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:Some perspective

[WaywardGeek]

It turns out that one of the people Oracle fired is effectively the Linus Torvald of Linux accessibility. He architected it, and wrote a ton of it. It's like firing Linux, and complaining that after all, it's only one guy.

As for OpenOffice accessibility, kiss it goodbye on Linux. Without Willie or a team of several guys to replace him, it will slowly degrade in to unusablity.

I'm 100% with you on the other guys hiring Willie. My preference would be Canonical (Ubuntu), but RedHat would be a decent fit, and I could even live with Novell. Maybe they could start working off the evil taint.