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Oracle Drops Sun's Commitment To Accessibility
An anonymous reader writes "What I feared has come true: after buying Sun, Oracle had a look at its accessibility group and made big cuts in it by firing the most important contributors to the Linux accessibility tools. This is a very sad day for disabled people, as it means we do not really have full-time developers any more." The coverage in OSTATIC has a few more details, including the caution: "This just shows that all too few companies are sponsoring a11y work. If one company laying off a couple of developers spells trouble for the project, then there were problems before that happened" (thanks to reader dave c-b for pointing this out).
The beautiful thing about Gnome is that it is an open source project that anyone can contribute to. Also, you can learn to type with your nose and maybe your foot (to operate the shift key) so you can contribute code to the project that way
The Greater Need for Accelerating Accessibility?
After all, the Gnome logo is a foot. Just type with you feet and it's alright!
XD
No offense, but this is just more fuel to the fire of GNOME vs KDE flamewars.
Retards use Linux? Who knew...
Doesn't Windows 7 offer excellent accessibility options??
Love me or leave me. Hey, where's everybody going?
Surely this does not come as a surprise to anyone?
Oracle, who have deliberately lessened the abilities of their own products (from a reasonably solid database system 10 years ago to a steaming turd now) in order to sell more licenses to do the same amount of work will continue to cut anything that is not immediately profitable.
Anything that Sun pursued on moral or ethical grounds, and anything that shows "future promise" will be axed as soon as they spot it.
As well as anything that could potentially compete with their more expensive in-house crap.
People have been worrying about MySQL. They have been right to worry. However, as a corporation, Oracle can and will have all relevant American laws re-written/re-interpreted as necessary to see all commercial deployment of MySQL in the USA dead within two years.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
Oracle has a solid core DB engine. It dates back to the seventies, but it has evolved and it's still really good. Everything built around it is pretty much crap. But people buy from Oracle for the DB engine, then get stuck buying a lot of other super-expensive, bad quality software. I love PostgreSQL, and it's getting better every day, but there's still some stuff the core Oracle engine did ten years ago you can't get anywhere else.
Startup your Word Perfects, warm the laser printers, and start sending your demands under the Disabilities Act.
It should say: Oracle breaks their commitment to accessibility, that they inherited when they acquired sun.
In other words, Oracle is going back on their word, and is perhaps about to show how dishonest, despicable, and evil they (apparently) are, or not, depending on whether they keep their word (or not).
Once you make a commitment, you can't "drop it". You either uphold your promise, or you break it.
It looks like Oracle's about to break their promise.
It doesn't matter at all that people who worked for Sun originally made the promise. Oracle acquired Sun, so they acquired all their promises, obligations, and dirty laundry too.
Revising or 'dropping' a promise you made is called reneging on obligations you made.
When a company says they're committed to something, they've made a promise. They can't become "uncommitted" or "no longer committed" without either succeeding, or having lied in the first place.
This has absolutely nothing to do with "wanting something for nothing." The more people working on accessibility, the quicker the work gets done. Naturally the reduction of contributers would be viewed as a bad thing by the OSS community.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Why? Oracle is not required under any laws to provide development time to help make Linux or any OS more friendly towards people with disabilities. Sun was doing this out of their own great good heart.
It is in their best interest to make Solaris/OpenSolaris more friendly towards people with disabilities in an attempt to capture more market share that otherwise would go to Apple Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows where such products already exist.
cat
In general, you're right. You want a feature in OSS, and no one is doing it? Do it yourself. Accessibility falls into a different category. You *could* say, sorry you weren't born with sight, try again next life. But that wouldn't be a very nice thing to say. We have two main commercial operating systems, Mac OS X, and Windows. So, let's say both companies decide accessibility doesn't matter, just screw it. Are people with disabilities supposed to just lie down and take it? I would hope we've evolved past that.
