Hello, Nolan.
When I first switched to Linux, I did so because I fell in love with
Ubuntu. Ubuntu is what I used (exclusively) until the accessibility
issues began to kick in. I am very appreciative of the hard work which
the Accessibility team puts into Ubuntu, and I understand that they are
very limited because fo various reasons. My frustration si most
certainly not with them, but with teh company whose operating system I
fell in love with back in 2006. I still remember the excitement I felt
when I saw the Ubuntu philosophy "for human beings".
But then, as time moved on, I had to move on as well. I really enjoyed
using Unity, and I absolutely loved all that Ubuntu had to offer. If it
was always as accessible as it once was, I would definitely go back. I
don't want to sound strange in saying this, but I am kind of "homesick"
for my first Linux operating system. While I am enjoying my experience
with Fedora, I really miss what I had come to know in Ubuntu.
I am not sure how I can help. I had posted a comment on Mark
Shuttleworth's blog sometime in 2012, but it seemed to go unnoticed.
I forwarded this message to the AccessibleFreedom Support mailing list;
I hope that this is alright.
In this world's eyes, I am basically a nobody, but if I can somehow lend
my voice in support of what you are standing for, I will certainly do
so. I am not online as much as I used to be, but as I am able I will
help you in making this call for accessibility known.
Kind regards.
On 01/02/2013 03:50 PM, Nolan Darilek wrote:
I would like to organize some sort of advocacy effort to get Canonical
to take accessibility more seriously. I understand the limitations of
the current accessibility team, but if we look back at the state of
computing two years ago vs. today, any reasonable person would agree
that telling a certain subset of the population that they can only be
assured accessible software on that schedule while others get upgrades
every six months is unreasonable. I don't want Ubuntu to be another
Android, an accessibility situation with which I am quite familiar.
I tried posting a comment here:
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1221/comment-page-1#comment-400356
because a post that claims that Canonical doesn't want to leave users
behind in 2013 seems at odds with a company whose next release I will
have guaranteed access to won't be out until 2014. Unfortunately, my
comment got caught up in Akismet and appears to have vanished. Perhaps
others who feel the same should ask Mark not to leave accessibility
behind while Canonical charges ahead in so many other areas.
Ubuntu Phone uses QML 5. I get that QT isn't as accessible, but it's
being adopted by a bunch of companies in the mobile space, so you'd
think that they'd have all contributed toward making it accessible.
Perhaps it's time for Canonical to set a good example in this space
and contribute more toward accessibility than it currently does.
I'm going to start actively commenting on Canonical and other blogs,
advocating for the expansion of the accessibility team. Thoughts on
what else we can do? I'd love to do this stuff myself, but I'm already
writing an Android screen reader and working on Android accessibility
projects, and end users can't always be called upon to take up the
slack that paying companies leave behind.
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