Hello,
This is sad news. Generally I have found things with accessibility in
GRML just working and have had little to really report. Normally any
issues have been upsteam issues (eg. this speakup one I think is an
upstream one). Also may be GRML has a strange place with me, I don't use
it that frequently as I mainly use it for system rescue, may be my
current installation of ArchLinux is just too stable...
Now addressing some specific points raised in this thread.
* Including non-standard things. What is the situation of speakup as I
understand it speakup is now part of the standard kernel sources. Will
speakup still be included even if other things go?
* Work needed to include it. OK, I think I agree that the scripts, while
nice may be not really needed and I could live without them. May be if
removing them may be just some sort of beep or sound when the system
finishes booting may help us. Also certainly in the case of BRLTTY, I
don't think I've ever had an issue where it doesn't work fine, it always
seems to work on about whatever distribution I try. Aren't the brltty
package in GRML just the standard debian ones, so the only work is to
include that package.
* The space issue. This is possibly the hardest, its hard always to
decide what should go. May those of us who use accessibility could
decide what really is not needed and so help free some space. As an
example, when using speakup I probably would only use espeakup,
therefore speech-dispatcher need not be on the CD. Probably if pushed to
it, brltty may be could go, however I really would need to be pushed to
it as I find it useful should the sound card fail to be unmuted. I would
though in such a pushed situation say brltty over speakup as probably
more people would use speakup (particularly with espeak) than would own
a Braille display and so use brltty. Also I certainly would not mind
seeing the helper scripts for accessibility go, although I doubt that
would free much space.
An alternative to the last one for freeing space, would it be possible
for there to be a GRML_accessible? May be this option does not sound
great as it might be adding to the work, however here are some of my
thoughts. As certainly in the past GRML has included X, well unless orca
is included and a desktop based on GTK (eg. XFCE or LXDE) then X is
useless to blind users. May be there could be a configuration for
building a LiveCD without X but with accessibility. To save on the work,
this CD would receive little attention from developers (building it
would simply be the main task) and only testing would be from users (IE.
users must report issues for them to be looked at).
Anyone have thoughts on this?
Michael Whapples
Post by Michael Prokop, everyone on the list. I am writing this to see how blind grml users
are handling current web technologies such as flash and javascript.
[...]
A good moment to jump in for me, on behalf of the Grml team: I want
to mention that the upcoming releases of Grml will no longer provide
the accessibility features we used to ship so far.
The reason for dropping accessibility support within Grml is that we
can't keep it up any longer. None of us Grml developers use any of
those features on our own nor do we have people using it in our
surroundings.
When problems with kernel modules, user space software and/or their
integration within Grml show up we have to work in this area. But
we're lacking manpower in the Grml team and the present manpower
is needed in other areas to keep the project up and running.
Troughout the last ~8 years - since the beginnings of Grml - the
feedback and help in this area was pretty limited overall, both by
developers as well as users. The feedback when asking for testing of
accessibility features in release candidates was close to zero.
In the meanwhile Debian itself became better and better with regards
to accessibility, thanks to great efforts by people like Samuel
Thibault and Mario Lang. AFAIK the debian-installer provides espeak
support nowadays, orca seems to be well established, etc.
Since we don't want to get known for half baken solutions we'll be
dropping the accessibility features from Grml starting with the
upcoming stable release.
If you are interested in accessibility support within Debian and its
derivatives we encourage you to check out the Debian-Accessibility
project (see http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-accessibility/ for
further details) and join their efforts.
regards,
-mika- - on behalf of the Grml project