I have to agree with Joanie that I hope that the laying off (not fired as in the summary) was an accident. But since they've laid off a bunch of other people working for accessibilty, it doesn't look all that good. Hope the letter helps, but if they've already started I don't think they mind having the bad "we don't like the disabled/orphans/elderly/puppies " PR. Good luck for getting the letter to work.
"Oracle is committed to creating accessible technologies and products that enhance the overall workplace environment and contribute to the productivity of our employees, our customers, and our customers' customers."
--Safra Catz, President and CFO, Oracle
For many reasons--legal, business, and ethical--Oracle recognizes the need for our applications, and our customers' and partners' products built with our tools, to be usable by the disabled community.
So not really "bellyaching", more of a "holding a company to the claims they make."
A lot of people were worried what would happen to the support of these programs when the buyout was announced. Almost as if they were part of a community that used the products and hoped that the support they have given the company wasn't going to result in them being abandoned after the merger.
I'm Joanie. By day, I'm an assistive technology specialist working with individuals who are blind or visually impaired. By night, weekend, and holiday for almost four years now, I've been a GNOME community contributor working primarily on the Orca screen reader, a project led by Sun's Accessibility Program Office.
---The author of the article you didn't read.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
I guess the blind didn't see that one coming!
They should have consulted the Oracle!
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here till next thursday, please tip your waitress!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Maybe the folks at Oracle use KDE.
Perhaps Sun has "promised" too much over the years on things that don't produce a return on investment. Perhaps this is why Oracle scooped them up. Perhaps Oracle wants to remain profitable.
Yes, actually it does. Though to be more specific, you want the work done faster for nothing. Not going to happen.
Turning to a Linux advocate for thoughts on Microsoft is like asking Hitler how he felt about the Jews.
Survival of the fittest, my friends.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The main guideline for accessibility is Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. From the Wikipedia entry: "The law applies to all Federal agencies when they develop, procure, maintain, or use electronic and information technology."
So if you want to sell to the federal government, you have to be 508 compliant. The EU has a comparable set of regulations. Oracle knows this and won't jeopardize their government sales by ignoring it, the opinions of the quoted blogger notwithstanding.
Come on, srsly. You had to know oracle was going to pull something like this. They don't care about people, they care about $$$. That's the bottom line. Period.
While anyone losing their job is a bummer, the tone of the submission is a little histrionic. What actually happened here is that Oracle laid off two people who were working on accessibility. Again, that's a shame... but as the OSTATIC article points out, if Gnome accessibility work was really just two layoffs away from ending for all time, there were problems with the project before Oracle ever got here.
Also, Oracle already sponsored an OpenSolaris accessibility group, and now they're in charge of the OpenOffice accessibility work as well, to say nothing of making sure their business applications are up to government standards... is it really fair to expect it to shoulder the burden of accessibility for Gnome, too?
Maybe Novell wants to hire these guys? Or Red Hat?
Breakfast served all day!
Sun was doing this because they hoped it would profit them later one and that is the only reason.
Yeah, let's stop paying for a public police force. If you can't afford to pay protection, you deserve what you get.
Accessibility falls into a different category. You *could* say, sorry you weren't born with sight, try again next life. But that wouldn't be a very nice thing to say.
Except it's the very people with disabilities who often work toward finding the solutions they need. Just ask Louis Braille.
Are people with disabilities supposed to just lie down and take it? I would hope we've evolved past that.
No, but they also don't need you to tell them what to take or not take. People with disabilities are just as capable as anyone else to solve their own problems without your concern, interference, or instructions.
Turning to a Linux advocate for thoughts on Microsoft is like asking Hitler how he felt about the Jews.
Since when did decisions by profit maximizing big business have any impact on Open Source Software? Yes, it may have been nice that Sun was spending money on supporting this sort of thing, but why have you come to expect - nay, DEPEND on a hand-out, as if the very life of the program was tied to it?
