Mewtamer. Very good response.
Actually I agree with you more than I disagree. Sounds like when it comes right
down to it. All of us come to the same conclusion.
What is best for one person may not be what's best for another and vice versa.
Only thing I slightly disagree on is your comments on funding. Although I do
understand what your saying. And agree with. And I am glad you pointed out that
things are stronger with volunteers.
I guess my view is don't start a project. Expect funding. And then drop it
because no funding occurred.
I don't know what ever happened to vinux or sonar etc. But f123lite was stopped
because of lack of funds.
My view is if you are sure you need funding for something. Unless you are sure
you can get the funding don't start the project only to have it die out in the
end. Or don't expect funding is all I am saying.
I plan on using stormux. If I can figure out how on earth to get rid of the
stormux user and create my own etc. Should be able to do what I did on
raspbian. I can probably tweak it to my liking.
As for touch screens. The first accessible phone I had where I could do
everything was a touch screen. So I kind of got used to it.
But I totally understand where you are coming from. I know many people who do
better with a device with buttons.
Anyway back to funding. Rabbit trailing here a bit. I don't like rasing funds.
As sometimes well almost always it doesn't go as you hoped for.
Which is probably why I sadly have not gotten to far in certain things.
I think the other thing about raising funds for things like an accessible linux
computer/distro etc is simply most people are thinking why is this necessary?
Don't they have mac, windows, and the readers that go along with them?
Thus why do they need another computer system. It never occurs to their minds
that maybe linux might be the best system for one person whereas windows or mac
may not be right for that person. Like me for example *sigh*.
I really hope linux accessibility does not die. But as Devin stated the 11y
accessibility site links to a lot of dead projects. How can you get people
interested in funding something if projects for such things keep going dead?
And this is why I am considering if I can ever figure things out in my head to
create a screen reader maybe both for CLI and GUI linux that will be supported
funding or no funding. That anyone can use and they won't have to worry about
it disappearing off the scene at some point.
I really hope fenrir is the screen reader to stay and orca too. But only time
will tell. Just because I don't care for fenrir. Doesn't mean I can't try to
learn to use it and maybe even to come to like it.
Its just its working out of the box on distros that carry its package is
questionable to say the least.
For example it does not work via the fenrir package on debian or raspbian for
me anyway. And it should work on debian as debian stable should make sure
everything works.
But anyway.
Okay, some of my own history and some of my comments on various topics
in this thread.
I was born with glaucoma and my right retina detached in infancy. As
such, I spent most of my childhood and adolescence with only one
functional eye and wearing glasses, and in a sense, had a foot in both
the sighted and blind worlds.
My education with computers as anything other than gaming machines
started in 1996 when my parents withdrew me from the local public
schools and sent me to my state's school for the blind to start the
fourth grade. I turned 10 that fall and my first exposure to a proper
computer lab had a mixture of Old Macintoshes, IBMs running DOS, Apple
IIe and a single Windows 3.11 machine. In that lab, I learned word
processing, the basics of the DOS command line and began my
transformation from a quick hunt-and-peck typer to a quicker touch
typist, though even today, I'm nowhere near professional speed.
Over the next few years as I moved up to the middle school program at
that school, I was exposed to Windows 95, 98, and 98SE as well as
learning the basics of spreadsheets, web browsing, powerpoint, and
databases, mostly on either Microsoft Works or Microsoft Office, and
when it came time for me to take my state's 8th grade computer
competency test in the spring of 2001, I was one of the few to pass
the test on the first try.
Highschool was more of the same, just on Windows XP. My family first
got a desktop with Win 98 and later an HP Pavilion with XP sometime
during my middle school or high school years. I liked the Win9x GUI,
but hated the WinXP GUI and as being more tech savvy than my parents
meant I eventually became the family's computer administrator
especially after I learned how to reinstall Windows, switching to
Classic Styled GUI elements was always the first thing I did after a
reinstall.
Highschool is also when I first dabbled with Linux, first with
Mandrake 8 or 9 and Fedora Core, but it wasn't until December of 05
when I was in my freshman year of college that I did my first serious
Dual-Boot between Windows XP and Ubuntu(specifically, Kubuntu as KDE
made a better first impression on me than Gnome). About the time Vista
came out, I ditched Windows for a Ubuntu single boot, the first
Desktop I bought myself was a System 76 machine that came pre-loaded
with Ubuntu.
Over the second half of the 00s, I switched from KDE to XFCE and then
to LXDE and eventually switched from Ubuntu to vanilla Debian. That
System 76 machine died(bulging capacitors on the motherboard), my
state's Disability services gifted me a Win7 HP machine that I put
Debian LXDE on within hours of getting it in the fall of 2011.
My Left retina detached in 2012. At first, I tried getting sighted
assistence from the computer administrator at my college, where some
of the advanced computer courses delved into Linux at least enough to
teach people how to install it, but we didn't have much luck getting
Orca up and running. We then discovered Adriane, the accessiblity
suite that comes with Knoppix, and back then, Knoppix still had a
CD-edition that booted in Adriane mode by default.
By that time, I was already comfortable with opening a terminal
emulator to do things from the command line, but the first time I
booted Adriane Knoppix, I immediately found SBL super intuitive, loved
that I could launch Firefox without launching a full desktop
environment and took to Orca's navigational hotkeys right away.
