Hello,
I have decided to post this to the indiana-discuss list as well as the
accessibility-discuss list as I feel it impacts on the opensolaris
distribution and how it may be viewed.
Recently I have heard that Willie Walker who was the lead for the Orca
project and the gnome accessibility project was laid off by oracle, so
removing a significant contribution to gnome accessibility. Here is a
link to an open letter written by another Orca contributor which may
give a bit more detail on this http://bit.ly/oracle-a11y. Now this is
very sad news for me as a visually impaired computer user who uses the
gnome desktop.
Now how does this relate to opensolaris? At the current moment in time
the gnome desktop, gnome accessibility and Orca is the only way I can
access opensolaris as a blind user. As the future of orca and gnome
accessibility is in some question (community members such as myself
probably will try and take on some of the development, but for myself I
can't guarantee anything as it will be voluntary and I will need time to
learn), it also brings the accessibility of solaris into question. Even
if community members are able to take on the extra work to keep gnome
accessibility alive, this doesn't guarantee any future for solaris
accessibility as a significant number of issues raised on the orca list
stem from poor integration of gnome accessibility in distributions.
Now the question I am most interested in the answer to, what is the
prospects for the future accessibility of opensolaris? At this point in
time opensolaris offers a very good accessibility experience (possibly
one of the best systems for gnome accessibility). In the most gloomy
outcome solaris will be totally useless to me if gnome accessibility
were to die, possibly more likely it will be not particularly good due
to poor integration issues (in which case again I would probably not
consider it as I wouldn't have any back up accessibility solution, on
Linux I have speakup which will give me at least text console access).
I am particularly interested in the future of the accessibility of
opensolaris as I was starting to learn about solaris (partly due to the
good gnome accessibility integration, I was going to be coming from
Linux) but now I wonder whether the time I would need to invest in
learning solaris really would be worth my while as would I have a future
of being able to use it?
Michael Whapples
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