When there is a need, the code will get written. By the grandson of the blind grandmother. Or the father of the deaf child. That has been the story of the whole open source movement to date. If you don't like what Oracle is doing, then fork and to hell with them. If you're whining because your subsidized job has been canceled - well too bad. Life sucks sometimes.
There's a reason Sun was losing money and got bought out. If you can't work on your project without pay, well, your motives have suddenly become clear. You don't care about the project but rather the paycheck. Stop pointing out how wonderful your project was going to be - because obviously it isn't important enough for you to keep working on it without being paid. And for God's sake don't blame Oracle for taking a business decision. I know it's hard to think this way today in the United Socialist States of America, but maybe Oracle doesn't want to go under like Sun did and therefore is canceling frivolous "feel good" projects that add ZERO to their bottom line.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
In general, you're right. You want a feature in OSS, and no one is doing it? Do it yourself.
And if you can't do it yourself and can't afford to pay someone to do it for you then bad luck, that's the free software way! Yay freedom!
A lot of the fear in blind-linux land isn't because Oracle fired two people, but because they fired Willie Walker. So far as I can tell from all the accessibility code I've read, Willie roughly plays the same role for open-source accessibility that Linus Torvalds plays for Linux. It's as if someone bought the company Linus works for, and said, "This guy is overpaid. Let's save some money."
I'm slowly losing my own vision, but while I can still use inaccessible software, I'm hacking like crazy in my free time to improve the things in Linux land. So, I've read a lot of code, and Willie's name is all over the place. The most important centerpiece of Linux accessibility is the Orca screen reader for the Gnome desktop. Who do you think was in charge of both Orca and Gnome accessibility? Willie, and for damned good reasons.
For guys like me who write code on Linux boxes for a living, Willie's departure from Sun is scary as hell.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
As long as Oracle is not selling Linux, Oracle has no legal obligation under 508 to make Linux accessible.
A lot of Linux gets deployed in government settings, not because somebody sells it, but because a local agency, school or office picks it up and realizing it is useful and free. This was possible as long as Sun was doing the heavy lifting of developing access tools that are required in government settings, under section 508 and ADA.
If accessibility development for Linux goes away, U.S. government offices and schools won't be able to use Linux. Oracle isn't mandated to do accessibility development in this situation, because they aren't selling anything. Somebody's going to have to pick this up if they want Linux to be viable in U.S. government and public schools.
A public police force benefits everybody except criminals. Accessibility options only benefit a tiny minority.
Perhaps a better comparison would be "Yeah, let's stop paying for public education. If you can't afford to pay for school, you deserve what you get." Which I agree with.
"Oracle is committed to creating accessible technologies and products that enhance the overall workplace environment and contribute to the productivity of our employees, our customers, and our customers' customers."
—Safra Catz, President and CFO, Oracle (http://www.oracle.com/accessibility/index.html)
Some people do what they promise, while others seem to work at Oracle... :-(
As long as Oracle is not selling Linux, Oracle has no legal obligation under 508 to make Linux accessible.
A lot of Linux gets deployed in government settings, not because somebody sells it, but because a local agency, school or office picks it up and realizing it is useful and free. This was possible as long as Sun was doing the heavy lifting of developing access tools that are required in government settings, under section 508 and ADA.
If accessibility development for Linux goes away, U.S. government offices and schools won't be able to use Linux. Oracle isn't mandated to do accessibility development in this situation, because they aren't selling anything. Somebody's going to have to pick this up if they want Linux to be viable in U.S. government and public schools.
"Are people with disabilities supposed to just lie down and take it?"
Well in the Open Source world, that's exactly what EVERYONE who isn't capable or willing to fix their problems themselves is supposed to do.
Don't like it? Fix it, hire someone to fix it, or shut the hell up. This is almost always (still!) promoted as a positive feature, but in reality is a significant disadvantage.
Sorry, but the disabled community gets no special treatment on this issue.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
It really strikes me that as this is such an important and empowering technology, and a part of the GNOME desktop no less, that it should fall to the people of the Free Software Foundation (or I guess more correctly of the GNU Project) to make this a high priority project, and see that it gets the attention it deserves.
