Sonar GNU/Linux merges with Vinux

[Kyle]

Sonar merges with the Vinux Project.
http://www.sonargnulinux.com and http://www.vinuxproject.org team up.

Exciting news for the Sonar and Vinux communities.
A special meeting was held early 2017 between core Sonar and Vinux team
members. It was agreed that the two projects will be working together
toward common goals. Whilst Vinux has recently indicated to move the
distro base from Ubuntu to Fedora, several meetings have been held
between Vinux and Sonar core members with an agreement taking place
toward common goals that will freshen up both projects. Some teams have
been expanded, and new teams have been created within Vinux, with the
influx of Sonar developers and users. Project leader Rob Whyte said that
the merge will minimize fragmentation and combine resources. Most
importantly, having a larger active community will allow us to develop
some visions we have had for some time.

Going forward in 2017, Vinux hopes to become a not for profit
organization and to step up what we can deliver to our loyal user base.
Under the new arrangements, Vinux has agreed to stem into the ARM
architecture, offering exciting new possibilities, and has also
committed to again provide Vinux hardware, focusing primarily on ARM
devices.

Though mainstream distro accessibility is paramount, we believe after
much consultation that a specialised distro is still required.
Together with Linux-a11y, most commonly known for the active development
of the Fenrir screen reader and the OCRPDF and OCRDesktop text
recognition tools, Vinux has agreed to continuously push for and
contribute to accessibility inclusion within main line distributions.

Vinux plans to produce images based mainly upon the Mate desktop
environment, but also Gnome; and builds for Arm devices, including the
Raspberry Pi, Odroid XU3, XU4 and C2 and hopefully others, depending on
the availability of hardware.

We at Vinux are excited for this new chapter we are embracing.
~Kyle
Vinux PR/Social Media Team Lead

[John G Heim]

I would like to offer the services of the International Association Of
Visually Impaired Technologists for this project. IAVIT already is a
501C3 non-profit in the United States. I am sure the Board Of Directors
of IAVIT would be thrilled to make whatever resources we have available
to the sonar/vinux project. If you guys have infrastructure needs, see us.





On 03/15/2017 06:30 AM, Kyle wrote:
> Sonar merges with the Vinux Project.
> http://www.sonargnulinux.com and http://www.vinuxproject.org team up.
>
> Exciting news for the Sonar and Vinux communities.
> A special meeting was held early 2017 between core Sonar and Vinux team
> members. It was agreed that the two projects will be working together
> toward common goals. Whilst Vinux has recently indicated to move the
> distro base from Ubuntu to Fedora, several meetings have been held
> between Vinux and Sonar core members with an agreement taking place
> toward common goals that will freshen up both projects. Some teams have
> been expanded, and new teams have been created within Vinux, with the
> influx of Sonar developers and users. Project leader Rob Whyte said that
> the merge will minimize fragmentation and combine resources. Most
> importantly, having a larger active community will allow us to develop
> some visions we have had for some time.
>
> Going forward in 2017, Vinux hopes to become a not for profit
> organization and to step up what we can deliver to our loyal user base.
> Under the new arrangements, Vinux has agreed to stem into the ARM
> architecture, offering exciting new possibilities, and has also
> committed to again provide Vinux hardware, focusing primarily on ARM
> devices.
>
> Though mainstream distro accessibility is paramount, we believe after
> much consultation that a specialised distro is still required.
> Together with Linux-a11y, most commonly known for the active development
> of the Fenrir screen reader and the OCRPDF and OCRDesktop text
> recognition tools, Vinux has agreed to continuously push for and
> contribute to accessibility inclusion within main line distributions.
>
> Vinux plans to produce images based mainly upon the Mate desktop
> environment, but also Gnome; and builds for Arm devices, including the
> Raspberry Pi, Odroid XU3, XU4 and C2 and hopefully others, depending on
> the availability of hardware.
>
> We at Vinux are excited for this new chapter we are embracing.
> ~Kyle
> Vinux PR/Social Media Team Lead
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-***@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list

[Tony Baechler]

Be warned that my comments are most likely unpopular and controversial. See
below. I'm not really interested in discussing this further, so don't expect
a response.

On 3/15/2017 3:30 AM, Kyle wrote:
> Sonar merges with the Vinux Project.


Well, this is indeed unfortunate. First, it was never said what "common
goals" were discussed. Granted I don't closely follow either project, but
I'm disappointed and surprised to see Vinux heading towards a Fedora base.
Red Hat has stated many, even numerous times, both in their inaction and in
published docs on their sites, that they have no or very little interest in
core accessibility. Yes, I realize this list is hosted by Red Hat, but
honestly, anyone can host a mailing list nowadays, so to me, that doesn't
count. Look at groups.io, Yahoo Groups, etc. Unlike Debian, Ubuntu and
Slackware, to the best of my knowledge, Fedora has never made their
installer accessible out of the box. I understand that now their installer
talks with Orca, but I think that's more by accident than anything. Fedora
does claim to have accessibility with the Gnome desktop though, but I don't
think one can easily use Speakup and a text console to do the install. I
could very well be wrong on this as I quit following Fedora years ago for
the above reasons. There were projects like Speakup Modified (now dead I
think), but they were community projects with no support from Fedora
developers. Presumably, since Sonar is being folded in, they will use a
distro other than Fedora. In the long term, I think Fedora would be a very
bad idea for many reasons which I won't go into here.

I think it's a great idea for there to be an a11y, or even
blindness-specific nonprofit to be formed. I would even say it's very long
overdue. If Apache, Mozilla, the Linux kernel and many others can do it,
there is no reason why the blind community can't. I would even suggest
moving this and other Linux lists to that organization. Yes, I realize that
nonprofit and not-for-profit are different. I would push to make it a U.S
based nonprofit. Start a Kickstarter or other fundraising compaign. I would
donate to it. As much as Facebook doesn't support accessibility and
generally is against the open source spirit, a page on there, Twitter,
Tumblr, etc would be a very good idea. There needs to be a strong publicity
team to write articles for both the blindness magazines (ACB Braille Forum,
etc) and the mainstream Linux magazines like LWN. Amazingly, there has been
almost no mention of Speakup in the mainstream Linux community at all. I
think a fair number of companies and developers don't take us seriously
because they don't know we exist and that blind people not only can and do
use computers but in fact can and do use Linux on a regular basis. I just
got an email from someone asking if I'm blind, how do I read and write?
There is still a huge amount of ignorance out there. I realize this isn't
strictly a Linux accessibility issue, but what leads to the next great
breakthrough might be started by a developer seeing that blind people want
an accessible desktop like everyone else. With an actual organization, KDE
could be pushed for accessibility and developers from the organization could
help. In other words, not only does it need to be a nonprofit a11y
organization who works with other developers and develops software, but it
also needs to be an advocacy and lobbyist group to demand big and small
companies make their software accessible.

However, I see a huge flaw in the merger. I think we're going down the same
path as Windows screen readers. I'm not saying that Vinux would go
commercial. What I'm saying is I fear they would end up like a big company
who shall remain nameless. There are other screen readers out there such as
NVDA, but very few people take them seriously because this big company has
almost a monopoly. Granted, Linux is still far from having a huge share of
the market, but if it should reach the 90% or even 50% point some day, it
would be very unfortunate for rehab agencies and employers to force people
to use Vinux because that's the only specialized distro for the blind. What
would be much better is to work with the mainstream distros like Debian and
Ubuntu to fix accessibility problems. Ubuntu is the most popular distro on
the desktop. While accessibility is good, it has problems. When 16.04 came
out, Orca was broken. I believe there are only a small number (no more than
a few) people on the accessibility team. Debian could also desperately use
help. It would look much better for the blind community if an organization
donated their time and talents to auditing the packages in Debian and either
fixing those with accessibility bugs which could easily be fixed or working
with the upstream developers, providing patches and consulting with them to
make their packages more accessible. To me, it seems like a huge waste of
time to put a ton of energy into beating Fedora, Ubuntu or whatever distro
into submission and slapping a "Vinux" or "Sonar" label on it when that same
upstream distro with very few tweaks could be made that way out of the box.
If you absolutely must modify packages, desktop settings, etc from the
upstream defaults, such as for low vision users, create a Vinux repository
instead or work with the Ubuntu community to create an official Ubuntu
flavor called Ubuntu VI or something. There is already a Ubuntu MATE flavor,
so why not work with them directly? While we're at it, what about Orca? I
see only one main paid developer working on it. I'm sure she could use some
help, not to mention thorough testing. Getting back to the Windows screen
readers, I fear that blind people will not be given the choice of what
distro they want and will be locked out of mainstream use because there is
primarily one Vinux to rule them all.

In conclusion, I will continue not recommending any specialized distro to my
clients and other people. I think they are almost always a mistake. As we
have seen yet again, it does lead to fragmentation and generally bad luck
for all concerned. I couldn't get any of them (Sonar, Vinux or Talking Arch)
to work reliably on my 2009 machine which runs XP great and has a very old,
well-supported standard sound card. I had to invent my own live / rescue CD
because there wasn't anything reliable. Hopefully the official Debian rescue
CD will have reliable speech soon. Something like a Vinux rescue CD would be
a great idea, but not a live system with an unreliable graphical desktop,
horrible speech (ESpeak) and an unreliable infrastructure which crashes for
no obvious reason while the mainstream Debian and Ubuntu distros don't. All
of that said, I wish both teams the best of luck and I guess we'll see what
happens. I would only add that if you haven't taken the plunge and actually
tried Linux, give Ubuntu MATE a try. It's fast, works well and can be
installed independently by the blind in about an hour. It does,
unfortunately, still use ESpeak. Getting a commercial company to release a
decent synth as open source would be a great thing for a nonprofit to do,
even if it required buying the rights.

[Christopher Chaltain]

I think we should work to make popular distributions accessible, and I
think that's still the goal of the Vinux team, but I still think it
makes sense to have custom distributions for the blind. It'll take time
and resources to get changes pushed up stream and blind new comers to
Linux, or even experienced Linux new comers who don't want to do all of
the heavy lifting themselves, should have an option. There are tons of
distributions for Linux for all sorts of niches, so I don't see an issue
with someone working on a distribution which will have the blind user in
mind.

I also think it's way too premature to compare Vinux to Freedom
Scientific. First, I don't think this will ever be an issue in Linux or
with the Vinux distribution, but even if it were, it's so far out in the
future, I don't think we need to spend a lot of energy worrying about it
now.

You always have the issue with Linux and open source projects that
people can fork something whenever they want too and go off in their own
direction. This freedom is great, but it then fragments the resource
pool, especially when that pool is as small as it is in the area of
accessibility. I see this effort as positive, because at least
temporarily, it's a pooling of resources that will allow for some
significant advances in Linux accessibility. Someone on this team, or
someone else, could always go off in their own direction and scratch
their own itch whenever they want to.

On 16/03/17 07:53, Tony Baechler wrote:
> Be warned that my comments are most likely unpopular and controversial.
> See below. I'm not really interested in discussing this further, so
> don't expect a response.
>
> On 3/15/2017 3:30 AM, Kyle wrote:
>> Sonar merges with the Vinux Project.
>
>
> Well, this is indeed unfortunate. First, it was never said what "common
> goals" were discussed. Granted I don't closely follow either project,
> but I'm disappointed and surprised to see Vinux heading towards a Fedora
> base. Red Hat has stated many, even numerous times, both in their
> inaction and in published docs on their sites, that they have no or very
> little interest in core accessibility. Yes, I realize this list is
> hosted by Red Hat, but honestly, anyone can host a mailing list
> nowadays, so to me, that doesn't count. Look at groups.io, Yahoo Groups,
> etc. Unlike Debian, Ubuntu and Slackware, to the best of my knowledge,
> Fedora has never made their installer accessible out of the box. I
> understand that now their installer talks with Orca, but I think that's
> more by accident than anything. Fedora does claim to have accessibility
> with the Gnome desktop though, but I don't think one can easily use
> Speakup and a text console to do the install. I could very well be wrong
> on this as I quit following Fedora years ago for the above reasons.
> There were projects like Speakup Modified (now dead I think), but they
> were community projects with no support from Fedora developers.
> Presumably, since Sonar is being folded in, they will use a distro other
> than Fedora. In the long term, I think Fedora would be a very bad idea
> for many reasons which I won't go into here.
>
> I think it's a great idea for there to be an a11y, or even
> blindness-specific nonprofit to be formed. I would even say it's very
> long overdue. If Apache, Mozilla, the Linux kernel and many others can
> do it, there is no reason why the blind community can't. I would even
> suggest moving this and other Linux lists to that organization. Yes, I
> realize that nonprofit and not-for-profit are different. I would push to
> make it a U.S based nonprofit. Start a Kickstarter or other fundraising
> compaign. I would donate to it. As much as Facebook doesn't support
> accessibility and generally is against the open source spirit, a page on
> there, Twitter, Tumblr, etc would be a very good idea. There needs to be
> a strong publicity team to write articles for both the blindness
> magazines (ACB Braille Forum, etc) and the mainstream Linux magazines
> like LWN. Amazingly, there has been almost no mention of Speakup in the
> mainstream Linux community at all. I think a fair number of companies
> and developers don't take us seriously because they don't know we exist
> and that blind people not only can and do use computers but in fact can
> and do use Linux on a regular basis. I just got an email from someone
> asking if I'm blind, how do I read and write? There is still a huge
> amount of ignorance out there. I realize this isn't strictly a Linux
> accessibility issue, but what leads to the next great breakthrough might
> be started by a developer seeing that blind people want an accessible
> desktop like everyone else. With an actual organization, KDE could be
> pushed for accessibility and developers from the organization could
> help. In other words, not only does it need to be a nonprofit a11y
> organization who works with other developers and develops software, but
> it also needs to be an advocacy and lobbyist group to demand big and
> small companies make their software accessible.
>
> However, I see a huge flaw in the merger. I think we're going down the
> same path as Windows screen readers. I'm not saying that Vinux would go
> commercial. What I'm saying is I fear they would end up like a big
> company who shall remain nameless. There are other screen readers out
> there such as NVDA, but very few people take them seriously because this
> big company has almost a monopoly. Granted, Linux is still far from
> having a huge share of the market, but if it should reach the 90% or
> even 50% point some day, it would be very unfortunate for rehab agencies
> and employers to force people to use Vinux because that's the only
> specialized distro for the blind. What would be much better is to work
> with the mainstream distros like Debian and Ubuntu to fix accessibility
> problems. Ubuntu is the most popular distro on the desktop. While
> accessibility is good, it has problems. When 16.04 came out, Orca was
> broken. I believe there are only a small number (no more than a few)
> people on the accessibility team. Debian could also desperately use
> help. It would look much better for the blind community if an
> organization donated their time and talents to auditing the packages in
> Debian and either fixing those with accessibility bugs which could
> easily be fixed or working with the upstream developers, providing
> patches and consulting with them to make their packages more accessible.
> To me, it seems like a huge waste of time to put a ton of energy into
> beating Fedora, Ubuntu or whatever distro into submission and slapping a
> "Vinux" or "Sonar" label on it when that same upstream distro with very
> few tweaks could be made that way out of the box. If you absolutely must
> modify packages, desktop settings, etc from the upstream defaults, such
> as for low vision users, create a Vinux repository instead or work with
> the Ubuntu community to create an official Ubuntu flavor called Ubuntu
> VI or something. There is already a Ubuntu MATE flavor, so why not work
> with them directly? While we're at it, what about Orca? I see only one
> main paid developer working on it. I'm sure she could use some help, not
> to mention thorough testing. Getting back to the Windows screen readers,
> I fear that blind people will not be given the choice of what distro
> they want and will be locked out of mainstream use because there is
> primarily one Vinux to rule them all.
>
> In conclusion, I will continue not recommending any specialized distro
> to my clients and other people. I think they are almost always a
> mistake. As we have seen yet again, it does lead to fragmentation and
> generally bad luck for all concerned. I couldn't get any of them (Sonar,
> Vinux or Talking Arch) to work reliably on my 2009 machine which runs XP
> great and has a very old, well-supported standard sound card. I had to
> invent my own live / rescue CD because there wasn't anything reliable.
> Hopefully the official Debian rescue CD will have reliable speech soon.
> Something like a Vinux rescue CD would be a great idea, but not a live
> system with an unreliable graphical desktop, horrible speech (ESpeak)
> and an unreliable infrastructure which crashes for no obvious reason
> while the mainstream Debian and Ubuntu distros don't. All of that said,
> I wish both teams the best of luck and I guess we'll see what happens. I
> would only add that if you haven't taken the plunge and actually tried
> Linux, give Ubuntu MATE a try. It's fast, works well and can be
> installed independently by the blind in about an hour. It does,
> unfortunately, still use ESpeak. Getting a commercial company to release
> a decent synth as open source would be a great thing for a nonprofit to
> do, even if it required buying the rights.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-***@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list

--
Christopher (CJ)
chaltain at Gmail

[John G Heim]

It's funny you should say it's long overdue for there to be a blindness
related non-profit. I was part of a group who created exactly that
several years ago. After much discussion, we called ourselves The
International Association Of Visually Impaired Technologists or IAVIT.
See www.iavit.org.

After creating the non-profit, the real problem has been lack of
interest in using it's resources. We are incorporated as a 501c3 in the
USA so we can legally accept donations. We have a lawyer, a bank
account, a paypal account at the non-profit rates, donated server space,
etc. The entire infrastructure is there. We're just waiting for people
to say, "Hey, I could use this or that."

