Arpit Jain <[email protected]> wrote:
Debian's existing accessibility work provides an important foundation. I would like to raise the broader question of whether accessibility validation can increasingly be approached at the level of complete professional workflows rather than individual components.
This has traditionally been accomplished by the participation of users of Debian (and other Linux distributions) with disabilities in the relevant free software/open-source communities. I think this partly explains why the accessibility community associated with Linux has tended to concentrate on well chosen strategic priorities, such as ensuring that the functionality which users rely on is supported as underlying technologies change, and fixing bugs that affect every-day use of the system.
As an informed and technically competent Linux user, I can directly engage with software developers and other users in these communities. Bug reports are taken seriously, even if they can't be fixed quickly. In contrast, getting a bug report through multiple layers of a corporate hierarchy so they are acknowledged and perhaps eventually resolved is more difficult, at least in my experience, and interacting with the authors of the code is often not possible in the case of proprietary systems.
So, I would say the Linux accessibility effort is under-resourced (and it isn't the only accessibility work which suffers from this shortcoming), but it's more responsive in some ways than the proprietary alternatives.