Accessibility options only benefit a tiny minority.
Obviously you plan on getting yourself killed before you get old. You certainly are dumb enough to succeed.
It's not like anybody would ever think of such a thing.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Just don't try to get to it from SQL Server. What a nightmare to set up and maintain. Queries time out, leaving the SQL job thinking it's connected but Oracle is just sitting there, for days on end. No our SQL timeouts aren't disabled.
Initial setup was a pain as well. 600MB install to get a handful of .dlls to make an Oracle.OleDB connection. The "client lite" installs didn't work one bit - kinda like some random guy putting files in a zip and telling you to put random things in random folders and run an arcane command-line utility to "install" it. Nope, doesn't work. 600MB here we go.
Universal installer - holy crap, I can watch it paint itself, like we're back in the days of NT 4 Server on a p233-MMX. Paint some lines, wait for disk IO, paint some more. Over MSTSC, the installer repaints each window 3 times. No other app behaves like that.
It might be a good database server, but it doesn't like to be connected to anything but itself. Or maybe we can just say it hates Windows. Either way, it's the part of the job I hate. Sure blame me for not being qualified, I was hired as ASP+SQL and they don't let me DBA, nor set aside time for training, and the Oracle drivers are unsupported. So it's all me fighting the beast. At least they could declaw it, or feed it before selling it to people so it doesn't immediately eat their souls.
>
Perhaps a better comparison would be "Yeah, let's stop paying for public education. If you can't afford to pay for school, you deserve what you get." Which I agree with.
Hence the 'posted by Anonymous Coward'. Don't feed the troll.
Sad indeed but they need to maintain products accessible as they are becoming regulated for government purchases and soon, if not already, will be required by large corporations for bidding on commercial tenders. Sun wants a nice, then fine but hopefully this is only a set-back and not a complete withdrawal.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
And this is why free software is superior to commercial software!
Why? Oracle is not required under any laws to provide development time to help make Linux or any OS more friendly towards people with disabilities. Sun was doing this out of their own great good heart.
It is in their best interest to make Solaris/OpenSolaris more friendly towards people with disabilities in an attempt to capture more market share that otherwise would go to Apple Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows where such products already exist.
Actually, they did this because if Sun wants to get Solaris with GNOME on government desktops they need to have accessibility. So this is to comply with government contracts. Nobody pays for this kind of thing out of the goodness of their hearts. This is a public-ly traded company.. sheesh. sri
Let me tell you, you're right that the blind do take control and solve the problem themselves. If you lost your sight and hearing, and you were a big Linux hacker, what would you do? Buy a Braille display, slap some low-level code to drive it into the kernel to read the console, and you're off coding! That project is called "speakup", and it's great for blind-deaf programmers, and not bad at all for the blind who can hear. What if you're a really good emacs hacker who loses your vision? What do you do? Rewrite the entire desktop environment based on talking emacs? That project is called emacspeak, and many consider it the most productive environment for blind programmers with good hearing.
What if you want access to all those great Gnome applications like FireFox and OpenOffice? Now, you're at the mercy of the big Linux distros, because it involves 100 binary packages that the distro ships to all take part. That's where you need a guy like Willie Walker, who has the clout at all the major distros to set the direction for the entire linux accessibility community. That's the guy Oracle fired. That's the code which may fall apart, and the blind will not be able to fix it, not unless they find a new Willie Walker.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
I hate asking this - but would it be possible for the people in need of this kind of software to create a facebook page and ask for donations. At @$250 per person, you need just 400 to hit the magic $100K number. I would happily donate for this cause, and I think a lot of others would too.
While working on such issues is very important. it is hard for companies to keep employees just cos they are working on something which is not directly productive to a company ( or convince google .. intel or someone else to fund your 'accessiblity' program.)
My sympathies to you, and I look forward to hearing that you have a facebook page for Willie Walker - and that you raise a lot of money. I look forward to dontating.
