Open Letter: How the FOSS Community May Help Disabled Users

[M. Fioretti]

On Fri, Apr 28, 2006 21:43:01 PM +0530, Rahul Sundaram
(sundaram at fedoraproject.org) wrote:

> On Fri, 2006-04-28 at 17:53 +0200, M. Fioretti wrote:
> > 
> > Of course, it is also highly likely that Fedora, given its rapid
> > release cycles, will to experiment also on the desktop and so on, may
> > be in a very good position to get ahead of its competitors to become
> > the preferred distro for disabled users. But this requires interest
> > for the background problem...
[...]

> Thats easier than you would imagine. Write in a proposal to start a
> project to the board.
> 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board
> 
> Work on building a community around Fedora with end users and
> developers starting with perhaps a mailing lists and discuss bugs
> with people concerned with this problem and highlight issues or
> suggest ways in which we can improve Fedora for such users and get
> this done.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Personally, I only know the disabled user I previously mentioned, and
he's already set on SUSE because for a lot of non technical reasons we
had to install that distro and he's already had an hard time to
progress there. 

It may also be useful to discuss offline (with you and/or more Fedora
developers) what would be the best way to structure such a proposal.
As others pointed out, some problems are best addressed by UI
developers, not distro packagers: I don't want to bark up the wrong
tree. On top of this, there already are accessibility efforts ongoing
at SUN, freedesktop.org and so on.

Last but not least, my own proposal and effort is more about community
building and communication, which are essential to not have
OpenDocument and all FOSS blocked by accessibility issues. I am more
concerned about that (especialy OpenDocument) that any other
particular distribution.

What I may put together, if nobody else steps in, is a proposal on that
wiki for a "Testing Fedora and FOSS together with/for disabled users":

	sit at the same desk
	install together
	use the system (write letters, surf the net, upgrade SW....)
	the hardest part: file any bug or request to the *right*
	place: fedora, kde, gnome, individual developers, webmasters
	of broken pages...). For a disabled user (let's be honest,
	for most non-geeks) it's almost impossible to figure out
	what is the right bugzilla to go to, and use it.

If you think it's a good thing (and again, if nobody else steps in with
a better proposal) I promise I'll do it within the next 7/10 days.

Ciao,
	Marco Fioretti


-- 
Marco Fioretti                    mfioretti, at the server mclink.it
Fedora Core 5 for low memory      http://www.rule-project.org/

Furious activity is no substitute for understanding. --  H.H. Williams