On 03/16/2017 07:53 AM, Tony Baechler wrote:
> Be warned that my comments are most likely unpopular and controversial.
> See below. I'm not really interested in discussing this further, so
> don't expect a response.
>
> On 3/15/2017 3:30 AM, Kyle wrote:
>> Sonar merges with the Vinux Project.
>
>
> Well, this is indeed unfortunate. First, it was never said what "common
> goals" were discussed. Granted I don't closely follow either project,
> but I'm disappointed and surprised to see Vinux heading towards a Fedora
> base. Red Hat has stated many, even numerous times, both in their
> inaction and in published docs on their sites, that they have no or very
> little interest in core accessibility. Yes, I realize this list is
> hosted by Red Hat, but honestly, anyone can host a mailing list
> nowadays, so to me, that doesn't count. Look at groups.io, Yahoo Groups,
> etc. Unlike Debian, Ubuntu and Slackware, to the best of my knowledge,
> Fedora has never made their installer accessible out of the box. I
> understand that now their installer talks with Orca, but I think that's
> more by accident than anything. Fedora does claim to have accessibility
> with the Gnome desktop though, but I don't think one can easily use
> Speakup and a text console to do the install. I could very well be wrong
> on this as I quit following Fedora years ago for the above reasons.
> There were projects like Speakup Modified (now dead I think), but they
> were community projects with no support from Fedora developers.
> Presumably, since Sonar is being folded in, they will use a distro other
> than Fedora. In the long term, I think Fedora would be a very bad idea
> for many reasons which I won't go into here.
>
> I think it's a great idea for there to be an a11y, or even
> blindness-specific nonprofit to be formed. I would even say it's very
> long overdue. If Apache, Mozilla, the Linux kernel and many others can
> do it, there is no reason why the blind community can't. I would even
> suggest moving this and other Linux lists to that organization. Yes, I
> realize that nonprofit and not-for-profit are different. I would push to
> make it a U.S based nonprofit. Start a Kickstarter or other fundraising
> compaign. I would donate to it. As much as Facebook doesn't support
> accessibility and generally is against the open source spirit, a page on
> there, Twitter, Tumblr, etc would be a very good idea. There needs to be
> a strong publicity team to write articles for both the blindness
> magazines (ACB Braille Forum, etc) and the mainstream Linux magazines
> like LWN. Amazingly, there has been almost no mention of Speakup in the
> mainstream Linux community at all. I think a fair number of companies
> and developers don't take us seriously because they don't know we exist
> and that blind people not only can and do use computers but in fact can
> and do use Linux on a regular basis. I just got an email from someone
> asking if I'm blind, how do I read and write? There is still a huge
> amount of ignorance out there. I realize this isn't strictly a Linux
> accessibility issue, but what leads to the next great breakthrough might
> be started by a developer seeing that blind people want an accessible
> desktop like everyone else. With an actual organization, KDE could be
> pushed for accessibility and developers from the organization could
> help. In other words, not only does it need to be a nonprofit a11y
> organization who works with other developers and develops software, but
> it also needs to be an advocacy and lobbyist group to demand big and
> small companies make their software accessible.
>
> However, I see a huge flaw in the merger. I think we're going down the
> same path as Windows screen readers. I'm not saying that Vinux would go
> commercial. What I'm saying is I fear they would end up like a big
> company who shall remain nameless. There are other screen readers out
> there such as NVDA, but very few people take them seriously because this
> big company has almost a monopoly. Granted, Linux is still far from
> having a huge share of the market, but if it should reach the 90% or
> even 50% point some day, it would be very unfortunate for rehab agencies
> and employers to force people to use Vinux because that's the only
> specialized distro for the blind. What would be much better is to work
> with the mainstream distros like Debian and Ubuntu to fix accessibility
> problems. Ubuntu is the most popular distro on the desktop. While
> accessibility is good, it has problems. When 16.04 came out, Orca was
> broken. I believe there are only a small number (no more than a few)
> people on the accessibility team. Debian could also desperately use
> help. It would look much better for the blind community if an
> organization donated their time and talents to auditing the packages in
> Debian and either fixing those with accessibility bugs which could
> easily be fixed or working with the upstream developers, providing
> patches and consulting with them to make their packages more accessible.
> To me, it seems like a huge waste of time to put a ton of energy into
> beating Fedora, Ubuntu or whatever distro into submission and slapping a
> "Vinux" or "Sonar" label on it when that same upstream distro with very
> few tweaks could be made that way out of the box. If you absolutely must
> modify packages, desktop settings, etc from the upstream defaults, such
> as for low vision users, create a Vinux repository instead or work with
> the Ubuntu community to create an official Ubuntu flavor called Ubuntu
> VI or something. There is already a Ubuntu MATE flavor, so why not work
> with them directly? While we're at it, what about Orca? I see only one
> main paid developer working on it. I'm sure she could use some help, not
> to mention thorough testing. Getting back to the Windows screen readers,
> I fear that blind people will not be given the choice of what distro
> they want and will be locked out of mainstream use because there is
> primarily one Vinux to rule them all.
>
> In conclusion, I will continue not recommending any specialized distro
> to my clients and other people. I think they are almost always a
> mistake. As we have seen yet again, it does lead to fragmentation and
> generally bad luck for all concerned. I couldn't get any of them (Sonar,
> Vinux or Talking Arch) to work reliably on my 2009 machine which runs XP
> great and has a very old, well-supported standard sound card. I had to
> invent my own live / rescue CD because there wasn't anything reliable.
> Hopefully the official Debian rescue CD will have reliable speech soon.
> Something like a Vinux rescue CD would be a great idea, but not a live
> system with an unreliable graphical desktop, horrible speech (ESpeak)
> and an unreliable infrastructure which crashes for no obvious reason
> while the mainstream Debian and Ubuntu distros don't. All of that said,
> I wish both teams the best of luck and I guess we'll see what happens. I
> would only add that if you haven't taken the plunge and actually tried
> Linux, give Ubuntu MATE a try. It's fast, works well and can be
> installed independently by the blind in about an hour. It does,
> unfortunately, still use ESpeak. Getting a commercial company to release
> a decent synth as open source would be a great thing for a nonprofit to
> do, even if it required buying the rights.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-***@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list

[Eric Oyen]

and now we see the crux of the issue. its called a lack of proper attention to the problem.

this is the biggest holdup to a lot of us blind folks, lack of coherent information. It's most telling in the local activities and events arena, but it shows up in technology as well. SOunds like it's time to spread the news on FB, swarm, snap chat, twitter, and any other social media outlet we can find. I might even point this article at Theo De Raadt of OpenBSD and see if he will actually consider it.. It would be nice to have a little support from some of the big names behind alternative Operating systems (like the BSD ecology or the Linux ecology). In fact, I will cc this missive to them. I doubt it will get any sort of useful response, but there is no harm in trying.

btw, I was involved in trying to get a screen reader working in OpenBSD. It was speakeasy and it failed rather ignominiously. Since I am not a coder, I didn't exactly have the tools required to properly port it. what I ended up with only partially worked. Getting any help from the OpenBSD development corps was a lost cause right from the outset. Here it is over 4 years later and I have one since given up on ever getting some help from them. Perhaps it's time that a bunch of us bug Theo directly. if he gets enough emails on the subject, he might reconsider his position. His developer email is Theo de Raadt <***@cvs.openbsd.org>

anyway, it also sounds like we need to get everyone else in the community of the blind on board with this. that means hitting up the various lighthouse organizations, the NFB, the ACB, and the AFB as well as the world blind union. SInce I am also on a number of technology lists dedicated to blind users and technology (including almost all of the mac lists for the blind), it shouldn't be that hard to get this information out. perhaps partnering up with a few of the bigger blindness blogs wouldn't hurt either.

-eric
from the central office of the Technomage Guild, access technology division 6.

On Mar 16, 2017, at 8:39 AM, John G Heim wrote:

> It's funny you should say it's long overdue for there to be a blindness related non-profit. I was part of a group who created exactly that several years ago. After much discussion, we called ourselves The International Association Of Visually Impaired Technologists or IAVIT. See www.iavit.org.
>
> After creating the non-profit, the real problem has been lack of interest in using it's resources. We are incorporated as a 501c3 in the USA so we can legally accept donations. We have a lawyer, a bank account, a paypal account at the non-profit rates, donated server space, etc. The entire infrastructure is there. We're just waiting for people to say, "Hey, I could use this or that."
>
> On 03/16/2017 07:53 AM, Tony Baechler wrote:
>> Be warned that my comments are most likely unpopular and controversial.
>> See below. I'm not really interested in discussing this further, so
>> don't expect a response.
>>
>> On 3/15/2017 3:30 AM, Kyle wrote:
>>> Sonar merges with the Vinux Project.
>>
>>
>> Well, this is indeed unfortunate. First, it was never said what "common
>> goals" were discussed. Granted I don't closely follow either project,
>> but I'm disappointed and surprised to see Vinux heading towards a Fedora
>> base. Red Hat has stated many, even numerous times, both in their
>> inaction and in published docs on their sites, that they have no or very
>> little interest in core accessibility. Yes, I realize this list is
>> hosted by Red Hat, but honestly, anyone can host a mailing list
>> nowadays, so to me, that doesn't count. Look at groups.io, Yahoo Groups,
>> etc. Unlike Debian, Ubuntu and Slackware, to the best of my knowledge,
>> Fedora has never made their installer accessible out of the box. I
>> understand that now their installer talks with Orca, but I think that's
>> more by accident than anything. Fedora does claim to have accessibility
>> with the Gnome desktop though, but I don't think one can easily use
>> Speakup and a text console to do the install. I could very well be wrong
>> on this as I quit following Fedora years ago for the above reasons.
>> There were projects like Speakup Modified (now dead I think), but they
>> were community projects with no support from Fedora developers.
>> Presumably, since Sonar is being folded in, they will use a distro other
>> than Fedora. In the long term, I think Fedora would be a very bad idea
>> for many reasons which I won't go into here.
>>
>> I think it's a great idea for there to be an a11y, or even
>> blindness-specific nonprofit to be formed. I would even say it's very
>> long overdue. If Apache, Mozilla, the Linux kernel and many others can
>> do it, there is no reason why the blind community can't. I would even
>> suggest moving this and other Linux lists to that organization. Yes, I
>> realize that nonprofit and not-for-profit are different. I would push to
>> make it a U.S based nonprofit. Start a Kickstarter or other fundraising
>> compaign. I would donate to it. As much as Facebook doesn't support
>> accessibility and generally is against the open source spirit, a page on
>> there, Twitter, Tumblr, etc would be a very good idea. There needs to be
>> a strong publicity team to write articles for both the blindness
>> magazines (ACB Braille Forum, etc) and the mainstream Linux magazines
>> like LWN. Amazingly, there has been almost no mention of Speakup in the
>> mainstream Linux community at all. I think a fair number of companies
>> and developers don't take us seriously because they don't know we exist
>> and that blind people not only can and do use computers but in fact can
>> and do use Linux on a regular basis. I just got an email from someone
>> asking if I'm blind, how do I read and write? There is still a huge
>> amount of ignorance out there. I realize this isn't strictly a Linux
>> accessibility issue, but what leads to the next great breakthrough might
>> be started by a developer seeing that blind people want an accessible
>> desktop like everyone else. With an actual organization, KDE could be
>> pushed for accessibility and developers from the organization could
>> help. In other words, not only does it need to be a nonprofit a11y
>> organization who works with other developers and develops software, but
>> it also needs to be an advocacy and lobbyist group to demand big and
>> small companies make their software accessible.
>>
>> However, I see a huge flaw in the merger. I think we're going down the
>> same path as Windows screen readers. I'm not saying that Vinux would go
>> commercial. What I'm saying is I fear they would end up like a big
>> company who shall remain nameless. There are other screen readers out
>> there such as NVDA, but very few people take them seriously because this
>> big company has almost a monopoly. Granted, Linux is still far from
>> having a huge share of the market, but if it should reach the 90% or
>> even 50% point some day, it would be very unfortunate for rehab agencies
>> and employers to force people to use Vinux because that's the only
>> specialized distro for the blind. What would be much better is to work
>> with the mainstream distros like Debian and Ubuntu to fix accessibility
>> problems. Ubuntu is the most popular distro on the desktop. While
>> accessibility is good, it has problems. When 16.04 came out, Orca was
>> broken. I believe there are only a small number (no more than a few)
>> people on the accessibility team. Debian could also desperately use
>> help. It would look much better for the blind community if an
>> organization donated their time and talents to auditing the packages in
>> Debian and either fixing those with accessibility bugs which could
>> easily be fixed or working with the upstream developers, providing
>> patches and consulting with them to make their packages more accessible.
>> To me, it seems like a huge waste of time to put a ton of energy into
>> beating Fedora, Ubuntu or whatever distro into submission and slapping a
>> "Vinux" or "Sonar" label on it when that same upstream distro with very
>> few tweaks could be made that way out of the box. If you absolutely must
>> modify packages, desktop settings, etc from the upstream defaults, such
>> as for low vision users, create a Vinux repository instead or work with
>> the Ubuntu community to create an official Ubuntu flavor called Ubuntu
>> VI or something. There is already a Ubuntu MATE flavor, so why not work
>> with them directly? While we're at it, what about Orca? I see only one
>> main paid developer working on it. I'm sure she could use some help, not
>> to mention thorough testing. Getting back to the Windows screen readers,
>> I fear that blind people will not be given the choice of what distro
>> they want and will be locked out of mainstream use because there is
>> primarily one Vinux to rule them all.
>>
>> In conclusion, I will continue not recommending any specialized distro
>> to my clients and other people. I think they are almost always a
>> mistake. As we have seen yet again, it does lead to fragmentation and
>> generally bad luck for all concerned. I couldn't get any of them (Sonar,
>> Vinux or Talking Arch) to work reliably on my 2009 machine which runs XP
>> great and has a very old, well-supported standard sound card. I had to
>> invent my own live / rescue CD because there wasn't anything reliable.
>> Hopefully the official Debian rescue CD will have reliable speech soon.
>> Something like a Vinux rescue CD would be a great idea, but not a live
>> system with an unreliable graphical desktop, horrible speech (ESpeak)
>> and an unreliable infrastructure which crashes for no obvious reason
>> while the mainstream Debian and Ubuntu distros don't. All of that said,
>> I wish both teams the best of luck and I guess we'll see what happens. I
>> would only add that if you haven't taken the plunge and actually tried
>> Linux, give Ubuntu MATE a try. It's fast, works well and can be
>> installed independently by the blind in about an hour. It does,
>> unfortunately, still use ESpeak. Getting a commercial company to release
>> a decent synth as open source would be a great thing for a nonprofit to
>> do, even if it required buying the rights.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Blinux-list mailing list
>> Blinux-***@redhat.com
>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-***@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list

[Anders Holmberg]

