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configuration was out-of-date, and I'm inclined to let that go, because we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