I still run Knoppix on that HP I got from the government, though
admittedly, I'm running it from harddrive and I've done a bunch of
customizations. I want to switch to vanilla Debian(90% of the software
I'm running is sourced from Debian testing anyways), but my attempts
to recreate whatever Adriane does to launch a single application
xsession haven't gone anywhere, I find espeakup clunky compared to SBL
and SBL is so poorly distributed that I'm pretty sure I'd have to
compile it from source to get it running on vanilla Debian, which I'm
clueless about.
History aside, some of my thoughts:
GUI vs CLI:
Even before going blind, there were a lot of things where I thought
the GUI just got in the way, but also a lot of things where I thought
the cli way of performing a task required remembering to many options
and parameters. As such, back then, I was about half in the GUI and
half in a terminal emulator, but I'd say there were more things where
I was switching from GUI to CLI than vice versa as I learned new
tools. I learned to program as part of my Computer Science major in
college, and while I enjoyed using Visual Studio's WYSIWYG Gui builder
when I was learning Visual Basic(a language I haven't touched since
finishing the course) when I later learned Java and C++, I much
preferred coding in a text editor and compiling from the command line
than using the IDEs presented in class(Eclipse for Java, Bloodshed for
C++) Admittedly, my VB and Java course where pre-blindness and I
learned C++ as I was in my transition phase. No idea how going blind
would've affected things had I found IDEs a more agreeable workflow
prior to going blind.
For what it's worth, I'm on team nano and find both emacs and vim to
be quite arcane(in the sense of hidden knowledge) though I confess
even nano took some getting used to what with ctrl+O being save
instaed of open, cut and past being ctrl+k and ctrl+u instead of
ctrl+x and ctrl+v, among a few other differences from the standard
keyboard shortcuts shared by the majority of GUI editors, but I think
what won me over to Nano is being able to type nano, enter at the
command line and just start typing into the new open blank
file(whereas if I remember the lessons I've had with vi, you have to
manually switch to insert mode after opeing a file or some such), and
now, I'm so accustomed to Nano that when I recently tried micro(which
is advertised as being like nano/pico in footprint, but with modern
keyboard shortcuts, it was actually disorienting despite it being the
same set of keyboard shortcuts I'm used to when posting on the
Internet using Firefox.
Regarding e-mail, I've never seen the point of an e-mail client and
have always just used the web interface for whichever e-mail service
I'm using. All of my current e-mails are via Gmail and I find it's
basic HTML view quite easy to use with Firefox and Orca, though I
confess that I find it nearly unusable with say, links and chain, lynx
the cat, or any other text-mode web browser I've tried. Which is one
reason Firefox remains the one GUI application I run on a daily
basis(the only other GUI program I've ran in the last year or so was a
visual novel game that was self voicing). My only real complaint with
Gmail's basic HTML web interface is that it sometimes defaults to
sending to just the last poster in mailing list threads instead of the
list and when it does that, it doesn't provide an option to send the
reply just to the list and has an annoying habit of adding people I
accidentaly reply too when I want to reply to the list to my
contacts(unfortunately, I can't organize my contacts with labels like
I can my e-mails that are just read and delete) and that it defaults
to quoting everything, though fortunately, it's just two keypress to
disable quoting(x to jump to the quote checkbox, space to uncheck it).
And while it hasn't been mentioned before, I'll add that I'm not a fan
of touchscreens and absolutely hate how the slate form factor has
taken over. Back when I could see, I thought they supplemented more
traditional control schemes nicely and were a nice replacement for a
mouse where a flat surface isn't available, but are physical buttons
for things that work better with digital inputs than analog ones too
much to ask for? I don't like Apple's our way or the highway mentality
towards what their customers can do on their devices, but I kind of
want to give an Android device newer than the Samsung Acclaim running
2.3 I had when I went blind a try, but I can't be without a usable
phone for however long it takes me to adapt to a
touchscreen-controlled screen reader, I can't afford to buy an android
device outright, nor can I afford having an extra line so I can pay
for the android with one of my carrier's installment plans while
keeping my trusty flip phone connected.
At the end of the day, I think what it comes down to is choice, being
presented with many ways of doing something and then being able to
choose the option that works best for you. I like Linux because there
are so many options catering to different types of user, and even for
the blind, there's a few different distros that have blind
accessiblity as a major or even primary goal. I don't like Microsoft
or Apple because they try too hard to make their ecosystems one size
fits all and to dictate what their end users can and can't do, and
with how just about every major smartphone maker makes nothing but
slates or if they make other form factors, they don't offer them in
the US market, is more of big tech trying to dictate user experience.
As for funding, while it would be nice if everyone with the skills and
interest to improve accessibility(or any other aspect of Linux you can
think of) could dedicate as much time as they like to such goals, the
sad and harsh reality is that most of them have to work to eat,
maintain a place to stay, and keep electricity running to their
computers. Volunteers are great, and they are arguably the strong
point of FOSS, but the fact remains that it's hard to build any
sufficiently complex software project without full-time devs and until
Universal Basic Income, post-scarcity food production or some other
futuristic, utopian idea becomes reality and everyone can afford to
quick the job they do to make ends meet to free up time for work they
want to do, most FOSS projects are going to need some funding to hire
full-time people to avoid completely stalling from lack of manpower.
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===========================================================
The raspberry-vi mailing list
Archives: //www.freelists.org/archives/raspberry-vi
Administrative contact: <mike.ray@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
-----------------------------------------------------------
Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi logo are trademarks of the Raspberry Pi
Foundation.
This list is not affiliated to the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the views and
attitudes expressed by the subscribers to this list do not reflect those of the
Foundation.
Mike Ray, list creator, January 2013
