Hi! For context (and to answer the question in the topic), I'm the Calamares maintainer in Debian and the Debian Live team member who added it to our live media...
On 2019/08/29 05:17, Sam Hartman wrote: >>>>>> "michael" == michael caron couturier <spike...@gmail.com> writes: > > michael> The app is unaccessible for blind users fix your mess > michael> before adding crap ... -- Michaël C. Couturier It is true that Calamares is inaccessible for blind users at the moment. But as mentioned in another post, the usual debian-installer is still available from the boot menu exactly as it was in stretch and debian-installer will probably continue to be available on live media for as long as it exists in debian. (unfortunately that boot menu isn't very accessible for many either, but I digress...). A few things exacerbated accessibility for buster which included sound driver issues and a move to wayland that makes it really difficult for apps to look at other apps, but I'm not going to spend too much time on that topic here either. > It's true that there's not an supported accessible installer that you > can run once you've booted a live system. In some ways this is a > regression over stretch. Although the installer you could run from a > live system previously had a lot of bugs. Not true, stretch didn't have any installer available from the live session, there is no regression from stretch here. > We were aware of the accessibility issues with Calamares and would love > to see them improve in the future. FWIW, after reading Mo Zhou's post[1] about tensorflow to to debian-devel on Sunday (I need tensorflow in order to package Mozilla deepspeech, which I want to use, among other things, for installer purposes), I realised I need to look into alternatives and have spent around 13 hours this week so far reading about speech to text in Linux and learning about natural language processing (which I apparently still need to do a lot of). My goal is to use this in an installer that might help for a lot of accessibility use cases (people who can't see, who have limb mobility problems or tremors etc) but who still can speak and hear to install Debian by talking to the installer. For example, you'd say something like "Reduce my windows partition by 20% and use the free space to install debian" or "Reduce my Windows partition to 400G and create a 20G partition for linux and 80 for home", then the installer should try to figure out what the user wants and repeat back what it intends to do and confirm that it's acceptable. I can understand how something like that may seem too ambitious for an idiot like me, and I realise that it might even take a few years to eventually get there, but I'm chugging along and making some slow but good progress in figuring it out. [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2019/08/msg00450.html > I also hope that over time Calamares accessibility improves. Calamares is working on it and have made good strides on getting the UI to run as a non-root user during the 3.2 series (they didn't hit all the goals listed in https://calamares.io/calamares-3.2-plan/ yet but they'll get there). I think an installer UI that doesn't run as root is a good thing for everyone. > Debian is best when we all work to improve it. Calamares, at this point, is an improvement for Debian. It makes the system installable from the live session and overall it makes the system easier to install for (at my thumbsuck who works with a lot of different kind of users) about 90% (or perhaps even a bit more) of the typical laptop/desktop users out there. It also makes things like full-disk-encryption that is becoming increasingly important out there really easy, that's still way too complicated for an average user in debian-installer. Calamares added initial support for RAID devices during the buster freeze (so we'll have it in bullseye) which boosts it by another percentage point or so for the segment I mentioned above. Adding some sort of preseed support and Debian-specific options that we're missing will boost it a little more. I don't think Calamares will ever make it to a 100% installer because of overall design issues which might even get fixed longer term (for example it's hard dependency on Qt libraries atm), but it does help for some very real problems out there. So, I'm not denying that Calamares has limitations, and that the accessibility issues are a problem, but including it for Buster has only brought positives without taking anything away from anyone compared to the situation we have in stretch, so I don't regret the progress that we've made at all. I could talk a lot about installers at this point but I'll leave that for another time. -Jonathan -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) <jcc> ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Debian Developer - https://wiki.debian.org/highvoltage ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ https://debian.org | https://jonathancarter.org ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ Be Bold. Be brave. Debian has got your back.
