I'm going to address points from several of Karen's messages:.
he is, according to those writing the article bringing accessibility
to Fedora workstation.
i respect that for those in the know, in the choir so to speak what he
is doing is clean up.
but that is not how the general Linux community is taking this
information.
Let's look at what the article actually says, particularly the intro
before the interview:
The first concerted effort to support accessibility under Linux was
undertaken by Sun Microsystems when they decided to use GNOME for
Solaris. Sun put together a team focused on building the pieces to
make GNOME 2 fully accessible and worked with hardware makers to
make sure things like Braille devices worked well. I even heard
claims that GNOME and Linux had the best accessibility of any
operating system for a while due to this effort. As Sun started
struggling and got acquired by Oracle this accessibility effort
eventually trailed off with the community trying to pick up the
slack afterwards. Especially engineers from Igalia were quite active
for a while trying to keep the accessibility support working well.
But over the years we definitely lost a bit of focus on this and we
know that various parts of GNOME 3 for instance aren’t great in
terms of accessibility. So at Red Hat we have had a lot of focus
over the last few years trying to ensure we are mindful about
diversity and inclusion when hiring, trying to ensure that we don’t
accidentally pre-select against underrepresented groups based on for
instance gender or ethnicity. But one area we realized we hadn’t
given so much focus recently was around technologies that allowed
people with various disabilities to make use of our software. Thus I
am very happy to announce that Red Hat has just hired Lukas
Tyrychtr, who is a blind software engineer, to lead our effort in
making sure Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Workstation has
excellent accessibility support!
That's somewhat long-winded, but it's clear to any careful reader that
the foundation for accessibility was already laid, and that what most
urgently needs to be done is to fix what has been broken in the years
since Sun's accessibility team was disbanded. If things get
misrepresented by others who have shared the article, that's surely not
the fault of the authors. That happens all the time when people share
things online; it's nothing new, and not worth belaboring.
there are people using Linux in the console daily who deserve equal
access.
I took this position in 2000, but for the last decade or more, access to
a GUI has been widely available to blind people at no extra cost. (If
there are blind people today who are truly stuck on old hardware with no
accessible GUI, that's unfortunate, but I think this is one case where
the best solution is charity, not expecting the rest of the world to
accommodate this situation forever. That's no different than for sighted
people stuck on very old hardware.) Blindness itself is a circumstance
beyond one's control that deserves reasonable accommodation. But today,
using the text console is a choice, a very conscious choice to swim
upstream, against the current. Anyone who makes that choice should be
prepared for difficulty. And in fact, the few people I know who choose
to use the console today are prepared to use a GUI of one form or
another when there's no other way to accomplish a task. A platform
company like Red Hat is under no obligation to cater to the preference
of the dwindling minority of a minority who choose to use the text
console. To be clear, I have nothing against people who find
console-based tools most productive; do whatever works for you. But we
need to be careful about what we demand from the mainstream world, and I
think that expecting to be able to do everything using only the console
is too much.
Second, this individual's job is to make this platform
accessible...which has never meant blindness exclusively.
His job, according to the article, is, "to lead our effort in making
sure Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Workstation has excellent
accessibility support." To me, the word "lead" suggests that he's not
doing this alone. Also, as I said above, the foundation of accessibility
for all disabilities was already laid, by the team at Sun, starting
roughly 20 years ago. They deliberately chose to start with a generic
accessibility API, not a specific solution for a particular disability,
because they understood that a well-designed accessibility API would
enable independent developers to provide assistive technologies for
multiple disabilities. And while I have my objections to a specific
layer of their accessibility architecture, I believe they were on the
mark here. Finally, I think it's safe to say that blindness is the most
difficult disability to accommodate for GUI application and toolkit
developers, as it requires them to provide a complete alternative
representation of their default, high-bandwidth mode of visual output.
Once that need has been met by implementing a sufficiently rich
accessibility API, independent developers can handle other disabilities
by implementing alternate input methods; indeed, the more comprehensive
the accessibility API implementation is, the more these other input
methods have to work with. So I think it's entirely reasonable for Red
Hat and Lukas to focus for now on making their GUI accessible to blind
people with a screen reader.
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.
As I wrote elsewhere, what he is actually paid for is between him and
Red Hat. If they are paying him exclusively to focus on improving GUI
accessibility with Orca, I think that's entirely reasonable, as I
explained above. The fact that his statements on Speakup were slightly
incomplete, or that he didn't say anything about Fenrir, is annoying to
those in the know, but not worth getting outraged over. Also note that
Lukas's primary job is not advocacy or education, but software
development. Along the way, he will need to educate other developers
about accessibility, but he's not obligated to comprehensively educate
the world at large about how blind people use Linux. The details of how
blind people can access the text console are of little or no interest to
most platform and application developers, who are the people that Lukas
would actually need to educate as part of his job. What we really need
them to understand is how they can make their GUIs accessible, and the
easier we make that for them, the more accessibility we will get. In
light of that, dwelling too much on console options could even be
considered an unnecessary and confusing distraction.
That attitude is dangerous, because he is educating those outside of
the accessibility experiences, who will believe his ignorance is factual.
If people outside the blind community, including platform and
application developers, believe that speech synthesis hardware is
vanishingly rare, or that one can't use Speakup with Fedora (but can use
BRLTTY or Orca), that's of no practical consequence. We just need them
to know how they can make their GUIs and web applications accessible,
and to be convinced that it's worth doing. On other disabilities, he said:
Of course, utilities for other accessibility needs exist as well,
but I don’t know much about these.
It's good that he's honest about what he doesn't know. I don't believe
that current gap in knowledge should disqualify him from the job that
Red Hat actually hired him to do, as opposed to the job that you seem to
think Red Hat should have hired someone to do. He's going to have his
hands full just making Fedora Workstation fully accessible to blind
people. I trust that he'll be willing to learn about other assistive
technologies when that knowledge is actually necessary.
may I ask from where he obtained his software engineering degree?
Studied computer science? Perhaps disability studies?
Neither Lukas nor Red Hat are obligated to provide this information to
random bystanders. But here's what I found in my quick research. Lukas
posted his university thesis on GitHub
<https://github.com/tyrylu/thesis>, and from that I deduced that he
earned his bachelor's degree (and perhaps a master's as well) in Applied
Informatics from Masaryk University in the Czech Republic.
there are certainly scores of disabled individuals with these various
levels of qualification..even who are Linux users.
Sure. But the question is not whether the job went to the person who
seems most qualified to an outside observer, or is known in that
observer's community, but whether the job went to a person who was
available and interested in the job, is qualified enough (as judged by
the people doing the hiring), and will get the work done. Red Hat have
been hiring developers to work on open source for decades, and I trust
that they are competent to choose a qualified candidate. Beyond that, as
I stated in my first reply, we can see for ourselves what Lukas has
previously done online. There's even more of that than I realized when I
wrote that message. For example, he successfully submitted a few patches
to the GTK repository, before Red Hat hired him, and he has been
reporting bugs in GNOME accessibility, particularly on Red Hat's bug
tracker, for years. And as I said on Friday, his feel-the-streets
project demonstrates an aptitude for taking on real-world programming
projects. So I believe Red Hat's decision to hire him was sound. Not
that they need my approval, or that of anyone on these lists.
Now, I suggest that we let the nit-picking go and just be happy that,
with financial backing from the leading company in this space, GUI
accessibility on Linux is moving forward.
Matt
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