On 10/11/14 02:46, Samuel Thibault wrote:
John G. Heim, le Thu 09 Oct 2014 15:04:06 -0500, a écrit :
I once asked on the kernel developers list what the right way to
access the serial port was. If speakup does it wrong, that implies there is
a right way, what is that?
"Doing it wrong" doesn't mean that the "right way" is already available.
The difficulty here is that the right way doesn't exist yet, even if the
kernel developers have an idea of how it would look like. It's a matter
of getting the time to do it.
Well, I've come to understand during the course of this discussion that
speakup isn't as stable as I thought. It looks like getting answers to
questions about speakup is pretty difficult under any circumstances
unless you press the right buttons. In a way I have to take back my
comments about the disrespect toward speakup that I saw expressed on the
kernel developers list.
However, I think the kernel developers still don't get that
accessibility isn't like other features. A developer has no ethical
obligation to support some cranky old piece of hardware or to support
software features no matter how popular they are. For example, I don't
think the cdrecord developer had any ethical obligation to resolve the
licensing issues that lead debian to fork cdrecord to wodim. I mean, I
think that was crazy but not unethical.
On the other hand, it is unethical for someone, even a volunteer, to
exclude a portion of the population who have no option in the matter. I
only wish I could see a computer monitor and use linux like everyone
else. I understand that as a practical matter, sometimes a developer has
to say, "I can't do accessibility here. It's just too hard." But that
should be an absolute last resort. I don't sense that from the linux
kernel developers or from the open source community as a whole. I think
most open source developers think of accessibilit like we're asking them
to support our old 486 hardware or complaining that our favorite hot
key has gone away. I know every change they make probably creates a
deluge of that kind of complaint. But accessibility just isn't the same
as those complaints.
I think most developers would say, "I'm just a volunteer. How could I
possibly be doing anything unethical?" But if you're volunteering at a
Klu Klux Klan rally, you're doing something unethical. If you're writing
software, even for free, that precludes it's use by blind people,
you're doing something unethical. A developer needs to do what is often
referred to as "best effort" with respect to accessibility or it's
wrong. And I don't think the kernel developers have given their best
effort with respect to getting speakup into the kernel.
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