm excited to see a young blind programmer working full-time on Linux accessibility. He could bring some fresh energy to this space that seemingly hasn't been there for a while. I look forward to finding out what he achieves.

Matt


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