On Wed, Apr 08, 2009 at 01:03:23PM +1000, Daniel Dalton wrote: > I couldn't agree with that. Debian provides brltty, orca and now speakup > modules, and just recently yasr. Emacspeak is also in the repo... <smiles> And if you don't have a braille display, or have been even granted the grace of being taught braille by The State? Sorry, I just can't see spending every waking moment learning how to keep Debian unstable/Sid working while I'm still playing catchup from when Woody had just been released, and I had just started learning Linux. A lot of things have happened since I was punching in monitor frequencies to get X11 working and looking for howtos on how to get the system to make a 56K call to my ISP. It's like, "Oh! there's already a pon and poff script already on the system for this. Wish I'd known that 6 months ago when I was tweaking settings in pppd.conf." Unless you already know exactly what you're doing and exactly where all the information is spread all across the internet, and are willing to spend every waking moment keeping track of all the changes, I still can't recommend Debian for new users. Your perspectives are coming from the top of the mountain, not the bottom. or from somewhere onn the slope where everyone else is. You likely *already know* how to get out of trouble when something completely hoses the system, or you possess hardware like braille terminals that give you added ways to access the system. I only have the2.6.18 Shane kernel to count on when the latest upgrade crashes on bootup, because there are no more speakup upgrades scheduled in Lenny, and I have to port to the never-ending battle with Sid...or do you really think all this talk sounds like English to a Fedora/Slackware/BSD/SuSE user or Linux newbie? It's not like someone who's just gotten their Lenny CD from cheapbytes, are even going to know what questions to ask to get info, let alone know where to go, what to look for, and how to even possibly manage to keep up with it all in an unstable version of Debian that may not work from one day to the next, all while just trying to get it set up and configured in the first place. Yes, I do have a problem with run-on sentences. <grins> I'm just saying that Debian isn't the best platform to choose where new technology like accessibility is concerned. Once a version goes stable, Advances get locked out, and when you depend on those advances, Debian is pretty much the worst system to count on. Very few things in Debian are standard with the rest of the Linux world because of debconf and dpkg dependencies. Debian is beginning to look like Windows where the ability to get around what the maintainers are forcing everyone to do is concerned. It's either "depend on Debian to do it or go without," a'la Microsoft. I had much the same problem with Orca, tying itself to the GTK libraries, instead of acting like speech-dispatcher and acting like a middleman between Xorg and the synthesizer, translating X server transmissions to speech. They are never going to stop playing catch-up, trying to clean up behind hundreds of programs rather than just one, decoding the X server transmissions/feed itself. Otherwise you're always having to depend on the sighted world to generously grant you some support, like a dog hoping for a few table scraps from it's master. I'm still waiting for that edbrowse upgrade that fixes the 1z bug that won't print the first line of a web page in Lenny, and it's been out there for months. I don't think it ever will be upgraded until Sid goes stable in another 2 to 4 years. That's Debian in a nutshell. It's policies make it the absolutely *wrong* platform where new tech is concerned, unless you're a linux guru and want to join the "play never-ending catch-up" game with the Orca maintainers. Maybe I'd have time to learn to code and write it myself, if I wasn't trying to keep my computer talking all the time. It's too bad linux fragmented into distro-based rather than kernel-based branchings. The talent fragmented with it and everyone lost from it. We've become another Tower of Babel, and it's getting progressively worse. <shrugs> Just my $.02. Debian's regimentation is a major stumbling block for the handicapped in an already difficult environment. Michael PS: If this gets me censored the way they did to me in the Orca group, it'll be worth it just to get it said. Thinking inside the sighted's box has never gotten us anywhere. Louis Braille learned *that* much and changed an entire world. You people are the radiant diamonds formed in that furnace. God Bless You All, and Thank You for all I have here.