Hi!
I think you can build brltty for bsd.
But i am not sure.
And that requiers a braille display.
/A
> 16 mars 2017 kl. 21:57 skrev Eric Oyen <***@icloud.com>:
>
> and now we see the crux of the issue. its called a lack of proper attention to the problem.
>
> this is the biggest holdup to a lot of us blind folks, lack of coherent information. It's most telling in the local activities and events arena, but it shows up in technology as well. SOunds like it's time to spread the news on FB, swarm, snap chat, twitter, and any other social media outlet we can find. I might even point this article at Theo De Raadt of OpenBSD and see if he will actually consider it.. It would be nice to have a little support from some of the big names behind alternative Operating systems (like the BSD ecology or the Linux ecology). In fact, I will cc this missive to them. I doubt it will get any sort of useful response, but there is no harm in trying.
>
> btw, I was involved in trying to get a screen reader working in OpenBSD. It was speakeasy and it failed rather ignominiously. Since I am not a coder, I didn't exactly have the tools required to properly port it. what I ended up with only partially worked. Getting any help from the OpenBSD development corps was a lost cause right from the outset. Here it is over 4 years later and I have one since given up on ever getting some help from them. Perhaps it's time that a bunch of us bug Theo directly. if he gets enough emails on the subject, he might reconsider his position. His developer email is Theo de Raadt <***@cvs.openbsd.org>
>
> anyway, it also sounds like we need to get everyone else in the community of the blind on board with this. that means hitting up the various lighthouse organizations, the NFB, the ACB, and the AFB as well as the world blind union. SInce I am also on a number of technology lists dedicated to blind users and technology (including almost all of the mac lists for the blind), it shouldn't be that hard to get this information out. perhaps partnering up with a few of the bigger blindness blogs wouldn't hurt either.
>
> -eric
> from the central office of the Technomage Guild, access technology division 6.
>
> On Mar 16, 2017, at 8:39 AM, John G Heim wrote:
>
>> It's funny you should say it's long overdue for there to be a blindness related non-profit. I was part of a group who created exactly that several years ago. After much discussion, we called ourselves The International Association Of Visually Impaired Technologists or IAVIT. See www.iavit.org.
>>
>> After creating the non-profit, the real problem has been lack of interest in using it's resources. We are incorporated as a 501c3 in the USA so we can legally accept donations. We have a lawyer, a bank account, a paypal account at the non-profit rates, donated server space, etc. The entire infrastructure is there. We're just waiting for people to say, "Hey, I could use this or that."
>>
>> On 03/16/2017 07:53 AM, Tony Baechler wrote:
>>> Be warned that my comments are most likely unpopular and controversial.
>>> See below. I'm not really interested in discussing this further, so
>>> don't expect a response.
>>>
>>> On 3/15/2017 3:30 AM, Kyle wrote:
>>>> Sonar merges with the Vinux Project.
>>>
>>>
>>> Well, this is indeed unfortunate. First, it was never said what "common
>>> goals" were discussed. Granted I don't closely follow either project,
>>> but I'm disappointed and surprised to see Vinux heading towards a Fedora
>>> base. Red Hat has stated many, even numerous times, both in their
>>> inaction and in published docs on their sites, that they have no or very
>>> little interest in core accessibility. Yes, I realize this list is
>>> hosted by Red Hat, but honestly, anyone can host a mailing list
>>> nowadays, so to me, that doesn't count. Look at groups.io, Yahoo Groups,
>>> etc. Unlike Debian, Ubuntu and Slackware, to the best of my knowledge,
>>> Fedora has never made their installer accessible out of the box. I
>>> understand that now their installer talks with Orca, but I think that's
>>> more by accident than anything. Fedora does claim to have accessibility
>>> with the Gnome desktop though, but I don't think one can easily use
>>> Speakup and a text console to do the install. I could very well be wrong
>>> on this as I quit following Fedora years ago for the above reasons.
>>> There were projects like Speakup Modified (now dead I think), but they
>>> were community projects with no support from Fedora developers.
>>> Presumably, since Sonar is being folded in, they will use a distro other
>>> than Fedora. In the long term, I think Fedora would be a very bad idea
>>> for many reasons which I won't go into here.
>>>
>>> I think it's a great idea for there to be an a11y, or even
>>> blindness-specific nonprofit to be formed. I would even say it's very
>>> long overdue. If Apache, Mozilla, the Linux kernel and many others can
>>> do it, there is no reason why the blind community can't. I would even
>>> suggest moving this and other Linux lists to that organization. Yes, I
>>> realize that nonprofit and not-for-profit are different. I would push to
>>> make it a U.S based nonprofit. Start a Kickstarter or other fundraising
>>> compaign. I would donate to it. As much as Facebook doesn't support
>>> accessibility and generally is against the open source spirit, a page on
>>> there, Twitter, Tumblr, etc would be a very good idea. There needs to be
>>> a strong publicity team to write articles for both the blindness
>>> magazines (ACB Braille Forum, etc) and the mainstream Linux magazines
>>> like LWN. Amazingly, there has been almost no mention of Speakup in the
>>> mainstream Linux community at all. I think a fair number of companies
>>> and developers don't take us seriously because they don't know we exist
>>> and that blind people not only can and do use computers but in fact can
>>> and do use Linux on a regular basis. I just got an email from someone
>>> asking if I'm blind, how do I read and write? There is still a huge
>>> amount of ignorance out there. I realize this isn't strictly a Linux
>>> accessibility issue, but what leads to the next great breakthrough might
>>> be started by a developer seeing that blind people want an accessible
>>> desktop like everyone else. With an actual organization, KDE could be
>>> pushed for accessibility and developers from the organization could
>>> help. In other words, not only does it need to be a nonprofit a11y
>>> organization who works with other developers and develops software, but
>>> it also needs to be an advocacy and lobbyist group to demand big and
>>> small companies make their software accessible.
>>>
>>> However, I see a huge flaw in the merger. I think we're going down the
>>> same path as Windows screen readers. I'm not saying that Vinux would go
>>> commercial. What I'm saying is I fear they would end up like a big
>>> company who shall remain nameless. There are other screen readers out
>>> there such as NVDA, but very few people take them seriously because this
>>> big company has almost a monopoly. Granted, Linux is still far from
>>> having a huge share of the market, but if it should reach the 90% or
>>> even 50% point some day, it would be very unfortunate for rehab agencies
>>> and employers to force people to use Vinux because that's the only
>>> specialized distro for the blind. What would be much better is to work
>>> with the mainstream distros like Debian and Ubuntu to fix accessibility
>>> problems. Ubuntu is the most popular distro on the desktop. While
>>> accessibility is good, it has problems. When 16.04 came out, Orca was
>>> broken. I believe there are only a small number (no more than a few)
>>> people on the accessibility team. Debian could also desperately use
>>> help. It would look much better for the blind community if an
>>> organization donated their time and talents to auditing the packages in
>>> Debian and either fixing those with accessibility bugs which could
>>> easily be fixed or working with the upstream developers, providing
>>> patches and consulting with them to make their packages more accessible.
>>> To me, it seems like a huge waste of time to put a ton of energy into
>>> beating Fedora, Ubuntu or whatever distro into submission and slapping a
>>> "Vinux" or "Sonar" label on it when that same upstream distro with very
>>> few tweaks could be made that way out of the box. If you absolutely must
>>> modify packages, desktop settings, etc from the upstream defaults, such
>>> as for low vision users, create a Vinux repository instead or work with
>>> the Ubuntu community to create an official Ubuntu flavor called Ubuntu
>>> VI or something. There is already a Ubuntu MATE flavor, so why not work
>>> with them directly? While we're at it, what about Orca? I see only one
>>> main paid developer working on it. I'm sure she could use some help, not
>>> to mention thorough testing. Getting back to the Windows screen readers,
>>> I fear that blind people will not be given the choice of what distro
>>> they want and will be locked out of mainstream use because there is
>>> primarily one Vinux to rule them all.
>>>
>>> In conclusion, I will continue not recommending any specialized distro
>>> to my clients and other people. I think they are almost always a
>>> mistake. As we have seen yet again, it does lead to fragmentation and
>>> generally bad luck for all concerned. I couldn't get any of them (Sonar,
>>> Vinux or Talking Arch) to work reliably on my 2009 machine which runs XP
>>> great and has a very old, well-supported standard sound card. I had to
>>> invent my own live / rescue CD because there wasn't anything reliable.
>>> Hopefully the official Debian rescue CD will have reliable speech soon.
>>> Something like a Vinux rescue CD would be a great idea, but not a live
>>> system with an unreliable graphical desktop, horrible speech (ESpeak)
>>> and an unreliable infrastructure which crashes for no obvious reason
>>> while the mainstream Debian and Ubuntu distros don't. All of that said,
>>> I wish both teams the best of luck and I guess we'll see what happens. I
>>> would only add that if you haven't taken the plunge and actually tried
>>> Linux, give Ubuntu MATE a try. It's fast, works well and can be
>>> installed independently by the blind in about an hour. It does,
>>> unfortunately, still use ESpeak. Getting a commercial company to release
>>> a decent synth as open source would be a great thing for a nonprofit to
>>> do, even if it required buying the rights.
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Blinux-list mailing list
>>> Blinux-***@redhat.com
>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Blinux-list mailing list
>> Blinux-***@redhat.com
>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-***@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list

[Eric Oyen]

that was one of the things I tried. I never could get it to work. Of course, someone may have properly ported it since I last tried some 4 years ago.

the only thing severely lacking in OpenBSD is braille/speech support in the installation. I mean, seriously, its a text based console environment so it should be rather easy to do, but getting Theo to see that is like pulling Teeth!

oh well, I will get a little sighted assistance here in the next few days and get an image setup under vmware. then I can get the post config done and actually be able to log into it. at that point, it should be relatively easy to add the ports tree and compile BrlTTY.



meanwhile, back to the actual issue at hand…. Does anyone here remember openSuse? I spent more than a year trying to get them to make their product accessible. Their version of Linux had some nice features, but it wouldn't work with any screen readers and there were no packages for such either. I kept asking on their forums and eventually a developer chimed in and stated they had no interest in making their product accessible (claiming too much work, etc. etc.). That was 7 years ago and they are still not accessible. So, it isn't just fedora that has an issue with us.

so, my question is this: why is Vinux now merging with SONAR (a Fedora based project) when Fedora is known to have little interest in our needs? I don't know about the rest of you, but it seems to me that we are being treated like the red headed step child here.

-eric
from the central office of the Technomage Guild, access technology division 6.

On Mar 16, 2017, at 2:00 PM, Anders Holmberg wrote:

> Hi!
> I think you can build brltty for bsd.
> But i am not sure.
> And that requiers a braille display.
> /A
>> 16 mars 2017 kl. 21:57 skrev Eric Oyen <***@icloud.com>:
>>
>> and now we see the crux of the issue. its called a lack of proper attention to the problem.
>>
>> this is the biggest holdup to a lot of us blind folks, lack of coherent information. It's most telling in the local activities and events arena, but it shows up in technology as well. SOunds like it's time to spread the news on FB, swarm, snap chat, twitter, and any other social media outlet we can find. I might even point this article at Theo De Raadt of OpenBSD and see if he will actually consider it.. It would be nice to have a little support from some of the big names behind alternative Operating systems (like the BSD ecology or the Linux ecology). In fact, I will cc this missive to them. I doubt it will get any sort of useful response, but there is no harm in trying.
>>
>> btw, I was involved in trying to get a screen reader working in OpenBSD. It was speakeasy and it failed rather ignominiously. Since I am not a coder, I didn't exactly have the tools required to properly port it. what I ended up with only partially worked. Getting any help from the OpenBSD development corps was a lost cause right from the outset. Here it is over 4 years later and I have one since given up on ever getting some help from them. Perhaps it's time that a bunch of us bug Theo directly. if he gets enough emails on the subject, he might reconsider his position. His developer email is Theo de Raadt <***@cvs.openbsd.org>
>>
>> anyway, it also sounds like we need to get everyone else in the community of the blind on board with this. that means hitting up the various lighthouse organizations, the NFB, the ACB, and the AFB as well as the world blind union. SInce I am also on a number of technology lists dedicated to blind users and technology (including almost all of the mac lists for the blind), it shouldn't be that hard to get this information out. perhaps partnering up with a few of the bigger blindness blogs wouldn't hurt either.
>>
>> -eric
>> from the central office of the Technomage Guild, access technology division 6.
>>
>> On Mar 16, 2017, at 8:39 AM, John G Heim wrote:
>>
>>> It's funny you should say it's long overdue for there to be a blindness related non-profit. I was part of a group who created exactly that several years ago. After much discussion, we called ourselves The International Association Of Visually Impaired Technologists or IAVIT. See www.iavit.org.
>>>
>>> After creating the non-profit, the real problem has been lack of interest in using it's resources. We are incorporated as a 501c3 in the USA so we can legally accept donations. We have a lawyer, a bank account, a paypal account at the non-profit rates, donated server space, etc. The entire infrastructure is there. We're just waiting for people to say, "Hey, I could use this or that."
>>>
>>> On 03/16/2017 07:53 AM, Tony Baechler wrote:
>>>> Be warned that my comments are most likely unpopular and controversial.
>>>> See below. I'm not really interested in discussing this further, so
>>>> don't expect a response.
>>>>
>>>> On 3/15/2017 3:30 AM, Kyle wrote:
>>>>> Sonar merges with the Vinux Project.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Well, this is indeed unfortunate. First, it was never said what "common
>>>> goals" were discussed. Granted I don't closely follow either project,
>>>> but I'm disappointed and surprised to see Vinux heading towards a Fedora
>>>> base. Red Hat has stated many, even numerous times, both in their
>>>> inaction and in published docs on their sites, that they have no or very
>>>> little interest in core accessibility. Yes, I realize this list is
>>>> hosted by Red Hat, but honestly, anyone can host a mailing list
>>>> nowadays, so to me, that doesn't count. Look at groups.io, Yahoo Groups,
>>>> etc. Unlike Debian, Ubuntu and Slackware, to the best of my knowledge,
>>>> Fedora has never made their installer accessible out of the box. I
>>>> understand that now their installer talks with Orca, but I think that's
>>>> more by accident than anything. Fedora does claim to have accessibility
>>>> with the Gnome desktop though, but I don't think one can easily use
>>>> Speakup and a text console to do the install. I could very well be wrong
>>>> on this as I quit following Fedora years ago for the above reasons.
>>>> There were projects like Speakup Modified (now dead I think), but they
>>>> were community projects with no support from Fedora developers.
>>>> Presumably, since Sonar is being folded in, they will use a distro other
>>>> than Fedora. In the long term, I think Fedora would be a very bad idea
>>>> for many reasons which I won't go into here.
>>>>
>>>> I think it's a great idea for there to be an a11y, or even
>>>> blindness-specific nonprofit to be formed. I would even say it's very
>>>> long overdue. If Apache, Mozilla, the Linux kernel and many others can
>>>> do it, there is no reason why the blind community can't. I would even
>>>> suggest moving this and other Linux lists to that organization. Yes, I
>>>> realize that nonprofit and not-for-profit are different. I would push to
>>>> make it a U.S based nonprofit. Start a Kickstarter or other fundraising
>>>> compaign. I would donate to it. As much as Facebook doesn't support
>>>> accessibility and generally is against the open source spirit, a page on
>>>> there, Twitter, Tumblr, etc would be a very good idea. There needs to be
>>>> a strong publicity team to write articles for both the blindness
>>>> magazines (ACB Braille Forum, etc) and the mainstream Linux magazines
>>>> like LWN. Amazingly, there has been almost no mention of Speakup in the
>>>> mainstream Linux community at all. I think a fair number of companies
>>>> and developers don't take us seriously because they don't know we exist
>>>> and that blind people not only can and do use computers but in fact can
>>>> and do use Linux on a regular basis. I just got an email from someone
>>>> asking if I'm blind, how do I read and write? There is still a huge
>>>> amount of ignorance out there. I realize this isn't strictly a Linux
>>>> accessibility issue, but what leads to the next great breakthrough might
>>>> be started by a developer seeing that blind people want an accessible
>>>> desktop like everyone else. With an actual organization, KDE could be
>>>> pushed for accessibility and developers from the organization could
>>>> help. In other words, not only does it need to be a nonprofit a11y
>>>> organization who works with other developers and develops software, but
>>>> it also needs to be an advocacy and lobbyist group to demand big and
>>>> small companies make their software accessible.
>>>>
>>>> However, I see a huge flaw in the merger. I think we're going down the
>>>> same path as Windows screen readers. I'm not saying that Vinux would go
>>>> commercial. What I'm saying is I fear they would end up like a big
>>>> company who shall remain nameless. There are other screen readers out
>>>> there such as NVDA, but very few people take them seriously because this
>>>> big company has almost a monopoly. Granted, Linux is still far from
>>>> having a huge share of the market, but if it should reach the 90% or
>>>> even 50% point some day, it would be very unfortunate for rehab agencies
>>>> and employers to force people to use Vinux because that's the only
>>>> specialized distro for the blind. What would be much better is to work
>>>> with the mainstream distros like Debian and Ubuntu to fix accessibility
>>>> problems. Ubuntu is the most popular distro on the desktop. While
>>>> accessibility is good, it has problems. When 16.04 came out, Orca was
>>>> broken. I believe there are only a small number (no more than a few)
>>>> people on the accessibility team. Debian could also desperately use
>>>> help. It would look much better for the blind community if an
>>>> organization donated their time and talents to auditing the packages in
>>>> Debian and either fixing those with accessibility bugs which could
>>>> easily be fixed or working with the upstream developers, providing
>>>> patches and consulting with them to make their packages more accessible.
>>>> To me, it seems like a huge waste of time to put a ton of energy into
>>>> beating Fedora, Ubuntu or whatever distro into submission and slapping a
>>>> "Vinux" or "Sonar" label on it when that same upstream distro with very
>>>> few tweaks could be made that way out of the box. If you absolutely must
>>>> modify packages, desktop settings, etc from the upstream defaults, such
>>>> as for low vision users, create a Vinux repository instead or work with
>>>> the Ubuntu community to create an official Ubuntu flavor called Ubuntu
>>>> VI or something. There is already a Ubuntu MATE flavor, so why not work
>>>> with them directly? While we're at it, what about Orca? I see only one
>>>> main paid developer working on it. I'm sure she could use some help, not
>>>> to mention thorough testing. Getting back to the Windows screen readers,
>>>> I fear that blind people will not be given the choice of what distro
>>>> they want and will be locked out of mainstream use because there is
>>>> primarily one Vinux to rule them all.
>>>>
>>>> In conclusion, I will continue not recommending any specialized distro
>>>> to my clients and other people. I think they are almost always a
>>>> mistake. As we have seen yet again, it does lead to fragmentation and
>>>> generally bad luck for all concerned. I couldn't get any of them (Sonar,
>>>> Vinux or Talking Arch) to work reliably on my 2009 machine which runs XP
>>>> great and has a very old, well-supported standard sound card. I had to
>>>> invent my own live / rescue CD because there wasn't anything reliable.
>>>> Hopefully the official Debian rescue CD will have reliable speech soon.
>>>> Something like a Vinux rescue CD would be a great idea, but not a live
>>>> system with an unreliable graphical desktop, horrible speech (ESpeak)
>>>> and an unreliable infrastructure which crashes for no obvious reason
>>>> while the mainstream Debian and Ubuntu distros don't. All of that said,
>>>> I wish both teams the best of luck and I guess we'll see what happens. I
>>>> would only add that if you haven't taken the plunge and actually tried
>>>> Linux, give Ubuntu MATE a try. It's fast, works well and can be
>>>> installed independently by the blind in about an hour. It does,
>>>> unfortunately, still use ESpeak. Getting a commercial company to release
>>>> a decent synth as open source would be a great thing for a nonprofit to
>>>> do, even if it required buying the rights.
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Blinux-list mailing list
>>>> Blinux-***@redhat.com
>>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Blinux-list mailing list
>>> Blinux-***@redhat.com
>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Blinux-list mailing list
>> Blinux-***@redhat.com
>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-***@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list

[Kelly Prescott]

I use BSD all the time.
I use Qemu to set them up.
This gives me the text consoles and I can install them and speakup does
the work.
I do NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD all that way.
once they are installed, I just ssh to them.