I read the article, heart warming indeed. I am grateful of corporate assistance in Open Source, I render respect and appreciation for what has come as a result of combining capitalistic economics with social/community based efforts. A lot can happen put the two together.
But, the article seems to portray doom and utter failure if it weren't for paid sponsorship of a particular sliver of Open Source projects. This is where the confusion sets in, because while there is a lot to thank business and their contributions, a lot has been done the by the community at large. I think Accessibility Features will continue, but perhaps not with the same zeal (this I understand, not sure how many disabled hackers there are out there). Progress will continue.
It sure seems to me, that Open Source projects really started getting much better in the early 2000s. About the same time the dot-com bubble burst and put a lot of skilled programmers on the street looking for new career paths. I never saw any reports, no stats to back this up, but it did seem this way. Anyways, after 9/11 I was one of those out looking for a new job, and I just sat at home and did whatever; which included coding.
Now that's Capitalism in all it's irony if you ask me; try to save a little money by laying off high skilled people and using those 6 figure salaries to pay executive bonuses, only to later lose billions in market share because those ex-employees continued working on their own anyways in different areas and fields.
Hey, I still miss the day they got rid of the curses installer for the java crap. :) However, I was fortunate enough to work in IT for 15 years, and I never once ran Windows. My Oracle experience is mostly on Solaris, with some HP and Linux. Believe it or not, the last time I ran Windows on my personal desktop was when 3.1 was still current. I actually made it a condition of my employment, I'd tell my boss straight up on my first day, that I won't run Windows, let me know now if that is a problem.
This is a very sad day for disabled people, as it means we do not really have full-time developers any more.
When I read this my first thought was "They should march...Um. I guess they can't."
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I don't understand one thing: what stops Willie from continuing his work? Did Oracle fire him and take his brains away? Did he leave his knowledge in Oracle's courtyard and start playing Minesweeper for the rest of his life?
Gnome Accessibility code is Open Source AFAIK. Correct me if I'm wrong please. Therefore, anyone can continue doing that, including the oh-so-famous Willie. If a company decides there's no gain involved in keeping someone, the company will let the guy go. Furthermore, if Willie is as famous as you state, other companies should fight over him like crazy.
Ergo: Either Willie ain't that good or he was doing what he was doing solely for money. And yes, if no passion was involved, I would be scared as well. Otherwise, just wait and see.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Will someone please inform a person too lazy to do more than a couple quick google searches, what, precisely "a11y work" is?
I can infer by context, but a concrete definition is always best for the geek brain.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
As a Legally Blind It Pro I'm with you. And here's something a lot of people are missing on this discussion. Linux or what ever oracle is pushing selling is going no-where without accessibility. Because I'd imagine some of the first places to pick it up would be the government and the Feds can't touch it if it doesn't have accessibility features.
That's the code which may fall apart, and the blind will not be able to fix it, not unless they find a new Willie Walker.
He's not dead you know... He's just not drawing a paycheck from Oracle anymore.
90+ percent of the blind just use Windows, and are fairly happy with it. The best software, JAWs, ain't cheap at > $1000 per year, but that's the price of top-notch closed-source assessibility software.
But Linux isn't for Average Joe. It's for hackers like a lot of us here on slashdot. We do work together and individually like crazy to make Linux a great platform for the blind and visually impaired. There are multipl very successful applications written primarily by a single blind author. Linux is where a blind hacker can take control of his own life, and get a well paying job as a programmer.
Still, Linux didn't get to where it is because of a bunch of hackers with spare time. The big pieces are all funded. Think OpenOffice would continue improving with no paid developers? From the Gnome desktop to Firefox to Skype, someone got paid to write or port the major apps.
The core accessibility of Gnome using a screen reader is too big a job for any one person. It takes a community leader and a hell of a coder, someone paid to do it full time. That person was Willie, until Oracle laid him off. I'm a fair hacker myself, but I'm very very concerned... All those great Gnome apps could become useless to the blind within a few years, and there's just too much for a hacker to fix in spare time.
