Kendell Clark

I don't want to accidentally irritate any interested developers, so I'll expand on my last comment. When I first switched to linux back in august of 2011, I used a distribution called vinux. It was, and still is, a fantastic distribution for anyone who is visually impaired. A few months after I first started, we were preparing for a new release, but there was a problem, Console speech, that is, speech in the text console, rather than xorg graphical sessions, was broken, largely due to pulse audio. One of our developers offered to fix the problem, but at a catch. He wanted $500 total before he'd work on a fix. That, in itself might not have been an issue, but there were some unusual circumstances. The entire vinux community, developers included is blind. Most of us don't have a ton of money to spair. I myself found the prospect a bit of an insult. Pay money to fix an issue you should be willing to fix for free? That was my first experience with that kind of attitude. I've also run into developers who were willing to write special applications for us blind people, including daisy playback software, but at a price. Some of them want to leave it open source, but most of the ones I've come across want me to pay them to write it, and the resulting application will be closed source. The excuse is often, gotta make a living. I find this too, rather insulting. Would you charge a sighted person for the privilage of being able to crack the spine of his/her book or press the "read" button on their book reader? Of course not. That's pretty much what you're doing when you expect money for assistive applications. Should developers get paid for their work? absolutely. I've never said otherwise. This is a messy problem and I don't know how to solve it. The last thing I want is to imply that I expect everything done for free. I do expect that applications written for us are open source, whether that be for the blind, dyslexic, physically handicapped, etc. But I find the attitude of having to insentivize developers to work on applications a bit offputting. It's the equivalent of telling a sighted person, "I'm going to open a document." When they look at the screen, it's black. "huh?" "Oh, right. Forgot to tell you, it'll cost you $50 for me to turn the screen on so you can look at it. Can't help it, gotta make a living." Has anyone else run into this, or am I one of the only ones who seem upset by this?

I'm glad I came across this article. I've been trying to raise awareness of the issues blind people in particular face when trying to use linux. I've been running into largely the same issues as in this article. Little documentation, developers assuming someone else will do it, or expecting money to fix what they should've done right in the first place. This last one is very much the minority, but it does happen sometimes. I'm a member of this website, so I'm trying to spread the word that accessibility isn't black magic. It's not hard to make something accessible. What we really need are more developers who know how the process works, less whining about how much trouble it is, and more coding. The accessibility community is severely understaffed. The people who keep linux usable are usually so overworked they don't have much time for much else. And I'll just put this out there. Myself, I'm not sure about other people, when I reach outside the linux community for help, I'm apauled at the response from other blind users. It generally boils down to "why do you want to improve that? It'll nver get anywhere, just use xyz" Which is usually one of windows or osx. That's not helping anything. Do others suffer from this indifference as well? A bigger problem is standards for "open access" are often predicated around antiquated technology. To de-geek that, the DAISy, digital accessible information system standard is the best we currently have in the way of accessible books, whether that be newspapers, magazines, etc. The standard is immensely complicated, long, dry, and explicitly specifies non open source friendly i.e patent encumbered audio formats for the only two formats the standard supports. Specifically, mp3 and wav. It also specifies an optional drm mechanism, which is part of the standard just enough so that daisy playback software can recognize a "protected" book, but cannot parse it without the "key" Every blindness company has their own implementation of this scheme, and each is incompatible with the other. It's a mess, and unlikely to get anywhere, so long as blind organizations and agencies assume everyone will just use windows. This is the issue. Any standard that's built around enabling disabled people to better access things almost always ends up including an "optional" drm mechanism. This is done, as far as I can tell, to appease the companies who treat all disabled people as potential criminals. Thing is, the drm mechanism usually ends up getting used, windows only software is written, and once again us linux users are left in the lurch because, why would anyone help support linux? Goes the usual argument Sorry for the rant, but it makes me angry when I try to solve these problems, only to run into the same wall of "there's not enough insentive" and "just use windows".