On Thu, 16 Mar 2017, Eric Oyen wrote:

> that was one of the things I tried. I never could get it to work. Of course, someone may have properly ported it since I last tried some 4 years ago.
>
> the only thing severely lacking in OpenBSD is braille/speech support in the installation. I mean, seriously, its a text based console environment so it should be rather easy to do, but getting Theo to see that is like pulling Teeth!
>
> oh well, I will get a little sighted assistance here in the next few days and get an image setup under vmware. then I can get the post config done and actually be able to log into it. at that point, it should be relatively easy to add the ports tree and compile BrlTTY.
>
>
>
> meanwhile, back to the actual issue at hand…. Does anyone here remember openSuse? I spent more than a year trying to get them to make their product accessible. Their version of Linux had some nice features, but it wouldn't work with any screen readers and there were no packages for such either. I kept asking on their forums and eventually a developer chimed in and stated they had no interest in making their product accessible (claiming too much work, etc. etc.). That was 7 years ago and they are still not accessible. So, it isn't just fedora that has an issue with us.
>
> so, my question is this: why is Vinux now merging with SONAR (a Fedora based project) when Fedora is known to have little interest in our needs? I don't know about the rest of you, but it seems to me that we are being treated like the red headed step child here.
>
> -eric
> from the central office of the Technomage Guild, access technology division 6.
>
> On Mar 16, 2017, at 2:00 PM, Anders Holmberg wrote:
>
>> Hi!
>> I think you can build brltty for bsd.
>> But i am not sure.
>> And that requiers a braille display.
>> /A
>>> 16 mars 2017 kl. 21:57 skrev Eric Oyen <***@icloud.com>:
>>>
>>> and now we see the crux of the issue. its called a lack of proper attention to the problem.
>>>
>>> this is the biggest holdup to a lot of us blind folks, lack of coherent information. It's most telling in the local activities and events arena, but it shows up in technology as well. SOunds like it's time to spread the news on FB, swarm, snap chat, twitter, and any other social media outlet we can find. I might even point this article at Theo De Raadt of OpenBSD and see if he will actually consider it.. It would be nice to have a little support from some of the big names behind alternative Operating systems (like the BSD ecology or the Linux ecology). In fact, I will cc this missive to them. I doubt it will get any sort of useful response, but there is no harm in trying.
>>>
>>> btw, I was involved in trying to get a screen reader working in OpenBSD. It was speakeasy and it failed rather ignominiously. Since I am not a coder, I didn't exactly have the tools required to properly port it. what I ended up with only partially worked. Getting any help from the OpenBSD development corps was a lost cause right from the outset. Here it is over 4 years later and I have one since given up on ever getting some help from them. Perhaps it's time that a bunch of us bug Theo directly. if he gets enough emails on the subject, he might reconsider his position. His developer email is Theo de Raadt <***@cvs.openbsd.org>
>>>
>>> anyway, it also sounds like we need to get everyone else in the community of the blind on board with this. that means hitting up the various lighthouse organizations, the NFB, the ACB, and the AFB as well as the world blind union. SInce I am also on a number of technology lists dedicated to blind users and technology (including almost all of the mac lists for the blind), it shouldn't be that hard to get this information out. perhaps partnering up with a few of the bigger blindness blogs wouldn't hurt either.
>>>
>>> -eric
>>> from the central office of the Technomage Guild, access technology division 6.
>>>
>>> On Mar 16, 2017, at 8:39 AM, John G Heim wrote:
>>>
>>>> It's funny you should say it's long overdue for there to be a blindness related non-profit. I was part of a group who created exactly that several years ago. After much discussion, we called ourselves The International Association Of Visually Impaired Technologists or IAVIT. See www.iavit.org.
>>>>
>>>> After creating the non-profit, the real problem has been lack of interest in using it's resources. We are incorporated as a 501c3 in the USA so we can legally accept donations. We have a lawyer, a bank account, a paypal account at the non-profit rates, donated server space, etc. The entire infrastructure is there. We're just waiting for people to say, "Hey, I could use this or that."
>>>>
>>>> On 03/16/2017 07:53 AM, Tony Baechler wrote:
>>>>> Be warned that my comments are most likely unpopular and controversial.
>>>>> See below. I'm not really interested in discussing this further, so
>>>>> don't expect a response.
>>>>>
>>>>> On 3/15/2017 3:30 AM, Kyle wrote:
>>>>>> Sonar merges with the Vinux Project.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Well, this is indeed unfortunate. First, it was never said what "common
>>>>> goals" were discussed. Granted I don't closely follow either project,
>>>>> but I'm disappointed and surprised to see Vinux heading towards a Fedora
>>>>> base. Red Hat has stated many, even numerous times, both in their
>>>>> inaction and in published docs on their sites, that they have no or very
>>>>> little interest in core accessibility. Yes, I realize this list is
>>>>> hosted by Red Hat, but honestly, anyone can host a mailing list
>>>>> nowadays, so to me, that doesn't count. Look at groups.io, Yahoo Groups,
>>>>> etc. Unlike Debian, Ubuntu and Slackware, to the best of my knowledge,
>>>>> Fedora has never made their installer accessible out of the box. I
>>>>> understand that now their installer talks with Orca, but I think that's
>>>>> more by accident than anything. Fedora does claim to have accessibility
>>>>> with the Gnome desktop though, but I don't think one can easily use
>>>>> Speakup and a text console to do the install. I could very well be wrong
>>>>> on this as I quit following Fedora years ago for the above reasons.
>>>>> There were projects like Speakup Modified (now dead I think), but they
>>>>> were community projects with no support from Fedora developers.
>>>>> Presumably, since Sonar is being folded in, they will use a distro other
>>>>> than Fedora. In the long term, I think Fedora would be a very bad idea
>>>>> for many reasons which I won't go into here.
>>>>>
>>>>> I think it's a great idea for there to be an a11y, or even
>>>>> blindness-specific nonprofit to be formed. I would even say it's very
>>>>> long overdue. If Apache, Mozilla, the Linux kernel and many others can
>>>>> do it, there is no reason why the blind community can't. I would even
>>>>> suggest moving this and other Linux lists to that organization. Yes, I
>>>>> realize that nonprofit and not-for-profit are different. I would push to
>>>>> make it a U.S based nonprofit. Start a Kickstarter or other fundraising
>>>>> compaign. I would donate to it. As much as Facebook doesn't support
>>>>> accessibility and generally is against the open source spirit, a page on
>>>>> there, Twitter, Tumblr, etc would be a very good idea. There needs to be
>>>>> a strong publicity team to write articles for both the blindness
>>>>> magazines (ACB Braille Forum, etc) and the mainstream Linux magazines
>>>>> like LWN. Amazingly, there has been almost no mention of Speakup in the
>>>>> mainstream Linux community at all. I think a fair number of companies
>>>>> and developers don't take us seriously because they don't know we exist
>>>>> and that blind people not only can and do use computers but in fact can
>>>>> and do use Linux on a regular basis. I just got an email from someone
>>>>> asking if I'm blind, how do I read and write? There is still a huge
>>>>> amount of ignorance out there. I realize this isn't strictly a Linux
>>>>> accessibility issue, but what leads to the next great breakthrough might
>>>>> be started by a developer seeing that blind people want an accessible
>>>>> desktop like everyone else. With an actual organization, KDE could be
>>>>> pushed for accessibility and developers from the organization could
>>>>> help. In other words, not only does it need to be a nonprofit a11y
>>>>> organization who works with other developers and develops software, but
>>>>> it also needs to be an advocacy and lobbyist group to demand big and
>>>>> small companies make their software accessible.
>>>>>
>>>>> However, I see a huge flaw in the merger. I think we're going down the
>>>>> same path as Windows screen readers. I'm not saying that Vinux would go
>>>>> commercial. What I'm saying is I fear they would end up like a big
>>>>> company who shall remain nameless. There are other screen readers out
>>>>> there such as NVDA, but very few people take them seriously because this
>>>>> big company has almost a monopoly. Granted, Linux is still far from
>>>>> having a huge share of the market, but if it should reach the 90% or
>>>>> even 50% point some day, it would be very unfortunate for rehab agencies
>>>>> and employers to force people to use Vinux because that's the only
>>>>> specialized distro for the blind. What would be much better is to work
>>>>> with the mainstream distros like Debian and Ubuntu to fix accessibility
>>>>> problems. Ubuntu is the most popular distro on the desktop. While
>>>>> accessibility is good, it has problems. When 16.04 came out, Orca was
>>>>> broken. I believe there are only a small number (no more than a few)
>>>>> people on the accessibility team. Debian could also desperately use
>>>>> help. It would look much better for the blind community if an
>>>>> organization donated their time and talents to auditing the packages in
>>>>> Debian and either fixing those with accessibility bugs which could
>>>>> easily be fixed or working with the upstream developers, providing
>>>>> patches and consulting with them to make their packages more accessible.
>>>>> To me, it seems like a huge waste of time to put a ton of energy into
>>>>> beating Fedora, Ubuntu or whatever distro into submission and slapping a
>>>>> "Vinux" or "Sonar" label on it when that same upstream distro with very
>>>>> few tweaks could be made that way out of the box. If you absolutely must
>>>>> modify packages, desktop settings, etc from the upstream defaults, such
>>>>> as for low vision users, create a Vinux repository instead or work with
>>>>> the Ubuntu community to create an official Ubuntu flavor called Ubuntu
>>>>> VI or something. There is already a Ubuntu MATE flavor, so why not work
>>>>> with them directly? While we're at it, what about Orca? I see only one
>>>>> main paid developer working on it. I'm sure she could use some help, not
>>>>> to mention thorough testing. Getting back to the Windows screen readers,
>>>>> I fear that blind people will not be given the choice of what distro
>>>>> they want and will be locked out of mainstream use because there is
>>>>> primarily one Vinux to rule them all.
>>>>>
>>>>> In conclusion, I will continue not recommending any specialized distro
>>>>> to my clients and other people. I think they are almost always a
>>>>> mistake. As we have seen yet again, it does lead to fragmentation and
>>>>> generally bad luck for all concerned. I couldn't get any of them (Sonar,
>>>>> Vinux or Talking Arch) to work reliably on my 2009 machine which runs XP
>>>>> great and has a very old, well-supported standard sound card. I had to
>>>>> invent my own live / rescue CD because there wasn't anything reliable.
>>>>> Hopefully the official Debian rescue CD will have reliable speech soon.
>>>>> Something like a Vinux rescue CD would be a great idea, but not a live
>>>>> system with an unreliable graphical desktop, horrible speech (ESpeak)
>>>>> and an unreliable infrastructure which crashes for no obvious reason
>>>>> while the mainstream Debian and Ubuntu distros don't. All of that said,
>>>>> I wish both teams the best of luck and I guess we'll see what happens. I
>>>>> would only add that if you haven't taken the plunge and actually tried
>>>>> Linux, give Ubuntu MATE a try. It's fast, works well and can be
>>>>> installed independently by the blind in about an hour. It does,
>>>>> unfortunately, still use ESpeak. Getting a commercial company to release
>>>>> a decent synth as open source would be a great thing for a nonprofit to
>>>>> do, even if it required buying the rights.
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Blinux-list mailing list
>>>>> Blinux-***@redhat.com
>>>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Blinux-list mailing list
>>>> Blinux-***@redhat.com
>>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Blinux-list mailing list
>>> Blinux-***@redhat.com
>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Blinux-list mailing list
>> Blinux-***@redhat.com
>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-***@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>

[Eric Oyen]

ok, can you send me the link with how to do that? I would certainly appreciate it a lot.

-eric
from the central office of the Technomage Guild, Access technology Division 6.

On Mar 16, 2017, at 8:30 PM, Kelly Prescott wrote:

> I use BSD all the time.
> I use Qemu to set them up.
> This gives me the text consoles and I can install them and speakup does the work.
> I do NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD all that way.
> once they are installed, I just ssh to them.
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, 16 Mar 2017, Eric Oyen wrote:
>
>> that was one of the things I tried. I never could get it to work. Of course, someone may have properly ported it since I last tried some 4 years ago.
>>
>> the only thing severely lacking in OpenBSD is braille/speech support in the installation. I mean, seriously, its a text based console environment so it should be rather easy to do, but getting Theo to see that is like pulling Teeth!
>>
>> oh well, I will get a little sighted assistance here in the next few days and get an image setup under vmware. then I can get the post config done and actually be able to log into it. at that point, it should be relatively easy to add the ports tree and compile BrlTTY.
>>
>>
>>
>> meanwhile, back to the actual issue at hand…. Does anyone here remember openSuse? I spent more than a year trying to get them to make their product accessible. Their version of Linux had some nice features, but it wouldn't work with any screen readers and there were no packages for such either. I kept asking on their forums and eventually a developer chimed in and stated they had no interest in making their product accessible (claiming too much work, etc. etc.). That was 7 years ago and they are still not accessible. So, it isn't just fedora that has an issue with us.
>>
>> so, my question is this: why is Vinux now merging with SONAR (a Fedora based project) when Fedora is known to have little interest in our needs? I don't know about the rest of you, but it seems to me that we are being treated like the red headed step child here.
>>
>> -eric
>> from the central office of the Technomage Guild, access technology division 6.
>>
>> On Mar 16, 2017, at 2:00 PM, Anders Holmberg wrote:
>>
>>> Hi!
>>> I think you can build brltty for bsd.
>>> But i am not sure.
>>> And that requiers a braille display.
>>> /A
>>>> 16 mars 2017 kl. 21:57 skrev Eric Oyen <***@icloud.com>:
>>>>
>>>> and now we see the crux of the issue. its called a lack of proper attention to the problem.
>>>>
>>>> this is the biggest holdup to a lot of us blind folks, lack of coherent information. It's most telling in the local activities and events arena, but it shows up in technology as well. SOunds like it's time to spread the news on FB, swarm, snap chat, twitter, and any other social media outlet we can find. I might even point this article at Theo De Raadt of OpenBSD and see if he will actually consider it.. It would be nice to have a little support from some of the big names behind alternative Operating systems (like the BSD ecology or the Linux ecology). In fact, I will cc this missive to them. I doubt it will get any sort of useful response, but there is no harm in trying.
>>>>
>>>> btw, I was involved in trying to get a screen reader working in OpenBSD. It was speakeasy and it failed rather ignominiously. Since I am not a coder, I didn't exactly have the tools required to properly port it. what I ended up with only partially worked. Getting any help from the OpenBSD development corps was a lost cause right from the outset. Here it is over 4 years later and I have one since given up on ever getting some help from them. Perhaps it's time that a bunch of us bug Theo directly. if he gets enough emails on the subject, he might reconsider his position. His developer email is Theo de Raadt <***@cvs.openbsd.org>
>>>>
>>>> anyway, it also sounds like we need to get everyone else in the community of the blind on board with this. that means hitting up the various lighthouse organizations, the NFB, the ACB, and the AFB as well as the world blind union. SInce I am also on a number of technology lists dedicated to blind users and technology (including almost all of the mac lists for the blind), it shouldn't be that hard to get this information out. perhaps partnering up with a few of the bigger blindness blogs wouldn't hurt either.
>>>>
>>>> -eric
>>>> from the central office of the Technomage Guild, access technology division 6.
>>>>
>>>> On Mar 16, 2017, at 8:39 AM, John G Heim wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> It's funny you should say it's long overdue for there to be a blindness related non-profit. I was part of a group who created exactly that several years ago. After much discussion, we called ourselves The International Association Of Visually Impaired Technologists or IAVIT. See www.iavit.org.
>>>>>
>>>>> After creating the non-profit, the real problem has been lack of interest in using it's resources. We are incorporated as a 501c3 in the USA so we can legally accept donations. We have a lawyer, a bank account, a paypal account at the non-profit rates, donated server space, etc. The entire infrastructure is there. We're just waiting for people to say, "Hey, I could use this or that."
>>>>>
>>>>> On 03/16/2017 07:53 AM, Tony Baechler wrote:
>>>>>> Be warned that my comments are most likely unpopular and controversial.
>>>>>> See below. I'm not really interested in discussing this further, so
>>>>>> don't expect a response.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On 3/15/2017 3:30 AM, Kyle wrote:
>>>>>>> Sonar merges with the Vinux Project.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Well, this is indeed unfortunate. First, it was never said what "common
>>>>>> goals" were discussed. Granted I don't closely follow either project,
>>>>>> but I'm disappointed and surprised to see Vinux heading towards a Fedora
>>>>>> base. Red Hat has stated many, even numerous times, both in their
>>>>>> inaction and in published docs on their sites, that they have no or very
>>>>>> little interest in core accessibility. Yes, I realize this list is
>>>>>> hosted by Red Hat, but honestly, anyone can host a mailing list
>>>>>> nowadays, so to me, that doesn't count. Look at groups.io, Yahoo Groups,
>>>>>> etc. Unlike Debian, Ubuntu and Slackware, to the best of my knowledge,
>>>>>> Fedora has never made their installer accessible out of the box. I
>>>>>> understand that now their installer talks with Orca, but I think that's
>>>>>> more by accident than anything. Fedora does claim to have accessibility
>>>>>> with the Gnome desktop though, but I don't think one can easily use
>>>>>> Speakup and a text console to do the install. I could very well be wrong
>>>>>> on this as I quit following Fedora years ago for the above reasons.
>>>>>> There were projects like Speakup Modified (now dead I think), but they
>>>>>> were community projects with no support from Fedora developers.
>>>>>> Presumably, since Sonar is being folded in, they will use a distro other
>>>>>> than Fedora. In the long term, I think Fedora would be a very bad idea
>>>>>> for many reasons which I won't go into here.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I think it's a great idea for there to be an a11y, or even
>>>>>> blindness-specific nonprofit to be formed. I would even say it's very
>>>>>> long overdue. If Apache, Mozilla, the Linux kernel and many others can
>>>>>> do it, there is no reason why the blind community can't. I would even
>>>>>> suggest moving this and other Linux lists to that organization. Yes, I
>>>>>> realize that nonprofit and not-for-profit are different. I would push to
>>>>>> make it a U.S based nonprofit. Start a Kickstarter or other fundraising
>>>>>> compaign. I would donate to it. As much as Facebook doesn't support
>>>>>> accessibility and generally is against the open source spirit, a page on
>>>>>> there, Twitter, Tumblr, etc would be a very good idea. There needs to be
>>>>>> a strong publicity team to write articles for both the blindness
>>>>>> magazines (ACB Braille Forum, etc) and the mainstream Linux magazines
>>>>>> like LWN. Amazingly, there has been almost no mention of Speakup in the
>>>>>> mainstream Linux community at all. I think a fair number of companies
>>>>>> and developers don't take us seriously because they don't know we exist
>>>>>> and that blind people not only can and do use computers but in fact can
>>>>>> and do use Linux on a regular basis. I just got an email from someone
>>>>>> asking if I'm blind, how do I read and write? There is still a huge
>>>>>> amount of ignorance out there. I realize this isn't strictly a Linux
>>>>>> accessibility issue, but what leads to the next great breakthrough might
>>>>>> be started by a developer seeing that blind people want an accessible
>>>>>> desktop like everyone else. With an actual organization, KDE could be
>>>>>> pushed for accessibility and developers from the organization could
>>>>>> help. In other words, not only does it need to be a nonprofit a11y
>>>>>> organization who works with other developers and develops software, but
>>>>>> it also needs to be an advocacy and lobbyist group to demand big and
>>>>>> small companies make their software accessible.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> However, I see a huge flaw in the merger. I think we're going down the
>>>>>> same path as Windows screen readers. I'm not saying that Vinux would go
>>>>>> commercial. What I'm saying is I fear they would end up like a big
>>>>>> company who shall remain nameless. There are other screen readers out
>>>>>> there such as NVDA, but very few people take them seriously because this
>>>>>> big company has almost a monopoly. Granted, Linux is still far from
>>>>>> having a huge share of the market, but if it should reach the 90% or
>>>>>> even 50% point some day, it would be very unfortunate for rehab agencies
>>>>>> and employers to force people to use Vinux because that's the only
>>>>>> specialized distro for the blind. What would be much better is to work
>>>>>> with the mainstream distros like Debian and Ubuntu to fix accessibility
>>>>>> problems. Ubuntu is the most popular distro on the desktop. While
>>>>>> accessibility is good, it has problems. When 16.04 came out, Orca was
>>>>>> broken. I believe there are only a small number (no more than a few)
>>>>>> people on the accessibility team. Debian could also desperately use
>>>>>> help. It would look much better for the blind community if an
>>>>>> organization donated their time and talents to auditing the packages in
>>>>>> Debian and either fixing those with accessibility bugs which could
>>>>>> easily be fixed or working with the upstream developers, providing
>>>>>> patches and consulting with them to make their packages more accessible.
>>>>>> To me, it seems like a huge waste of time to put a ton of energy into
>>>>>> beating Fedora, Ubuntu or whatever distro into submission and slapping a
>>>>>> "Vinux" or "Sonar" label on it when that same upstream distro with very
>>>>>> few tweaks could be made that way out of the box. If you absolutely must
>>>>>> modify packages, desktop settings, etc from the upstream defaults, such
>>>>>> as for low vision users, create a Vinux repository instead or work with
>>>>>> the Ubuntu community to create an official Ubuntu flavor called Ubuntu
>>>>>> VI or something. There is already a Ubuntu MATE flavor, so why not work
>>>>>> with them directly? While we're at it, what about Orca? I see only one
>>>>>> main paid developer working on it. I'm sure she could use some help, not
>>>>>> to mention thorough testing. Getting back to the Windows screen readers,
>>>>>> I fear that blind people will not be given the choice of what distro
>>>>>> they want and will be locked out of mainstream use because there is
>>>>>> primarily one Vinux to rule them all.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> In conclusion, I will continue not recommending any specialized distro
>>>>>> to my clients and other people. I think they are almost always a
>>>>>> mistake. As we have seen yet again, it does lead to fragmentation and
>>>>>> generally bad luck for all concerned. I couldn't get any of them (Sonar,
>>>>>> Vinux or Talking Arch) to work reliably on my 2009 machine which runs XP
>>>>>> great and has a very old, well-supported standard sound card. I had to
>>>>>> invent my own live / rescue CD because there wasn't anything reliable.
>>>>>> Hopefully the official Debian rescue CD will have reliable speech soon.
>>>>>> Something like a Vinux rescue CD would be a great idea, but not a live
>>>>>> system with an unreliable graphical desktop, horrible speech (ESpeak)
>>>>>> and an unreliable infrastructure which crashes for no obvious reason
>>>>>> while the mainstream Debian and Ubuntu distros don't. All of that said,
>>>>>> I wish both teams the best of luck and I guess we'll see what happens. I
>>>>>> would only add that if you haven't taken the plunge and actually tried
>>>>>> Linux, give Ubuntu MATE a try. It's fast, works well and can be
>>>>>> installed independently by the blind in about an hour. It does,
>>>>>> unfortunately, still use ESpeak. Getting a commercial company to release
>>>>>> a decent synth as open source would be a great thing for a nonprofit to
>>>>>> do, even if it required buying the rights.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> Blinux-list mailing list
>>>>>> Blinux-***@redhat.com
>>>>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Blinux-list mailing list
>>>>> Blinux-***@redhat.com
>>>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Blinux-list mailing list
>>>> Blinux-***@redhat.com
>>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Blinux-list mailing list
>>> Blinux-***@redhat.com
>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Blinux-list mailing list
>> Blinux-***@redhat.com
>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-***@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list