Great reply. I remember back in the days of BBSes. Making add-ons for the blind was relatively easy then, since everything was text based. Hell, with a 300 baud modem, the software could probably speak the text faster than it would show up. :) Everything is much more complicated now, and you can't expect one person to just throw something together to solve the problem.
Its not in there best interest if they get sued or investigated by the DoJ under the ADA act. Even if its groundless there's no way to spin that in the PR world. Plus if they don't support accessibility there goes there government contracts. The feds can buy software taht isn't disability friendly. (Period) Odds are they had some peeny pushing moron over there make a cut without thinking.
I humbly stand corrected.
cat
awww.. you can sit, it's no big deal. :)
sri
Accessibility options only benefit a tiny minority... If you can't afford to pay for school, you deserve what you get." Which I agree with.
What a nasty, creepy little attitude you have. Yuck.
In fact, given the over-the-top troll quotient I've seen in this thread, I'm betting the OP might be regretting having having taken the trouble to submit it. I'm out of here.
Experienced accessibility and GUI guys are hard to find and important to a company the size of Oracle. The people working on Gnome accessibility are quite good.
Oracle should have kept them. They could have put them to work on other projects and let them continue Gnome work on the side.
If you cannot earn from your passion, you tend to shift your passion somewhere.
Because now Willie has to get a job doing something else, working many hours a week on another task that ISN'T this one. So he's left doing this work as a side-project, which I imagine doesn't leave a lot of room for serious work.
I wouldn't say either is overall 'superior'. Proprietary software developers are more likely to have a vested interest in developing accessible software and someone is accountable. The free software way is that if you need it you either pay someone to do it or have to learn how and find time to do it yourself, if you can't do either then bad luck you don't get access and there is also not always someone accountable for non-compliance with ADA/DDA.
By ensuring that the developers in question have more time available to work on open source solutions
31012464
blurb = "The Sun %s project, which we mentioned a few years ago on Slashdot, is being shut down in the wake of the Oracle acquisition.
That should save the editors a little time over the next few weeks as they iterate over every minimally-viable, staff-of-three Sun mini-project that has been terminated by Oracle.
Actually, since we use the same accessibility controls to test software, they don't benefit a minority. Sorry, but without them, we'd just end up recreating them to do what they provide, except it'd be far less standardized into one API.
Willie Walker, is that you?
Is this me?
I don't get it. Everyone here keeps talking like work on accessibility for the disabled is somehow a charity operation, even in open source land. Like there needs to be laws to mandated it, or no one would do it. Work on accessibility is a very very important corner of computer science in general. It is where some of the most groundbreaking crap us lazy people (sorry, the motivationally challenged) have derived the stuff we take for granted everyday now on our phones, our call centers, and so on. To talk about this sort of work as if it was only for the blind, or only for the hearing impaired is silly. Shame on you all, and dumb move by any companies R&D department that walks away from it. What helps someone read a screen today, gets incorporated in to your cell phone tomorrow for the sighted that simply want to be more efficient or the just motivationally challenged.
It is also one of the really practical areas of AI, things like voice recognition, and so on.
The big opertunity that is being missed I believe is that something like 45% of Americans will be over 55 by 2012 (I might have stat a bit backwards), and that means gobs and gobs of money that can provide IT technology to the disabled. A large portion of the American population is going to be in that category shortly. It might very well be the new .com bubble of the next 10 years, to those that can appreciate the problem early. Sadly, I don't see a whole lot of that going on yet, but it will come.
My hats off and full support to anyone working in that field, regardless of who your end target it is. My predication is that your going to wake up one morning very rich not too long from now.
Living in Chile
CEO Ellison decided to pass the time by pushing a few wheelchair users down staircases while he was at it. -_-
The problem then is the high-bus-factor that open source accessibility seems to have.
