Unity and accessibility

[Alan Bell]

As Luke is rather busy, I can answer a few of these points to save time.

On 28/10/10 21:44, Anthony Sales wrote:
> 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
there have been lots and lots of discussions about this at UDS, 
accessibility is absolutely a priority for Unity and we intend to have 
accessibility testing as part of the iso testing release process.
>   or will we/you have to default to Gnome for the 'blind profile'.
it will certainly be possible to opt out of Unity and use the 
traditional Gnome desktop or indeed Gnome Shell (all three are Gnome)
> Is it true that Canonical want to copyright Unity?
All code is copyrighted by the author as soon as it is written, unless 
some agreement changes that. Canonical do hold the copyright for Unity 
code and they also want contributions from third parties to sign a 
copyright transfer agreement handing Canonical the copyright to 
contributions. This means that Canonical will be the sole copyright 
holder for the entire unity codebase. This in turn means they can change 
the license (maybe one day to GPL v4 for example) without hunting about 
for permission from every single contributor (lets say they want to do 
this in 20 years time and some of the contributors and copyright holders 
are uncontactable or even dead) they can also license it in a non-free 
way to other companies if they want to. If you can figure out who might 
want it that way and why, do let me know.

> 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.
absolutely they have commercial plans. They don't appear to have freedom 
hating proprietary plans though.
http://www.ubuntu.com/project/about-ubuntu/our-philosophy
>   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,
DON'T PANIC <- big friendly letters
> which of course may turn out to be a red herring.
do Narwhals eat 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
>


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Alan Bell
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