[Eric Oyen]

well,
emotionalism aside, a lot of what you have to say appears based in the realistic fact that we, as a community, don't have an actual unified distro to call our own. Sure, Vinux is a decent distro, but it's lacking a lot of useful features outside of accessibility.

I, myself, use Ubuntu primarily because of the larger software repository. I have also had to help out my room mate (who is definitely a Linux NewB) and Ubuntu was the easiest to use.

Now, as for Fedora, it is not accessible out of the box by default. THis provides some rather hard to tackle problems when it comes to properly installing or configuring the OS. I know, I tried 2 nights ago and got so frustrated that I ended up shelving that project until I could get sighted assistance.

Oh yeah, btw, if you think that We, the blind, are being ignored in the Linux community, you haven't seen the level of ignorance and disdain we see in the BSD ecology. Want an accessible install image? good luck, it's not supported. Want an accessible OS after you have installed it? again, not supported.

so, you think we, as a community, have it bad in linux? Not as bad as in other places.

Oh yes, you are also correct at the level of ignorance out there on the net. I get asked continually how I, as a blind person, can even use a computer. I get so tired of explaining, ad nausium, that there is technology that allows me to do this. I get the usual platitudes and then they go right on being as stupid and ignorant as before. It's like beating your head against a brick wall.

Lastly, like you suggested, I would support a kick starter project dedicated to making a truly blind accessible OS in linux as its own distribution. What would help, is getting Linus Torvalds on board with this. A word or two from the big guy on this would certainly lend a lot more support to us.

-eric
from the central office of the Technomage Guild, access technology division 6


On Mar 16, 2017, at 5:53 AM, Tony Baechler wrote:

> Be warned that my comments are most likely unpopular and controversial. See below. I'm not really interested in discussing this further, so don't expect a response.
>
> On 3/15/2017 3:30 AM, Kyle wrote:
>> Sonar merges with the Vinux Project.
>
>
> Well, this is indeed unfortunate. First, it was never said what "common goals" were discussed. Granted I don't closely follow either project, but I'm disappointed and surprised to see Vinux heading towards a Fedora base. Red Hat has stated many, even numerous times, both in their inaction and in published docs on their sites, that they have no or very little interest in core accessibility. Yes, I realize this list is hosted by Red Hat, but honestly, anyone can host a mailing list nowadays, so to me, that doesn't count. Look at groups.io, Yahoo Groups, etc. Unlike Debian, Ubuntu and Slackware, to the best of my knowledge, Fedora has never made their installer accessible out of the box. I understand that now their installer talks with Orca, but I think that's more by accident than anything. Fedora does claim to have accessibility with the Gnome desktop though, but I don't think one can easily use Speakup and a text console to do the install. I could very well be wrong on this as I qu
it following Fedora years ago for the above reasons. There were projects like Speakup Modified (now dead I think), but they were community projects with no support from Fedora developers. Presumably, since Sonar is being folded in, they will use a distro other than Fedora. In the long term, I think Fedora would be a very bad idea for many reasons which I won't go into here.
>
> I think it's a great idea for there to be an a11y, or even blindness-specific nonprofit to be formed. I would even say it's very long overdue. If Apache, Mozilla, the Linux kernel and many others can do it, there is no reason why the blind community can't. I would even suggest moving this and other Linux lists to that organization. Yes, I realize that nonprofit and not-for-profit are different. I would push to make it a U.S based nonprofit. Start a Kickstarter or other fundraising compaign. I would donate to it. As much as Facebook doesn't support accessibility and generally is against the open source spirit, a page on there, Twitter, Tumblr, etc would be a very good idea. There needs to be a strong publicity team to write articles for both the blindness magazines (ACB Braille Forum, etc) and the mainstream Linux magazines like LWN. Amazingly, there has been almost no mention of Speakup in the mainstream Linux community at all. I think a fair number of companies and developers don'
t take us seriously because they don't know we exist and that blind people not only can and do use computers but in fact can and do use Linux on a regular basis. I just got an email from someone asking if I'm blind, how do I read and write? There is still a huge amount of ignorance out there. I realize this isn't strictly a Linux accessibility issue, but what leads to the next great breakthrough might be started by a developer seeing that blind people want an accessible desktop like everyone else. With an actual organization, KDE could be pushed for accessibility and developers from the organization could help. In other words, not only does it need to be a nonprofit a11y organization who works with other developers and develops software, but it also needs to be an advocacy and lobbyist group to demand big and small companies make their software accessible.
>
> However, I see a huge flaw in the merger. I think we're going down the same path as Windows screen readers. I'm not saying that Vinux would go commercial. What I'm saying is I fear they would end up like a big company who shall remain nameless. There are other screen readers out there such as NVDA, but very few people take them seriously because this big company has almost a monopoly. Granted, Linux is still far from having a huge share of the market, but if it should reach the 90% or even 50% point some day, it would be very unfortunate for rehab agencies and employers to force people to use Vinux because that's the only specialized distro for the blind. What would be much better is to work with the mainstream distros like Debian and Ubuntu to fix accessibility problems. Ubuntu is the most popular distro on the desktop. While accessibility is good, it has problems. When 16.04 came out, Orca was broken. I believe there are only a small number (no more than a few) people on the acce
ssibility team. Debian could also desperately use help. It would look much better for the blind community if an organization donated their time and talents to auditing the packages in Debian and either fixing those with accessibility bugs which could easily be fixed or working with the upstream developers, providing patches and consulting with them to make their packages more accessible. To me, it seems like a huge waste of time to put a ton of energy into beating Fedora, Ubuntu or whatever distro into submission and slapping a "Vinux" or "Sonar" label on it when that same upstream distro with very few tweaks could be made that way out of the box. If you absolutely must modify packages, desktop settings, etc from the upstream defaults, such as for low vision users, create a Vinux repository instead or work with the Ubuntu community to create an official Ubuntu flavor called Ubuntu VI or something. There is already a Ubuntu MATE flavor, so why not work with them directly? While we're
at it, what about Orca? I see only one main paid developer working on it. I'm sure she could use some help, not to mention thorough testing. Getting back to the Windows screen readers, I fear that blind people will not be given the choice of what distro they want and will be locked out of mainstream use because there is primarily one Vinux to rule them all.
>
> In conclusion, I will continue not recommending any specialized distro to my clients and other people. I think they are almost always a mistake. As we have seen yet again, it does lead to fragmentation and generally bad luck for all concerned. I couldn't get any of them (Sonar, Vinux or Talking Arch) to work reliably on my 2009 machine which runs XP great and has a very old, well-supported standard sound card. I had to invent my own live / rescue CD because there wasn't anything reliable. Hopefully the official Debian rescue CD will have reliable speech soon. Something like a Vinux rescue CD would be a great idea, but not a live system with an unreliable graphical desktop, horrible speech (ESpeak) and an unreliable infrastructure which crashes for no obvious reason while the mainstream Debian and Ubuntu distros don't. All of that said, I wish both teams the best of luck and I guess we'll see what happens. I would only add that if you haven't taken the plunge and actually tried Linu
x, give Ubuntu MATE a try. It's fast, works well and can be installed independently by the blind in about an hour. It does, unfortunately, still use ESpeak. Getting a commercial company to release a decent synth as open source would be a great thing for a nonprofit to do, even if it required buying the rights.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-***@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list

[Joel Roth]

Eric Oyen wrote:

> ...we, as a community, don't have an actual unified distro
> to call our own. Sure, Vinux is a decent distro, but it's
> lacking a lot of useful features outside of accessibility.

> I, myself, use Ubuntu primarily because of the larger
> software repository. I have also had to help out my room
> mate (who is definitely a Linux NewB) and Ubuntu was the
> easiest to use.

Hi Eric,

I'm not sure how things are at present, but in the past,
Debian has shown some commitment to supporting
accessibility[1], including at the installer level[2].

This is not the same as a special-purpose distribution, and
I think the pages were written some time ago. Still I would
think that some effort would be worthwhile, and would
benefit all Debian derivatives, which could include
a accessbility-centric distribution.

1. https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility
2. https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility#Debian_installer_accessibility

Regards,

Joel


--
Joel Roth

[Devin Prater]

My biggest problem with Fedora is the lack of packages. Coming from Arch,
and the AUR, I'm used to having *all* of the Audacious plugins, including
crystalizer and such, but Fedora only came with a few of them. Also, for
packages like Emacspeak, you have to build the dependencies, DND builddep,
for Emacspeak to even install, which I don't understand why. builddep
wasn't needed on other packages, but it is with Emacspeak. Also, Boxing
does not work with Fedora, and eSpeak-ng is... broken or only pulls down
espeak or something. So, as I've said in IRC, I really recommend either
Debian or Arch to work with. Arch, already having Fenrir, OcrDesktop,
Emacspeak-git, Boxing support, all that, would be a fine place to start. I
know, Fedora is that middle ground between cutting-edge and yearly update
cycles, but really, it all depends on how much work we, the community, want
to do. Getting Boxing working may even be impossible on Fedora, I don't
know, but that would put any Emacspeak user off right then, or any user who
is impatient for eSpeak to gain a *lot* more privity and a more natural way
of speaking, *not* a natural voice. But, there are always other distros we
can base ourselves off of, Fedora isn't the only alternative. I just think
Arch would be a far better way to go, it's definitely be easier to start. I
know Orca is developed on Fedora, and that might add a perceived wow
factor, or a closeness with the developer, but again, Arch has the orca-git
aur package, and their is, as some one said earlier, only one developer
working on Orca.
The first big problem with Fedora is Braille. Brltty comes with the use of
the API commented, so that new users will have to know how to work with
config files, and how to uncomment things, just to get Braille with Orca.
As a Braille display user myself, it was pretty disheartening.
Then, when I did get Braille working, I found that reading with it wasn't
so fun after all. If I didn't press a key for a while, a key on the
keyboard of the laptop that is, the screen would lock, and my reading
material would be replaced by the lock screen. So now, I have my books and
such on the display for reading in the word processor.
A more serious issue with the Braille display is copying things to it. The
Various Ultra has internal storage. When I want to copy something directly
to it, it says that it cannot. But there's a side-effect, everything on the
storage media is deleted for some reason. So, I'll have to just use a flash
drive as an intermediary between them. Yes, Linux has that effect on people
after a while, you learn to just accept the flaws and deal with it, as you
had to with Windows, because there's so little support, so little time, so
little care. Especially with Braille, those who don't use it don't seem to
care much, and those who use it can't do much to change things. At least, I
can't, as I don't know a programming language.
Now for the most serious problem, Orca, for me, doesn't talk at the log in
screen. It may just be from me uninstalling and reinstalling Orca and
eSpeak so many times, and I may install another distro because of all this
Discord, all these problems, but for now, I have to listen for the little
pops of Pulse audio/alsa doing their thing to know when to press enter,
type my password, press enter again. But I didn't wipe Windows from my
machine just to run back to it, I will soldier on through this bleak
landscape, because I see so much potential if we manage to do all this.
Linux has the ability to grow, to get better, by our direct actions, not
just emailing ***@apple.com and hoping that, besides the
automated response, something will happen. I am, though, a rather sindical
person. I don't expect Orca to have amazing Braille support, with
formatting information shown by way of Liblouis, Audacious plugins being
all there, Boxing working or Emacspeak folks waking up to the possibility
that if they focused a little on helping with eSpeak, it may progress more
than just bandaging bad pronunciación a. I'm not saying this or that
project isn't getting anywhere, sure it is, but we need more help than what
we have, a sighted Orca developer who knows not much about Braille, and a
community of devs who probably don't even know we're considering their
distro to be a base for ours. But, I'll sit back and wait and see what
comes of all this, helping out where I can with documentation or user
support, all that. I'm training to be an ATI, assistive technology
instructor, so if y'all want what I can offer, as I've said in IRC where
sometimes my voice is drown out by noise, then I'm here.