My guess was the same...
http://www.kidud.co.il
Quoting from a comment I made on the ostatic blog:
"""
Few companies realise the benefits of accessibility. If your product is accessible, you can take advantage of that API to perform tests on the GUI -- that is, driving the GUI through the accessibility layer.
Being accessible means respecting the users colour scheme preferences, fonts and other system settings. This makes the application fit better into the users preferences. This does not just affect accessibility -- try using most applications with a black window background and white text (some applications ignore the text colour and render text black!).
Being accessible also means using keyboard shortcuts that fit with the system and being able to use the application without using a mouse. While some applications (like drawing applications) will require mouse or a tablet to draw with, having the application be drivable through the keyboard means that it is faster to use for the people who know those key sequences (e.g. it is faster to press Ctrl+O to open a file than to move the mouse to the menu/toolbar option for it).
"""
Also, I use text-to-speech software (accessibility) to listen to stories. I am not (yet) blind, I just find it easier. I also use that software to help with proofreading.
And, if I am in a terminal, without access to an X11 server, I can use links to browse the web (the part that supports accessibility, that is).
Allowing a program to be used through a command-line API as well as a GUI also helps with accessibility (a blind user can use it through a command shell, or Braille TTY), while it also makes scripting easier for admins or power users.
Using plain-text configuration files makes it easier to correct and fix issues, or just edit by hand, while it helps with accessibility for the same reason.
So, no... accessibility doesn't only benefit a tiny minority, it is just that people are not usually aware of it.
Like all good trolls, GP ignores frivolous things like "facts" in order to hide the huge flaws in their opinion.
For one thing the disability rate in most nations is pretty standardised at between 10-20% of the population. In the UK, 18.6%, or almost one in five people have a disability. Hardly a "tiny minority" by any means. 40% of the UK population will be aged 45+ this year, the largest number of people in work is in the 45-65 age group and 33% of people aged 50+ have a disability.
These tools help a massive number of people to be productive and contribute to society instead of doing nothing and being a drain on society, the pretty minimal costs associated with accessibility tools is far outweighed by the benefit currently delivered. Maybe GP would prefer to get his software a little cheaper but have a huge tax rise to pay for a big chunk of the population to be out of work needlessly, but to me that thinking is flawed.
On top of that, the disabled sector has huge buying power, around £50b annually which they are more inclined to spend on products which benefit them (for instance, they make up the largest sector of online spending because of the direct accessibility benefits it offers). The success of the internet and ecommerce, which benefits all of us regardless of ability, is in no small part thanks to the contributions of the "tiny minority" GP advocates ignoring.
Then of course there are huge usability benefits that everyone can enjoy which are driven by accessibility. Being able to resize a font that some designer decided would look cool rendered microscopically is the first one that springs to mind, then there are audio books, originally invented to give blind users access to books but now widely used by people who are perhaps driving or working out or just prefer to relax and listen to their favourite book after a long day. There are many other examples. The reasoning behind a feature may be to allow access to users that would otherwise be shut out, but that doesn't mean those same features can't make all of our lives just a little bit easier.
For me this is a big issue, working in web development, accessibility is so deeply intertwined with usability and search engine optimisation (white hat optimisation, that is, presenting relevant data in a format that is easily read by a machine benefits users with screen readers who access that information in the same way) that I can't even imagine not building it in at the root of a project now.
At the risk of sounding hippie, it seems to me that the free software movement should be about inclusion and enabling access to all. I was under the impression that the free software way was about the betterment of mankind by providing everyone tools they can use without restriction, and it turns out all along it's actually just about satisfying your own needs and screw everyone else?
Sorry folks , but these are NOT "the most important contributors to the Linux accessibility tools. " but just
"the most important contributors to the GNOME accessibility tools. "
GNOME != Linux.
There's KDE, XFCE Fluxbox and plenty others.
but as the OSTATIC article points out, if Gnome accessibility work was really just two layoffs away from ending for all time, there were problems with the project before Oracle ever got here.
