Hello, friendly list, this discussion was inside another discussion and perhaps partly because of my poor choice of words, was thought to be a distro flame war, but that was never my intention or desire.
I want to make a point about Accessibility in general and Accessibility in Debian in particular. Nothing I say should be taken as an offense to any of the developers who have done an amazing job in making Linux, and Debian in particular accessible. My two favorite Linux distros are Debian and Slint. I have some favorable comments about how robust Slackware is opposed to Debian - or most other distributions - but that's way off topic. Suffice it to say, that being a Debian is the only way to go type person, I've been very impressed with the robustness of Slackware, especially the accessible International version, Slint. Now on topic. Part of accessibility is having accessibility features known about by users and have them easily used. Debian does this very well in their installer which speaks to blind or visually impaired users, and provides visually impaired users with a high contrast graphical installer. Excellent. My original post - which I take responsibility of not wording as well as I should have mentioned "ease of use". I was attempting both to tell the members of this list, which are both users and developers about how Slint based on Slackwware has succeeded in having almost all of it's accessibility features accessible to the new non-technical user. As the blind that go to the museums say: "What's good of having guided tour headphones available in the manager's office when the only notice of them is a written notice we cannot see?" None of the accessibility features in Slint require any user effort other than running a script to use. With Debian you first have to know these features even exist, then you have to install them. In Slint, thanks to Didier Spaier's work these features are documented in an accessible console document. Of course, his work depends in part on your wonderful work on brltty and other features, again, this is not an invitation to a distro war, it's just about accessibility features being accessible and my recognizing these features have been wonderfully achieved in Slint. If such wonderful achievements aren't at least mentioned, some or all of them will probably never be brought into Debian to improve accessibility. Certainly as Samuel pointed out, all these features are available in Debian, but unfortunately it takes a bit of digging to find out about them. Again, thanks to everyone for their efforts in achieving accessibility of Linux. This always was a team effort of many selfless persons world-wide, and for that I am personally grateful and appreciative. David