On March 16, 2017 6:37:05 PM Joel Roth <***@pobox.com> wrote:

> Eric Oyen wrote:
>
>> ...we, as a community, don't have an actual unified distro
>> to call our own. Sure, Vinux is a decent distro, but it's
>> lacking a lot of useful features outside of accessibility.
>
>> I, myself, use Ubuntu primarily because of the larger
>> software repository. I have also had to help out my room
>> mate (who is definitely a Linux NewB) and Ubuntu was the
>> easiest to use.
>
> Hi Eric,
>
> I'm not sure how things are at present, but in the past,
> Debian has shown some commitment to supporting
> accessibility[1], including at the installer level[2].
>
> This is not the same as a special-purpose distribution, and
> I think the pages were written some time ago. Still I would
> think that some effort would be worthwhile, and would
> benefit all Debian derivatives, which could include
> a accessbility-centric distribution.
>
> 1. https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility
> 2. https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility#Debian_installer_accessibility
>
> Regards,
>
> Joel
>
>
> --
> Joel Roth
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-***@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list

[Eric Oyen]

hmmm. good idea there. :)

btw, I wouldn't mind compiling a version of Linux to operate on my Braille Sense U2 (which currently uses windows CE 6). Unfortunately, getting hardware specs out of HIMS International just isn't possible right now. It's like they are treating the device as some ultra secret patented device (A black box). I'd take mine apart if I didn't need it for some things.

-eric
from the central office of the Technomage Guild, Division 6.

On Mar 16, 2017, at 4:36 PM, Joel Roth wrote:

> Eric Oyen wrote:
>
>> ...we, as a community, don't have an actual unified distro
>> to call our own. Sure, Vinux is a decent distro, but it's
>> lacking a lot of useful features outside of accessibility.
>
>> I, myself, use Ubuntu primarily because of the larger
>> software repository. I have also had to help out my room
>> mate (who is definitely a Linux NewB) and Ubuntu was the
>> easiest to use.
>
> Hi Eric,
>
> I'm not sure how things are at present, but in the past,
> Debian has shown some commitment to supporting
> accessibility[1], including at the installer level[2].
>
> This is not the same as a special-purpose distribution, and
> I think the pages were written some time ago. Still I would
> think that some effort would be worthwhile, and would
> benefit all Debian derivatives, which could include
> a accessbility-centric distribution.
>
> 1. https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility
> 2. https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility#Debian_installer_accessibility
>
> Regards,
>
> Joel
>
>
> --
> Joel Roth
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-***@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list

[Tony Baechler]

Sorry for the late reply, but see comments below.

On 3/16/2017 3:36 PM, Joel Roth wrote:
> Eric Oyen wrote:
>
>> ...we, as a community, don't have an actual unified distro
>> to call our own. Sure, Vinux is a decent distro, but it's
>> lacking a lot of useful features outside of accessibility.

OK, but why do we, as a community, need a special distro? Yes, it's free
software, so there is certainly nothing stopping you as long as you realize
it's your pet distro along with the about 300 others on distrowatch.com. I
would much rather have a popular, mainstream distro which includes great
accessibility like Debian and derivatives.

>
> I'm not sure how things are at present, but in the past,
> Debian has shown some commitment to supporting
> accessibility[1], including at the installer level[2].

Yes, Debian still supports accessibility. Every alpha release of D-I has
accessibility features and fixes.

>
> This is not the same as a special-purpose distribution, and
> I think the pages were written some time ago. Still I would
> think that some effort would be worthwhile, and would
> benefit all Debian derivatives, which could include
> a accessbility-centric distribution.
>
> 1. https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility
> 2. https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility#Debian_installer_accessibility

These pages should be fairly current and are often updated by Debian
developers like Samuel Thibault.

[Devin Prater]

#+OPTIONS: latex:t toc:nil H:3
*message
I still say that arch is the best for accessibility, as we get all the
current stuff, and the AUR, Arch user repository, is absolutely
wonderful, even having programs like OcrDesktop, which I’ve not
found any distros like Fedora. I think, though, that there
should be maybe two distros for the blind: one for absolute
newbies, and another for more experienced users who want to get
up and going, but still have the power to progress in learning.
Sonar filled that second goal well: It had accessibility,
desktops built-in, and ran on n Arch derivative. The reason it
failed is because the distro under it, Manjaro, fell into
disarray, bringing Sonar down with it. That’s just my $0.02￠,
and I’ll be happy to stay with arch Linux, Emacs, Emacspeak, and
Voxin for my usage because my gosh, that’s what works for me.
Sure, if Emacspeak’s eSpeak support becomes better, I’ll
definitely go with it, as it has more languages and is being
updated, but besides all that, Debian is too outdated, Fedora
doesn’t have the packages I want, Sonar is dead, so yeah. Arch
is my /only/ real option, and it took plenty of time getting it
to work. If I didn’t have the kind folken on the IRC network, I
would still be running Fedora, or even just trudging down a road
full of Windows emptiness.
--
Sent from Discordia using Gnus for Emacs.
Email: ***@gmail.com
Long days and pleasant nights!

Tony Baechler <***@baechler.net> writes:

> Sorry for the late reply, but see comments below.
>
> On 3/16/2017 3:36 PM, Joel Roth wrote:
>> Eric Oyen wrote:
>>
>>> ...we, as a community, don't have an actual unified distro
>>> to call our own. Sure, Vinux is a decent distro, but it's
>>> lacking a lot of useful features outside of accessibility.
>
> OK, but why do we, as a community, need a special distro? Yes, it's
> free software, so there is certainly nothing stopping you as long as
> you realize it's your pet distro along with the about 300 others on
> distrowatch.com. I would much rather have a popular, mainstream distro
> which includes great accessibility like Debian and derivatives.
>
>>
>> I'm not sure how things are at present, but in the past,
>> Debian has shown some commitment to supporting
>> accessibility[1], including at the installer level[2].
>
> Yes, Debian still supports accessibility. Every alpha release of D-I
> has accessibility features and fixes.
>
>>
>> This is not the same as a special-purpose distribution, and
>> I think the pages were written some time ago. Still I would
>> think that some effort would be worthwhile, and would
>> benefit all Debian derivatives, which could include
>> a accessbility-centric distribution.
>>
>> 1. https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility
>> 2. https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility#Debian_installer_accessibility
>
> These pages should be fairly current and are often updated by Debian
> developers like Samuel Thibault.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-***@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list

[Jude dDaShiell]

Last i read, both sonargnulinux and vinux were in the process of merging into Fedora and that first release was supposed to have happened sometime in April 2017 and would be called Fedora 26.0. What has happened since then I do not now know.

Sent from BlueMail for iPhone
On Apr 18, 2017 at 6:32 AM, Tony Baechler <***@baechler.net> wrote:

Sorry for the late reply, but see comments below.

On 3/16/2017 3:36 PM, Joel Roth wrote:
Eric Oyen wrote:

...we, as a community, don't have an actual unified distro
to call our own. Sure, Vinux is a decent distro, but it's
lacking a lot of useful features outside of accessibility.

OK, but why do we, as a community, need a special distro? Yes, it's free
software, so there is certainly nothing stopping you as long as you realize
it's your pet distro along with the about 300 others on distrowatch.com. I
would much rather have a popular, mainstream distro which includes great
accessibility like Debian and derivatives.


I'm not sure how things are at present, but in the past,
Debian has shown some commitment to supporting
accessibility[1], including at the installer level[2].

Yes, Debian still supports accessibility. Every alpha release of D-I has
accessibility features and fixes.


This is not the same as a special-purpose distribution, and
I think the pages were written some time ago. Still I would
think that some effort would be worthwhile, and would
benefit all Debian derivatives, which could include
a accessbility-centric distribution.

1. https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility
2. https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility#Debian_installer_accessibility

These pages should be fairly current and are often updated by Debian
developers like Samuel Thibault.

_______________________________________________
Blinux-list mailing list
Blinux-***@redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list

[John G Heim]

Just fedora? Not vidora or something like that? Hey, if you guys end up
calling your distro vidora, I want credit. :-)

I look at the debate over whether it is better to have a distro for the
blind or to work on improving mainstream distros like the debate over
barley versus wheat beers. Personally, I prefer barley beers over any
and all wheat beers. But if someone wants to brew a wheat beer, it's
fine with me and I'd even help out if they asked. It's a matter of good
and better. In other words, my opinion is that even if you think it
would be better if these developers spent their time on mainstream
distros, we should all still recognize that what they are doing is
really helpful. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

On 04/18/2017 08:45 AM, Jude dDaShiell wrote:
> Last i read, both sonargnulinux and vinux were in the process of merging
> into Fedora and that first release was supposed to have happened
> sometime in April 2017 and would be called Fedora 26.0. What has
> happened since then I do not now know.
>
> Sent from BlueMail <http://www.bluemail.me/r> for iPhone
>
> On Apr 18, 2017 at 6:32 AM, Tony Baechler <***@baechler.net
> <mailto:***@baechler.net>> wrote:
> Sorry for the late reply, but see comments below.
>
> On 3/16/2017 3:36 PM, Joel Roth wrote:
>> Eric Oyen wrote:
>>
>>> ...we, as a community, don't have an actual unified distro
>>> to call our own. Sure, Vinux is a decent distro, but it's
>>> lacking a lot of useful features outside of accessibility.
>
> OK, but why do we, as a community, need a special distro? Yes, it's free
> software, so there is certainly nothing stopping you as long as you realize
> it's your pet distro along with the about 300 others on distrowatch.com
> <http://distrowatch.com>. I
> would much rather have a popular, mainstream distro which includes great
> accessibility like Debian and derivatives.
>
>>
>> I'm not sure how things are at present, but in the past,
>> Debian has shown some commitment to supporting
>> accessibility[1], including at the installer level[2].
>
> Yes, Debian still supports accessibility. Every alpha release of D-I has
> accessibility features and fixes.
>
>>
>> This is not the same as a special-purpose distribution, and
>> I think the pages were written some time ago. Still I would
>> think that some effort would be worthwhile, and would
>> benefit all Debian derivatives, which could include
>> a accessbility-centric distribution.
>>
>> 1. https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility
>> 2. https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility#Debian_installer_accessibility
>
> These pages should be fairly current and are often updated by Debian
> developers like Samuel Thibault.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-***@redhat.com <mailto:Blinux-***@redhat.com>
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-***@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>

[Eric Oyen]

here is one thing that might be distro independent: create an accessibility package set. This would include the required libs, scripts, binaries and config files needed to make any distro accessible. It would include emacspeak, BrlTTY, ORCA, the appropriate audio drivers and libraries and even access to the kernel modules required to make it all work.

Now, since some of the packages needed will be dependencies for other things (like sound and scripting like python), it shouldn't be all that difficult to gather everything else.

Having this setup so that any distro can be made accessible would definitely be a plus. Honestly, making this a standard package set will go a long way toward allowing us access to any distro, regardless of package management system, layout or Desktop environment.

-eric

On Apr 18, 2017, at 7:28 AM, John G Heim wrote:

> Just fedora? Not vidora or something like that? Hey, if you guys end up calling your distro vidora, I want credit. :-)
>
> I look at the debate over whether it is better to have a distro for the blind or to work on improving mainstream distros like the debate over barley versus wheat beers. Personally, I prefer barley beers over any and all wheat beers. But if someone wants to brew a wheat beer, it's fine with me and I'd even help out if they asked. It's a matter of good and better. In other words, my opinion is that even if you think it would be better if these developers spent their time on mainstream distros, we should all still recognize that what they are doing is really helpful. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
>
> On 04/18/2017 08:45 AM, Jude dDaShiell wrote:
>> Last i read, both sonargnulinux and vinux were in the process of merging
>> into Fedora and that first release was supposed to have happened
>> sometime in April 2017 and would be called Fedora 26.0. What has
>> happened since then I do not now know.
>>
>> Sent from BlueMail <http://www.bluemail.me/r> for iPhone
>>
>> On Apr 18, 2017 at 6:32 AM, Tony Baechler <***@baechler.net
>> <mailto:***@baechler.net>> wrote:
>> Sorry for the late reply, but see comments below.
>>
>> On 3/16/2017 3:36 PM, Joel Roth wrote:
>>> Eric Oyen wrote:
>>>
>>>> ...we, as a community, don't have an actual unified distro
>>>> to call our own. Sure, Vinux is a decent distro, but it's
>>>> lacking a lot of useful features outside of accessibility.
>>
>> OK, but why do we, as a community, need a special distro? Yes, it's free
>> software, so there is certainly nothing stopping you as long as you realize
>> it's your pet distro along with the about 300 others on distrowatch.com
>> <http://distrowatch.com>. I
>> would much rather have a popular, mainstream distro which includes great
>> accessibility like Debian and derivatives.
>>
>>>
>>> I'm not sure how things are at present, but in the past,
>>> Debian has shown some commitment to supporting
>>> accessibility[1], including at the installer level[2].
>>
>> Yes, Debian still supports accessibility. Every alpha release of D-I has
>> accessibility features and fixes.
>>
>>>
>>> This is not the same as a special-purpose distribution, and
>>> I think the pages were written some time ago. Still I would
>>> think that some effort would be worthwhile, and would
>>> benefit all Debian derivatives, which could include
>>> a accessbility-centric distribution.
>>>
>>> 1. https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility
>>> 2. https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility#Debian_installer_accessibility
>>
>> These pages should be fairly current and are often updated by Debian
>> developers like Samuel Thibault.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Blinux-list mailing list
>> Blinux-***@redhat.com <mailto:Blinux-***@redhat.com>
>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Blinux-list mailing list
>> Blinux-***@redhat.com
>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-***@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list

[Christopher Chaltain]

I'm a bit confused by your message. You say that Vinux is lacking a lot
of useful features. You point out the large software repository
available to Ubuntu. vinux is based on Ubuntu, so everything you get
with Ubuntu you get with Vinux.

On 16/03/17 14:42, Eric Oyen wrote:
> well,
> emotionalism aside, a lot of what you have to say appears based in the realistic fact that we, as a community, don't have an actual unified distro to call our own. Sure, Vinux is a decent distro, but it's lacking a lot of useful features outside of accessibility.
>
> I, myself, use Ubuntu primarily because of the larger software repository. I have also had to help out my room mate (who is definitely a Linux NewB) and Ubuntu was the easiest to use.
>
> Now, as for Fedora, it is not accessible out of the box by default. THis provides some rather hard to tackle problems when it comes to properly installing or configuring the OS. I know, I tried 2 nights ago and got so frustrated that I ended up shelving that project until I could get sighted assistance.
>
> Oh yeah, btw, if you think that We, the blind, are being ignored in the Linux community, you haven't seen the level of ignorance and disdain we see in the BSD ecology. Want an accessible install image? good luck, it's not supported. Want an accessible OS after you have installed it? again, not supported.
>
> so, you think we, as a community, have it bad in linux? Not as bad as in other places.
>
> Oh yes, you are also correct at the level of ignorance out there on the net. I get asked continually how I, as a blind person, can even use a computer. I get so tired of explaining, ad nausium, that there is technology that allows me to do this. I get the usual platitudes and then they go right on being as stupid and ignorant as before. It's like beating your head against a brick wall.
>
> Lastly, like you suggested, I would support a kick starter project dedicated to making a truly blind accessible OS in linux as its own distribution. What would help, is getting Linus Torvalds on board with this. A word or two from the big guy on this would certainly lend a lot more support to us.
>
> -eric
> from the central office of the Technomage Guild, access technology division 6
>
>
> On Mar 16, 2017, at 5:53 AM, Tony Baechler wrote:
>
>> Be warned that my comments are most likely unpopular and controversial. See below. I'm not really interested in discussing this further, so don't expect a response.
>>
>> On 3/15/2017 3:30 AM, Kyle wrote:
>>> Sonar merges with the Vinux Project.
>>
>>
>> Well, this is indeed unfortunate. First, it was never said what "common goals" were discussed. Granted I don't closely follow either project, but I'm disappointed and surprised to see Vinux heading towards a Fedora base. Red Hat has stated many, even numerous times, both in their inaction and in published docs on their sites, that they have no or very little interest in core accessibility. Yes, I realize this list is hosted by Red Hat, but honestly, anyone can host a mailing list nowadays, so to me, that doesn't count. Look at groups.io, Yahoo Groups, etc. Unlike Debian, Ubuntu and Slackware, to the best of my knowledge, Fedora has never made their installer accessible out of the box. I understand that now their installer talks with Orca, but I think that's more by accident than anything. Fedora does claim to have accessibility with the Gnome desktop though, but I don't think one can easily use Speakup and a text console to do the install. I could very well be wrong on this as I q
u
> it following Fedora years ago for the above reasons. There were projects like Speakup Modified (now dead I think), but they were community projects with no support from Fedora developers. Presumably, since Sonar is being folded in, they will use a distro other than Fedora. In the long term, I think Fedora would be a very bad idea for many reasons which I won't go into here.
>>
>> I think it's a great idea for there to be an a11y, or even blindness-specific nonprofit to be formed. I would even say it's very long overdue. If Apache, Mozilla, the Linux kernel and many others can do it, there is no reason why the blind community can't. I would even suggest moving this and other Linux lists to that organization. Yes, I realize that nonprofit and not-for-profit are different. I would push to make it a U.S based nonprofit. Start a Kickstarter or other fundraising compaign. I would donate to it. As much as Facebook doesn't support accessibility and generally is against the open source spirit, a page on there, Twitter, Tumblr, etc would be a very good idea. There needs to be a strong publicity team to write articles for both the blindness magazines (ACB Braille Forum, etc) and the mainstream Linux magazines like LWN. Amazingly, there has been almost no mention of Speakup in the mainstream Linux community at all. I think a fair number of companies and developers don
'
> t take us seriously because they don't know we exist and that blind people not only can and do use computers but in fact can and do use Linux on a regular basis. I just got an email from someone asking if I'm blind, how do I read and write? There is still a huge amount of ignorance out there. I realize this isn't strictly a Linux accessibility issue, but what leads to the next great breakthrough might be started by a developer seeing that blind people want an accessible desktop like everyone else. With an actual organization, KDE could be pushed for accessibility and developers from the organization could help. In other words, not only does it need to be a nonprofit a11y organization who works with other developers and develops software, but it also needs to be an advocacy and lobbyist group to demand big and small companies make their software accessible.
>>
>> However, I see a huge flaw in the merger. I think we're going down the same path as Windows screen readers. I'm not saying that Vinux would go commercial. What I'm saying is I fear they would end up like a big company who shall remain nameless. There are other screen readers out there such as NVDA, but very few people take them seriously because this big company has almost a monopoly. Granted, Linux is still far from having a huge share of the market, but if it should reach the 90% or even 50% point some day, it would be very unfortunate for rehab agencies and employers to force people to use Vinux because that's the only specialized distro for the blind. What would be much better is to work with the mainstream distros like Debian and Ubuntu to fix accessibility problems. Ubuntu is the most popular distro on the desktop. While accessibility is good, it has problems. When 16.04 came out, Orca was broken. I believe there are only a small number (no more than a few) people on the acc
e
> ssibility team. Debian could also desperately use help. It would look much better for the blind community if an organization donated their time and talents to auditing the packages in Debian and either fixing those with accessibility bugs which could easily be fixed or working with the upstream developers, providing patches and consulting with them to make their packages more accessible. To me, it seems like a huge waste of time to put a ton of energy into beating Fedora, Ubuntu or whatever distro into submission and slapping a "Vinux" or "Sonar" label on it when that same upstream distro with very few tweaks could be made that way out of the box. If you absolutely must modify packages, desktop settings, etc from the upstream defaults, such as for low vision users, create a Vinux repository instead or work with the Ubuntu community to create an official Ubuntu flavor called Ubuntu VI or something. There is already a Ubuntu MATE flavor, so why not work with them directly? While we'
re
> at it, what about Orca? I see only one main paid developer working on it. I'm sure she could use some help, not to mention thorough testing. Getting back to the Windows screen readers, I fear that blind people will not be given the choice of what distro they want and will be locked out of mainstream use because there is primarily one Vinux to rule them all.
>>
>> In conclusion, I will continue not recommending any specialized distro to my clients and other people. I think they are almost always a mistake. As we have seen yet again, it does lead to fragmentation and generally bad luck for all concerned. I couldn't get any of them (Sonar, Vinux or Talking Arch) to work reliably on my 2009 machine which runs XP great and has a very old, well-supported standard sound card. I had to invent my own live / rescue CD because there wasn't anything reliable. Hopefully the official Debian rescue CD will have reliable speech soon. Something like a Vinux rescue CD would be a great idea, but not a live system with an unreliable graphical desktop, horrible speech (ESpeak) and an unreliable infrastructure which crashes for no obvious reason while the mainstream Debian and Ubuntu distros don't. All of that said, I wish both teams the best of luck and I guess we'll see what happens. I would only add that if you haven't taken the plunge and actually tried Lin
u
> x, give Ubuntu MATE a try. It's fast, works well and can be installed independently by the blind in about an hour. It does, unfortunately, still use ESpeak. Getting a commercial company to release a decent synth as open source would be a great thing for a nonprofit to do, even if it required buying the rights.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Blinux-list mailing list
>> Blinux-***@redhat.com
>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-***@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>