I don't really understand this. I do assume "for all time" is hyperbole.
Important, popular, projects where most of the work is by one or two developers are common.
Example: UW-IMAP (At least until recent UW budget cuts). Most used imap implementation on the planet?
Example: troff, the original little-commented PDP-11 assembly language version. It was tense for those who depended troff to write manuals, dissertations or books when the developer died.
Example: TeX
Example: Macintosh Window Clipping
Example: Trumpet Winsock (DOS/Early Windows TCP/IP)
Example: 4K Micro-soft [sic] BASIC
Which jackass is modding all the responses down?
And Oracle doesn't?
Well, it is open source so stop whining and get busy coding.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
What do you expect out of Larry Ellison????
"This just shows that all too few companies are sponsoring a11y work"
I h2e f5g s4d a6s!
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
I don't think desktops are their priority right now and thus that is reflected in the staffing changes. They probably looked at what they were getting and made the changes based on that. sri
Willie did blog about why he does this
Oracle and unix guy.
Nobody pays for this kind of thing out of the goodness of their hearts. This is a public-ly traded company..
Which is a non-sequitur. Publicly traded companies do "goodness" stuff all the time: check out how much money (and time) big corporations spend on community projects (say, Target, Mickey D or almost any company from Fortune's 100 best companies to work for). They do it because, gee, they can, and their owners and/or employees want to. And it can of course be good for business. Much of that is not ONLY due to their benevolence, but much of it actually is.
It is rather ignorant to suggest that just because company is owned by shareholders, it precludes any possibility of corporate entities actually wanting to do Good Stuff, above and beyond their legal minimum requirements.
Good for them. If the handicap benefit from Sun getting the government to use a more secure OS then I fail to see the problem.
and it turns out all along it's actually just about satisfying your own needs and screw everyone else?
Well its about everyone satisfying your own needs and contributing these back to the community. So if no-one with the ability to develop a solution that satisfies your needs has done so you are in a tight spot. It gives the 'freedom' to do whatever you want, but you still need someone to actually 'do' it.
I'm no MS lover -- I've lost many an hour due to their pointless mucking about with the UI and other functionality between versions of their products, and I quite loathe how abusive their relationship with their customers is. (By the same token, it takes two to tango, but anyway...)
That said, I must also say that OpenOffice.org has been an amazing disappointment in various and sundry ways. Despite the considerable *potential* of the project, there are so many ways in which it falls completely flat. Assorted bugs that may present substantial barriers to adoption for more serious use remain unfixed, some for 5, 6, 7, even *8* years, sometimes with no indication of any progress and despite being theoretically trivial to implement (and despite sometimes being implemented in IBM's OOo-derived Lotus Symphony suite): [1], [2], [3]...
By any objective measure, the OOo development process has been poorly managed. I seem to recall an article here on Slashdot some months back that characterized OOo project management as "moribund", but I cannot find the link at the moment. The fact remains that other office software applications, some FOSS and some proprietary, have progressed by leaps and bounds (though, in MSO's case, perhaps simply "changed" as opposed to "progressed", YMMV) over the past almost-decade, while OOo has been largely dead in the water.
I've followed OOo since I learned of it some time before the 1.0 release, and I've gone from enthusiastic supporter and interested contributor to the fora, to a disaffected and disillusioned (though still hopeful) former user. As a Japanese-English translator, I need accurate word and character counts, which OOo still hasn't implemented. I know this makes me something of a fringe case, but I am far from alone when I say that I simply cannot use OOo in any real professional capacity.
Oh, well.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Well in Canada it can be a human rights violation if sell goods or provide a service to the public and don't make efforts to make it available to persons with disabilities. In one well known case a national broadcaster was taken to task for not providing closed captioning and lost.
IANAL but there is no reason that I know of for why this law does not apply to software or websites.
Does the USA have a persons with disabilities act? What does it say about software and websites?