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).

Comments

Re:Retards

[binarylarry]

No, retards currently use Windows, it has great accessibility support.

This about making sure retards can use Linux in the future.

Holy crip he's a crapple !

[Gothmolly]

Survival of the fittest, my friends.

Re:*Physically disabled*

[swordgeek]

"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.

Re:Capitalism at work...

[VendettaMF]

>> Also wanting to run an OS which is different from the ones sold by apple and microsoft makes one cheap?

Depends entirely on the reasons for which you wish to use it.
If for some reason you need a selection of C/C++ dev tools, plus several scripting languages, and an OS that is effectively a server OS on your desktop then fair enough, though what someone whose work/hobbies require such for is doing making office-style docs in any app is beyond me.

If on the other hand you just don't want to pay for your OS, and live somewhere that copyright is reliably enforced, and so choose the above OS, well, yeah, that's cheap and you're denying yourself a reasonable user experience through your cheapness.