--
Christopher (CJ)
chaltain at Gmail

[Jeffery Mewtamer]

--
Sincerely,

Jeffery Wright
President Emeritus, Nu Nu Chapter, Phi Theta Kappa.
Former Secretary, Student Government Association, College of the Albemarle.

[Jeffery Mewtamer]

As someone who has never used Vinux and hasn't used Ubuntu since
around Lucid, the complaint about Vinux having fewer features might be
related to bundled software. As someone who's quite comfortable with
the command line and package management via Aptitude, I actually
prefer distros that install only a bare minimum of software and being
able to add what I need for my own use on top of a clean system and
lament whenever a distro does away with a CD version, but for less
experienced users, lots of preinstalled packages, even if most are
things they'll never use, is important.

Now, I have no idea what comes pre-installed on Vinux compared with
whichever flavor of Ubuntu is being suggested as an alternative to
Vinux, but if the Ubuntu flavor has more pre-installed stuff, that
could potentially mean that flavor of Ubuntu can meet a larger number
of use cases with a single one size fits most solution for enabling
accessibility while Vinux is accessible out of the box, but requires
more personal customization to satisfy the same number of use cases.

Also, unless Vinux uses the Ubuntu repositories directly, it being
based on Ubuntu is no guarantee it's repositories won't have vastly
different contents, and even if Vinux uses the Ubuntu repositories or
the Vinux repositories are a complete snapshot of the Ubuntu
repositories aside from Vinux-specific alterations, there's always the
possibility that Vinux-specific alterations will break something with
a package that is identical to it's Ubuntu version, and Vinux will
logically never be as thoroughly tested as whatever mainstream distro
it's based on.

--
Sincerely,

Jeffery Wright
President Emeritus, Nu Nu Chapter, Phi Theta Kappa.
Former Secretary, Student Government Association, College of the Albemarle.

[Larry Hart]

Well Christopher, I think he means that if they switched to Fedora, many of the
packages may not be available. Myself, in 2010 I picked Debian as packages are
newer.
Hart

[Eric Oyen]

well, it does seem confusing.
However, when vinux changed over to canonical (or broke from it, I am not sure), a lot of changes got made.

I did a comparison of the 14.04 LTS version of Ubuntu and the build of Vinux that was its direct equivalent and the amount of stuff available in the software center varied widely. That was also the last version that also worked with ORCA properly. What I found in the software center on vinux was an abbreviated version of the full software repo available on the full ubuntu. I am not sure why and I haven't had the time to look at the repo entries in either system to see if they are pointed to differing places.


anyway, I wish I had the time to learn C++ or python or any of the other coding languages. at age 52, my brain isn't quite as fast as it once was.

-eric
from the central office of the Technomage Guild, access technology division 6


On Mar 16, 2017, at 6:48 PM, Christopher Chaltain wrote:

> I'm a bit confused by your message. You say that Vinux is lacking a lot of useful features. You point out the large software repository available to Ubuntu. vinux is based on Ubuntu, so everything you get with Ubuntu you get with Vinux.
>
> On 16/03/17 14:42, Eric Oyen wrote:
>> well,
>> emotionalism aside, a lot of what you have to say appears based in the realistic fact that we, as a community, don't have an actual unified distro to call our own. Sure, Vinux is a decent distro, but it's lacking a lot of useful features outside of accessibility.
>>
>> I, myself, use Ubuntu primarily because of the larger software repository. I have also had to help out my room mate (who is definitely a Linux NewB) and Ubuntu was the easiest to use.
>>
>> Now, as for Fedora, it is not accessible out of the box by default. THis provides some rather hard to tackle problems when it comes to properly installing or configuring the OS. I know, I tried 2 nights ago and got so frustrated that I ended up shelving that project until I could get sighted assistance.
>>
>> Oh yeah, btw, if you think that We, the blind, are being ignored in the Linux community, you haven't seen the level of ignorance and disdain we see in the BSD ecology. Want an accessible install image? good luck, it's not supported. Want an accessible OS after you have installed it? again, not supported.
>>
>> so, you think we, as a community, have it bad in linux? Not as bad as in other places.
>>
>> Oh yes, you are also correct at the level of ignorance out there on the net. I get asked continually how I, as a blind person, can even use a computer. I get so tired of explaining, ad nausium, that there is technology that allows me to do this. I get the usual platitudes and then they go right on being as stupid and ignorant as before. It's like beating your head against a brick wall.
>>
>> Lastly, like you suggested, I would support a kick starter project dedicated to making a truly blind accessible OS in linux as its own distribution. What would help, is getting Linus Torvalds on board with this. A word or two from the big guy on this would certainly lend a lot more support to us.
>>
>> -eric
>> from the central office of the Technomage Guild, access technology division 6
>>
>>
>> On Mar 16, 2017, at 5:53 AM, Tony Baechler wrote:
>>
>>> Be warned that my comments are most likely unpopular and controversial. See below. I'm not really interested in discussing this further, so don't expect a response.
>>>
>>> On 3/15/2017 3:30 AM, Kyle wrote:
>>>> Sonar merges with the Vinux Project.
>>>
>>>
>>> Well, this is indeed unfortunate. First, it was never said what "common goals" were discussed. Granted I don't closely follow either project, but I'm disappointed and surprised to see Vinux heading towards a Fedora base. Red Hat has stated many, even numerous times, both in their inaction and in published docs on their sites, that they have no or very little interest in core accessibility. Yes, I realize this list is hosted by Red Hat, but honestly, anyone can host a mailing list nowadays, so to me, that doesn't count. Look at groups.io, Yahoo Groups, etc. Unlike Debian, Ubuntu and Slackware, to the best of my knowledge, Fedora has never made their installer accessible out of the box. I understand that now their installer talks with Orca, but I think that's more by accident than anything. Fedora does claim to have accessibility with the Gnome desktop though, but I don't think one can easily use Speakup and a text console to do the install. I could very well be wrong on this as I
q
> u
>> it following Fedora years ago for the above reasons. There were projects like Speakup Modified (now dead I think), but they were community projects with no support from Fedora developers. Presumably, since Sonar is being folded in, they will use a distro other than Fedora. In the long term, I think Fedora would be a very bad idea for many reasons which I won't go into here.
>>>
>>> I think it's a great idea for there to be an a11y, or even blindness-specific nonprofit to be formed. I would even say it's very long overdue. If Apache, Mozilla, the Linux kernel and many others can do it, there is no reason why the blind community can't. I would even suggest moving this and other Linux lists to that organization. Yes, I realize that nonprofit and not-for-profit are different. I would push to make it a U.S based nonprofit. Start a Kickstarter or other fundraising compaign. I would donate to it. As much as Facebook doesn't support accessibility and generally is against the open source spirit, a page on there, Twitter, Tumblr, etc would be a very good idea. There needs to be a strong publicity team to write articles for both the blindness magazines (ACB Braille Forum, etc) and the mainstream Linux magazines like LWN. Amazingly, there has been almost no mention of Speakup in the mainstream Linux community at all. I think a fair number of companies and developers do
n
> '
>> t take us seriously because they don't know we exist and that blind people not only can and do use computers but in fact can and do use Linux on a regular basis. I just got an email from someone asking if I'm blind, how do I read and write? There is still a huge amount of ignorance out there. I realize this isn't strictly a Linux accessibility issue, but what leads to the next great breakthrough might be started by a developer seeing that blind people want an accessible desktop like everyone else. With an actual organization, KDE could be pushed for accessibility and developers from the organization could help. In other words, not only does it need to be a nonprofit a11y organization who works with other developers and develops software, but it also needs to be an advocacy and lobbyist group to demand big and small companies make their software accessible.
>>>
>>> However, I see a huge flaw in the merger. I think we're going down the same path as Windows screen readers. I'm not saying that Vinux would go commercial. What I'm saying is I fear they would end up like a big company who shall remain nameless. There are other screen readers out there such as NVDA, but very few people take them seriously because this big company has almost a monopoly. Granted, Linux is still far from having a huge share of the market, but if it should reach the 90% or even 50% point some day, it would be very unfortunate for rehab agencies and employers to force people to use Vinux because that's the only specialized distro for the blind. What would be much better is to work with the mainstream distros like Debian and Ubuntu to fix accessibility problems. Ubuntu is the most popular distro on the desktop. While accessibility is good, it has problems. When 16.04 came out, Orca was broken. I believe there are only a small number (no more than a few) people on the ac
c
> e
>> ssibility team. Debian could also desperately use help. It would look much better for the blind community if an organization donated their time and talents to auditing the packages in Debian and either fixing those with accessibility bugs which could easily be fixed or working with the upstream developers, providing patches and consulting with them to make their packages more accessible. To me, it seems like a huge waste of time to put a ton of energy into beating Fedora, Ubuntu or whatever distro into submission and slapping a "Vinux" or "Sonar" label on it when that same upstream distro with very few tweaks could be made that way out of the box. If you absolutely must modify packages, desktop settings, etc from the upstream defaults, such as for low vision users, create a Vinux repository instead or work with the Ubuntu community to create an official Ubuntu flavor called Ubuntu VI or something. There is already a Ubuntu MATE flavor, so why not work with them directly? While we'
> re
>> at it, what about Orca? I see only one main paid developer working on it. I'm sure she could use some help, not to mention thorough testing. Getting back to the Windows screen readers, I fear that blind people will not be given the choice of what distro they want and will be locked out of mainstream use because there is primarily one Vinux to rule them all.
>>>
>>> In conclusion, I will continue not recommending any specialized distro to my clients and other people. I think they are almost always a mistake. As we have seen yet again, it does lead to fragmentation and generally bad luck for all concerned. I couldn't get any of them (Sonar, Vinux or Talking Arch) to work reliably on my 2009 machine which runs XP great and has a very old, well-supported standard sound card. I had to invent my own live / rescue CD because there wasn't anything reliable. Hopefully the official Debian rescue CD will have reliable speech soon. Something like a Vinux rescue CD would be a great idea, but not a live system with an unreliable graphical desktop, horrible speech (ESpeak) and an unreliable infrastructure which crashes for no obvious reason while the mainstream Debian and Ubuntu distros don't. All of that said, I wish both teams the best of luck and I guess we'll see what happens. I would only add that if you haven't taken the plunge and actually tried Li
n
> u
>> x, give Ubuntu MATE a try. It's fast, works well and can be installed independently by the blind in about an hour. It does, unfortunately, still use ESpeak. Getting a commercial company to release a decent synth as open source would be a great thing for a nonprofit to do, even if it required buying the rights.
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Blinux-list mailing list
>>> Blinux-***@redhat.com
>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Blinux-list mailing list
>> Blinux-***@redhat.com
>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>>
>
> --
> Christopher (CJ)
> chaltain at Gmail
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-***@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list

[Christopher Chaltain]

I never noticed this, but I never did a side by side comparison between
Vinux 5 and Ubuntu 14.04. I suppose it's possible the Vinux team
commented out some repositories available in Ubuntu, but I'd be
surprised if this were the case. I never had any issues enabling or
adding any Ubuntu repositories I wanted to under Vinux though.

