accessibility & ubuntu

[Henrik Nilsen Omma]

Melissa Draper wrote:
> I originally posted the text below to the community chat yesterday, and
> UbuWu directed me to post it here as well...so I am.
>   
Hi Melissa,

Thank you for speaking up on this issue. I've posted a reply in the 
forums (perhaps we should move the discussion there, to involve 
ourselves more in the wider community :) )

--- Post in Ubuntu forums at:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=132335
---

- Henrik

OK, I've looked at these conversations, and I think this particular 
instance of a) someone being a bit impatient and unfocused due to being 
tipsy on a saturday night, b) the common problem of it not always being 
easy to know where to turn with questions and requests within the Ubuntu 
community. Turning up in ubuntu-devel drunk on a Saturday night 
demanding a new feature when most devs are away is probably not going to 
yield the best result.

AFAICT good advice was already given in #ubuntu, namely to try the nano 
editor. It's very simple, has a large cursor and with the preferences 
for the terminal you can set the font size as large as you want.

But there is a wider question here, which we should probably discuss 
more seriously: the lack of visibility of the accessibility team. One 
reason for this is that the AT (assistive technology) features in in 
Ubuntu really haven't been much to shout about so far. With the versions 
we have released do date, I would not go around evangelising the Ubuntu 
platform to visually impaired computer users (except for the few who are 
interested in development on the bleeding edge). I would be doing them a 
disservice; IMO they were better off staying with Windows or MacOSX.

However, with the release of 6.04 (dapper), this is about to change. We 
will have the key AT features like screen readers and magnifiers 
installed by default and even running as an option on the live CD. At 
that point we should start promoting Ubuntu more widely to the disabled 
community and get feedback from them on how well it's meeting their needs.

If we get an influx of new users with the need for these technologies it 
would also be helpful to have better sources of documentation and 
sources of support. WRT documentation, we are working on two documents 
that will be included on the CD itself and on help.ubuntu.com. First 
there is a brief introduction to the available features and a more 
extensive user guide. (both need work, help is appreciated)

As for support, we have the ubuntu-accessibility mailing list and a 
separate #ubuntu-accessibility IRC channel. Both of these have a fairly 
low level of activity though, mainly because our accessibility team is 
just quite small still. And also, those may not be everyone's preferred 
mode of communication.

I think a special Assistive Technology sub-forum section would be very 
useful at this point, as a first point of call for new users with 
questions about what the possibilities are with the current software. It 
would be even better if a few members of the existing forum community 
could help out by answering basic questions. It should only take a few 
minutes to check out some of our existing AT applications, just to have 
a rough familiarity with them, and be able to help answer questions. We 
should also set up a FAQ in the wiki for this purpose.

I agree that we in the accessibility team are something of a 'hidden 
force' as you put it, but this is mainly due to our own limited 
capacity. The core team of active contributors is small, at 5-6 people 
perhaps, and we are focusing our energy on getting the features to 
actually work. We would love to see more involvement from the wider 
community. Much can be done with, testing, documentation writing and 
user support. We need more champions in the Forums and elsewhere