Unity and accessibility

[Anthony Sales]

Hi Luke,

Could you clarify the plans have for Ubuntu in regard to Unity, Accessibility, Gnome and the alleged licensing of Unity? And what are you thoughts initially - do you think it is possible to make Unity accessible, or will we/you have to default to Gnome for the 'blind profile'. Is it true that Canonical want to copyright Unity? And if so do you know what there thinking is behind this - is it merely a formality - or does Canonical have more commercial plans for Ubuntu. I personally wouldn't object to a commercialisation of ubuntu - as this seems the next logical step in making Ubuntu a popular desktop - but if this constraints development in other projects, then maybe it might have a negative effect on open-source accessibility etc. Anyway, I just wondered if you could clarify things because at the moment there seems to be a little confusion and panic about this issue, which of course may turn out to be a red herring.

Tony Sales.
________________________________________
From: ubuntu-accessibility-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com [ubuntu-accessibility-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com] On Behalf Of Luke Yelavich [themuso at ubuntu.com]
Sent: 26 October 2010 13:46
To: ubuntu-accessibility at lists.ubuntu.com
Subject: Re: Unity and accessibility

On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 07:40:53AM EDT, E.J. Zufelt wrote:
> Good morning,
>
> I read a release this morning explaining that possibly as of 11.04 Ubuntu will ship with Unity, based on gnome, and not gnome, as the default window manager.  I am wondering what accessibility features exist in Unity and how well it supports gnome based assistive technology applications like Orca?

Unity in its current form does not have much in the way of accessibility. It doesn't even have keyboard navigation to move around the environment, let alone assistive technology support.

For the 11.04 release, I will be working very closely with the unity developers to implement accessibility and keyboard navigation support, so much so, that it will be my primary focus for this cycle.

I will also attempt to address any other accessibility issues we need to fix, like the installer, if I get the time.

Luke

--
Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list
Ubuntu-accessibility at lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility