Kendell Clark

thanks a lot for the nice comment. Linux is absolutely not perfect, but it fits my needs completely. Root applications are not an issue in gnome, no. I don't know how they got around that, because they are still an issue in other desktops based on gtk2, like mate. A way around this is to use gksu to open the application, that usually works with orca. No idea why, but there it is. I've been trying to find out exactly what's going on here but my programming skills are very limited. I'm so tired of blind people outside the linux community being so sarcastic and hostile when I try to drumb up interest in linux. Snort! Linux? I use windows. You should too. It just works. Nvda is a fantastic screen reader. I use it whenever I have to maintain mellisa's windows box, and what I need to do cannot be done from within linux, but most of my windows maintenance is done from inside a fedora installation on her box. I have a serious dislike for windows. Windows itself isn't too bad, I suppose, but what I dislike in particular is the zealousness of the windows community. The idea that everyone should use it, regardless. Apple fans can be like this as well, but I don't want to start any flame wars. Suffice it to say that linux is what I use, and I'm intending to improve it. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Is windows? Absolutely not. Mac I have little experience with, other than booting fedora on my mom's mac once. The biggest issues linux faces is a lack of resources. We need more developers, and a bigger blindness and disabled community. Once we have that, you'll be amazed at how quickly linux improves. We also need google to get off it's high horse and add screen reader support to chrome/chromium, rather than forcing us to use chromevox, which in my opinion is unintuitive and just plain awkward to use. Firefox is another issue. I have zero proof for this, this is just my opinion, but I get the feeling mozilla puts a much higher priority on their windows accessibility efforts than they do their linux ones. Joanie, the orca developer, has had issues with mozilla refusing to fix known bugs because those bugs don't affect windows. Enough said. If you are a blind linux user, I urge you to subscribe to the orca list and help solve bugs. If you find a bug in an application, please email the orca list with an attached debug log. To generate one, open your run dialog or a terminal and type orca --replace --debug. Take whatever steps are necessary to reproduce the problem, then immediately close orca, either by running orca --replace or using alt+win+s to toggle it off and back on. The reason for this is debug logs are very, very verbose and can grow large quickly, Attach this to an email to the orca list. If joanie fails to respond, which can sometimes happen, I'll take a look, and file a bug against orca if necessary. Of course, you can file a bug yourself, if you know how. The idea is to get these bugs fixed, and orca improved.

I'll second that comment. I'm going to try to explain my reasons for using linux clearly, and why I feel windows is not a good alternative, for me and many others. This is going to be a bit long, so get some coffee or something. In order for windows to meet my needs completely it would need to do the following. Provide a screen reader and sound drivers on it's official installation image, along with a clearly documented method of turning them both on, so I could install independently. Support nearly any computer and computer architecture I put a usb drive containing an image onto. Be able to be booted on different hardware. That is, I could yank a hard drive out of one machine and transplant it in another, and it would boot, without blue screening on me or nagging about activation. It would need to be open source, and have it's source code available for public view and review. And to top it all off, it would need to give me far more control over it than any version of windows currently does, without bugging me about storing my settings in the cloud. This is what windows 8,1 and 10 currently do, though their may be a way around it. Last time I tried the windows 10 beta, which was yesterday, I got it installed, only to have the built in screen reader, narrator, focus on a window that was not accessible, and windows refused to let me continue until I'd completed setup. Now that I've gotten that out of the way, a person who works for the government is exactly what linux needs. If your fellow government employees would spend some of that energy they currently pour into windows and it's proprietary software and spend it on linux, the rewards would be amazing. I'm amazed linux has gotten as far as it has, seeing as how it has to rely on volunteer developers contributing to accessibility in their spair time. On top of this, there are at most a handful of developers contributing to the entire accessibility stack. In short, we need more developers and company support. The only reason windows has gotten where it is now is because of the government support, and all the companies falling all over themselves to support it. If those same companies supported linux as fervently as they do microsoft we'd be living in a different world. Those companies would need to get off their high horse and open up their source code, because I for one would not accept closed source assistive applications, regardless of how tempting they might be. End of rant. Linux has areas where it needs improvement. Absolutely. I'm going to see linux improve to the point where I don't have to deal with zealous comments from windows users, not that i'm saying you are one, if I have to dedicate the rest of my life to see it happen.