On 16/03/17 21:39, Eric Oyen wrote:
> well, it does seem confusing.
> However, when vinux changed over to canonical (or broke from it, I am not sure), a lot of changes got made.
>
> I did a comparison of the 14.04 LTS version of Ubuntu and the build of Vinux that was its direct equivalent and the amount of stuff available in the software center varied widely. That was also the last version that also worked with ORCA properly. What I found in the software center on vinux was an abbreviated version of the full software repo available on the full ubuntu. I am not sure why and I haven't had the time to look at the repo entries in either system to see if they are pointed to differing places.
>
>
> anyway, I wish I had the time to learn C++ or python or any of the other coding languages. at age 52, my brain isn't quite as fast as it once was.
>
> -eric
> from the central office of the Technomage Guild, access technology division 6
>
>
> On Mar 16, 2017, at 6:48 PM, Christopher Chaltain wrote:
>
>> I'm a bit confused by your message. You say that Vinux is lacking a lot of useful features. You point out the large software repository available to Ubuntu. vinux is based on Ubuntu, so everything you get with Ubuntu you get with Vinux.
>>
>> On 16/03/17 14:42, Eric Oyen wrote:
>>> well,
>>> emotionalism aside, a lot of what you have to say appears based in the realistic fact that we, as a community, don't have an actual unified distro to call our own. Sure, Vinux is a decent distro, but it's lacking a lot of useful features outside of accessibility.
>>>
>>> I, myself, use Ubuntu primarily because of the larger software repository. I have also had to help out my room mate (who is definitely a Linux NewB) and Ubuntu was the easiest to use.
>>>
>>> Now, as for Fedora, it is not accessible out of the box by default. THis provides some rather hard to tackle problems when it comes to properly installing or configuring the OS. I know, I tried 2 nights ago and got so frustrated that I ended up shelving that project until I could get sighted assistance.
>>>
>>> Oh yeah, btw, if you think that We, the blind, are being ignored in the Linux community, you haven't seen the level of ignorance and disdain we see in the BSD ecology. Want an accessible install image? good luck, it's not supported. Want an accessible OS after you have installed it? again, not supported.
>>>
>>> so, you think we, as a community, have it bad in linux? Not as bad as in other places.
>>>
>>> Oh yes, you are also correct at the level of ignorance out there on the net. I get asked continually how I, as a blind person, can even use a computer. I get so tired of explaining, ad nausium, that there is technology that allows me to do this. I get the usual platitudes and then they go right on being as stupid and ignorant as before. It's like beating your head against a brick wall.
>>>
>>> Lastly, like you suggested, I would support a kick starter project dedicated to making a truly blind accessible OS in linux as its own distribution. What would help, is getting Linus Torvalds on board with this. A word or two from the big guy on this would certainly lend a lot more support to us.
>>>
>>> -eric
>>> from the central office of the Technomage Guild, access technology division 6
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mar 16, 2017, at 5:53 AM, Tony Baechler wrote:
>>>
>>>> Be warned that my comments are most likely unpopular and controversial. See below. I'm not really interested in discussing this further, so don't expect a response.
>>>>
>>>> On 3/15/2017 3:30 AM, Kyle wrote:
>>>>> Sonar merges with the Vinux Project.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Well, this is indeed unfortunate. First, it was never said what "common goals" were discussed. Granted I don't closely follow either project, but I'm disappointed and surprised to see Vinux heading towards a Fedora base. Red Hat has stated many, even numerous times, both in their inaction and in published docs on their sites, that they have no or very little interest in core accessibility. Yes, I realize this list is hosted by Red Hat, but honestly, anyone can host a mailing list nowadays, so to me, that doesn't count. Look at groups.io, Yahoo Groups, etc. Unlike Debian, Ubuntu and Slackware, to the best of my knowledge, Fedora has never made their installer accessible out of the box. I understand that now their installer talks with Orca, but I think that's more by accident than anything. Fedora does claim to have accessibility with the Gnome desktop though, but I don't think one can easily use Speakup and a text console to do the install. I could very well be wrong on this as I
> q
>> u
>>> it following Fedora years ago for the above reasons. There were projects like Speakup Modified (now dead I think), but they were community projects with no support from Fedora developers. Presumably, since Sonar is being folded in, they will use a distro other than Fedora. In the long term, I think Fedora would be a very bad idea for many reasons which I won't go into here.
>>>>
>>>> I think it's a great idea for there to be an a11y, or even blindness-specific nonprofit to be formed. I would even say it's very long overdue. If Apache, Mozilla, the Linux kernel and many others can do it, there is no reason why the blind community can't. I would even suggest moving this and other Linux lists to that organization. Yes, I realize that nonprofit and not-for-profit are different. I would push to make it a U.S based nonprofit. Start a Kickstarter or other fundraising compaign. I would donate to it. As much as Facebook doesn't support accessibility and generally is against the open source spirit, a page on there, Twitter, Tumblr, etc would be a very good idea. There needs to be a strong publicity team to write articles for both the blindness magazines (ACB Braille Forum, etc) and the mainstream Linux magazines like LWN. Amazingly, there has been almost no mention of Speakup in the mainstream Linux community at all. I think a fair number of companies and developers d
o
> n
>> '
>>> t take us seriously because they don't know we exist and that blind people not only can and do use computers but in fact can and do use Linux on a regular basis. I just got an email from someone asking if I'm blind, how do I read and write? There is still a huge amount of ignorance out there. I realize this isn't strictly a Linux accessibility issue, but what leads to the next great breakthrough might be started by a developer seeing that blind people want an accessible desktop like everyone else. With an actual organization, KDE could be pushed for accessibility and developers from the organization could help. In other words, not only does it need to be a nonprofit a11y organization who works with other developers and develops software, but it also needs to be an advocacy and lobbyist group to demand big and small companies make their software accessible.
>>>>
>>>> However, I see a huge flaw in the merger. I think we're going down the same path as Windows screen readers. I'm not saying that Vinux would go commercial. What I'm saying is I fear they would end up like a big company who shall remain nameless. There are other screen readers out there such as NVDA, but very few people take them seriously because this big company has almost a monopoly. Granted, Linux is still far from having a huge share of the market, but if it should reach the 90% or even 50% point some day, it would be very unfortunate for rehab agencies and employers to force people to use Vinux because that's the only specialized distro for the blind. What would be much better is to work with the mainstream distros like Debian and Ubuntu to fix accessibility problems. Ubuntu is the most popular distro on the desktop. While accessibility is good, it has problems. When 16.04 came out, Orca was broken. I believe there are only a small number (no more than a few) people on the a
c
> c
>> e
>>> ssibility team. Debian could also desperately use help. It would look much better for the blind community if an organization donated their time and talents to auditing the packages in Debian and either fixing those with accessibility bugs which could easily be fixed or working with the upstream developers, providing patches and consulting with them to make their packages more accessible. To me, it seems like a huge waste of time to put a ton of energy into beating Fedora, Ubuntu or whatever distro into submission and slapping a "Vinux" or "Sonar" label on it when that same upstream distro with very few tweaks could be made that way out of the box. If you absolutely must modify packages, desktop settings, etc from the upstream defaults, such as for low vision users, create a Vinux repository instead or work with the Ubuntu community to create an official Ubuntu flavor called Ubuntu VI or something. There is already a Ubuntu MATE flavor, so why not work with them directly? While we
'
>> re
>>> at it, what about Orca? I see only one main paid developer working on it. I'm sure she could use some help, not to mention thorough testing. Getting back to the Windows screen readers, I fear that blind people will not be given the choice of what distro they want and will be locked out of mainstream use because there is primarily one Vinux to rule them all.
>>>>
>>>> In conclusion, I will continue not recommending any specialized distro to my clients and other people. I think they are almost always a mistake. As we have seen yet again, it does lead to fragmentation and generally bad luck for all concerned. I couldn't get any of them (Sonar, Vinux or Talking Arch) to work reliably on my 2009 machine which runs XP great and has a very old, well-supported standard sound card. I had to invent my own live / rescue CD because there wasn't anything reliable. Hopefully the official Debian rescue CD will have reliable speech soon. Something like a Vinux rescue CD would be a great idea, but not a live system with an unreliable graphical desktop, horrible speech (ESpeak) and an unreliable infrastructure which crashes for no obvious reason while the mainstream Debian and Ubuntu distros don't. All of that said, I wish both teams the best of luck and I guess we'll see what happens. I would only add that if you haven't taken the plunge and actually tried L
i
> n
>> u
>>> x, give Ubuntu MATE a try. It's fast, works well and can be installed independently by the blind in about an hour. It does, unfortunately, still use ESpeak. Getting a commercial company to release a decent synth as open source would be a great thing for a nonprofit to do, even if it required buying the rights.
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Blinux-list mailing list
>>>> Blinux-***@redhat.com
>>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Blinux-list mailing list
>>> Blinux-***@redhat.com
>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>>>
>>
>> --
>> Christopher (CJ)
>> chaltain at Gmail
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Blinux-list mailing list
>> Blinux-***@redhat.com
>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-***@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>

--
Christopher (CJ)
chaltain at Gmail

[Tobias Vinteus]

Hi,
What motivated their choice of Fedora over, sayy, Ubuntu? What was it's
selling points for the devs?


On Thu, 16 Mar 2017, Tony Baechler wrote:

> Be warned that my comments are most likely unpopular and controversial. See
> below. I'm not really interested in discussing this further, so don't expect
> a response.
>
> On 3/15/2017 3:30 AM, Kyle wrote:
>> Sonar merges with the Vinux Project.
>
>
> Well, this is indeed unfortunate. First, it was never said what "common
> goals" were discussed. Granted I don't closely follow either project, but I'm
> disappointed and surprised to see Vinux heading towards a Fedora base. Red
> Hat has stated many, even numerous times, both in their inaction and in
> published docs on their sites, that they have no or very little interest in
> core accessibility. Yes, I realize this list is hosted by Red Hat, but
> honestly, anyone can host a mailing list nowadays, so to me, that doesn't
> count. Look at groups.io, Yahoo Groups, etc. Unlike Debian, Ubuntu and
> Slackware, to the best of my knowledge, Fedora has never made their installer
> accessible out of the box. I understand that now their installer talks with
> Orca, but I think that's more by accident than anything. Fedora does claim to
> have accessibility with the Gnome desktop though, but I don't think one can
> easily use Speakup and a text console to do the install. I could very well be
> wrong on this as I quit following Fedora years ago for the above reasons.
> There were projects like Speakup Modified (now dead I think), but they were
> community projects with no support from Fedora developers. Presumably, since
> Sonar is being folded in, they will use a distro other than Fedora. In the
> long term, I think Fedora would be a very bad idea for many reasons which I
> won't go into here.
>
> I think it's a great idea for there to be an a11y, or even blindness-specific
> nonprofit to be formed. I would even say it's very long overdue. If Apache,
> Mozilla, the Linux kernel and many others can do it, there is no reason why
> the blind community can't. I would even suggest moving this and other Linux
> lists to that organization. Yes, I realize that nonprofit and not-for-profit
> are different. I would push to make it a U.S based nonprofit. Start a
> Kickstarter or other fundraising compaign. I would donate to it. As much as
> Facebook doesn't support accessibility and generally is against the open
> source spirit, a page on there, Twitter, Tumblr, etc would be a very good
> idea. There needs to be a strong publicity team to write articles for both
> the blindness magazines (ACB Braille Forum, etc) and the mainstream Linux
> magazines like LWN. Amazingly, there has been almost no mention of Speakup in
> the mainstream Linux community at all. I think a fair number of companies and
> developers don't take us seriously because they don't know we exist and that
> blind people not only can and do use computers but in fact can and do use
> Linux on a regular basis. I just got an email from someone asking if I'm
> blind, how do I read and write? There is still a huge amount of ignorance out
> there. I realize this isn't strictly a Linux accessibility issue, but what
> leads to the next great breakthrough might be started by a developer seeing
> that blind people want an accessible desktop like everyone else. With an
> actual organization, KDE could be pushed for accessibility and developers
> from the organization could help. In other words, not only does it need to be
> a nonprofit a11y organization who works with other developers and develops
> software, but it also needs to be an advocacy and lobbyist group to demand
> big and small companies make their software accessible.
>
> However, I see a huge flaw in the merger. I think we're going down the same
> path as Windows screen readers. I'm not saying that Vinux would go
> commercial. What I'm saying is I fear they would end up like a big company
> who shall remain nameless. There are other screen readers out there such as
> NVDA, but very few people take them seriously because this big company has
> almost a monopoly. Granted, Linux is still far from having a huge share of
> the market, but if it should reach the 90% or even 50% point some day, it
> would be very unfortunate for rehab agencies and employers to force people to
> use Vinux because that's the only specialized distro for the blind. What
> would be much better is to work with the mainstream distros like Debian and
> Ubuntu to fix accessibility problems. Ubuntu is the most popular distro on
> the desktop. While accessibility is good, it has problems. When 16.04 came
> out, Orca was broken. I believe there are only a small number (no more than a
> few) people on the accessibility team. Debian could also desperately use
> help. It would look much better for the blind community if an organization
> donated their time and talents to auditing the packages in Debian and either
> fixing those with accessibility bugs which could easily be fixed or working
> with the upstream developers, providing patches and consulting with them to
> make their packages more accessible. To me, it seems like a huge waste of
> time to put a ton of energy into beating Fedora, Ubuntu or whatever distro
> into submission and slapping a "Vinux" or "Sonar" label on it when that same
> upstream distro with very few tweaks could be made that way out of the box.
> If you absolutely must modify packages, desktop settings, etc from the
> upstream defaults, such as for low vision users, create a Vinux repository
> instead or work with the Ubuntu community to create an official Ubuntu flavor
> called Ubuntu VI or something. There is already a Ubuntu MATE flavor, so why
> not work with them directly? While we're at it, what about Orca? I see only
> one main paid developer working on it. I'm sure she could use some help, not
> to mention thorough testing. Getting back to the Windows screen readers, I
> fear that blind people will not be given the choice of what distro they want
> and will be locked out of mainstream use because there is primarily one Vinux
> to rule them all.
>
> In conclusion, I will continue not recommending any specialized distro to my
> clients and other people. I think they are almost always a mistake. As we
> have seen yet again, it does lead to fragmentation and generally bad luck for
> all concerned. I couldn't get any of them (Sonar, Vinux or Talking Arch) to
> work reliably on my 2009 machine which runs XP great and has a very old,
> well-supported standard sound card. I had to invent my own live / rescue CD
> because there wasn't anything reliable. Hopefully the official Debian rescue
> CD will have reliable speech soon. Something like a Vinux rescue CD would be
> a great idea, but not a live system with an unreliable graphical desktop,
> horrible speech (ESpeak) and an unreliable infrastructure which crashes for
> no obvious reason while the mainstream Debian and Ubuntu distros don't. All
> of that said, I wish both teams the best of luck and I guess we'll see what
> happens. I would only add that if you haven't taken the plunge and actually
> tried Linux, give Ubuntu MATE a try. It's fast, works well and can be
> installed independently by the blind in about an hour. It does,
> unfortunately, still use ESpeak. Getting a commercial company to release a
> decent synth as open source would be a great thing for a nonprofit to do,
> even if it required buying the rights.
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Blinux-***@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>

[Fernando Botelho]

John,

F123, the project I lead has cooperated with Sonar and Vinux in the past
and will probably do so again in the future, but I did not know about The
International Association Of Visually Impaired Technologists (IAVIT). I
will be in touch in the next couple of weeks to bounce off a few ideas
and see where we might be able to partner.

You can checkout the direction we are taking in our latest projects in
this short 88-second video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgl4poleT7U

And this introductory page:
https://public.f123.org/experimental/About-F123e.html

Best,

Fernando

[Jeffery Mewtamer]

I haven't used Vinux or Sonar, and what I've read of Ubuntu's main
line development has turned me off to anything that uses an Ubuntu
base, but probably my biggest want on the accessibility front would be
to see the Adriane accessibility suite ported upstream from Knoppix to
vanilla Debian and then propagate through all Debian derivatives. Or
at least get the parts of Adriane that provide a talking terminal that
I find far more usable than speakup and the ability to launch
Firefox+Orca without an entire desktop environment getting in the
way(though, if I could find a text-mode browser half as usable as
Firefox is with Orca, I might could free myself from the GUI once and
for all).

--
Sincerely,

Jeffery Wright
President Emeritus, Nu Nu Chapter, Phi Theta Kappa.
Former Secretary, Student Government Association, College of the Albemarle.

[MENGUAL Jean-Philippe]

Hi,

Of course you are right saying that we have to recognize that the oriented devs work is helpful and better than a so hard contribution to mainstream.

However this approach, where we build an alternative image of a distro with some specific settings has a risk, we saw with Sonar and, in a less strong measure, Vinux: devs are not numerous, and end up tired. And their effort is not supported enough due to the low number of people. I think if we all could work mainstream, maintaining a quite strong political action in distros, we coule make mainstream improve and become universal. All the more as it may enable to bring aware devs of larger communities, and avoiding to have accessibility regressions, etc. So would have an impact of upstream software, distro decisions, and then a stronger policital influence.

It is the sense of the debian accessibility team.

That is why Hypra chooses to contribute directly to Debian, its repo are just to provide immeidately future improvements or avoid future bugs we could not fix, essentially Libreoffice. The most important specific stuff of Hypra repo, which is just a set of Debian packages installed after the distro is installed, are:
- Orca bindings similar as Jaws or NVDA, because upstream is not ready to include various profiles whereas we are sure it is what expect not-power users (why not providing this in a Debian patch later, we are thinking of this);
- a set of config where Compiz is the window manager, to have in one desktop accessibility for everybody, including persons without disability. This set, I hope, will be in Debian someday, but we could upload Compiz too late and could not then, before freeze and stable, to finish work completely, making test, and proposing it is the default behavior as MATE is when installing from a braille device or a speech synth. But we will work for that as soon as the dev cycle starts again in Debian, with thought about patches, upstream, sync, etc. It is not a trivial thought, hence the fact we had to do our repo waiting for this thought be acceptable by the community.

regards,


Jean-Philippe MENGUAL

HYPRA, progressons ensemble

Tél.: [phone]

Mail: ***@hypra.fr

Site Web: http://www.hypra.fr

----- John G Heim <***@math.wisc.edu> a écrit :
> Just fedora? Not vidora or something like that? Hey, if you guys end up
> calling your distro vidora, I want credit. :-)
>
> I look at the debate over whether it is better to have a distro for the
> blind or to work on improving mainstream distros like the debate over
> barley versus wheat beers. Personally, I prefer barley beers over any
> and all wheat beers. But if someone wants to brew a wheat beer, it's
> fine with me and I'd even help out if they asked. It's a matter of good
> and better. In other words, my opinion is that even if you think it
> would be better if these developers spent their time on mainstream
> distros, we should all still recognize that what they are doing is
> really helpful. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
>
> On 04/18/2017 08:45 AM, Jude dDaShiell wrote:
> > Last i read, both sonargnulinux and vinux were in the process of merging
> > into Fedora and that first release was supposed to have happened
> > sometime in April 2017 and would be called Fedora 26.0. What has
> > happened since then I do not now know.
> >
> > Sent from BlueMail <http://www.bluemail.me/r> for iPhone
> >
> > On Apr 18, 2017 at 6:32 AM, Tony Baechler <***@baechler.net
> > <mailto:***@baechler.net>> wrote:
> > Sorry for the late reply, but see comments below.
> >
> > On 3/16/2017 3:36 PM, Joel Roth wrote:
> >> Eric Oyen wrote:
> >>
> >>> ...we, as a community, don't have an actual unified distro
> >>> to call our own. Sure, Vinux is a decent distro, but it's
> >>> lacking a lot of useful features outside of accessibility.
> >
> > OK, but why do we, as a community, need a special distro? Yes, it's free
> > software, so there is certainly nothing stopping you as long as you realize
> > it's your pet distro along with the about 300 others on distrowatch.com
> > <http://distrowatch.com>. I
> > would much rather have a popular, mainstream distro which includes great
> > accessibility like Debian and derivatives.
> >
> >>
> >> I'm not sure how things are at present, but in the past,
> >> Debian has shown some commitment to supporting
> >> accessibility[1], including at the installer level[2].
> >
> > Yes, Debian still supports accessibility. Every alpha release of D-I has
> > accessibility features and fixes.
> >
> >>
> >> This is not the same as a special-purpose distribution, and
> >> I think the pages were written some time ago. Still I would
> >> think that some effort would be worthwhile, and would
> >> benefit all Debian derivatives, which could include
> >> a accessbility-centric distribution.
> >>
> >> 1. https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility
> >> 2. https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility#Debian_installer_accessibility
> >
> > These pages should be fairly current and are often updated by Debian
> > developers like Samuel Thibault.
> >
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> >
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