On Sunday 05 July 2009 13:54:10 Halim Sahin wrote:

hi,

I would like to give some important notes/hints about the opensuse accessibility

and I'm not sure which mailinglist is the right one I know there are some support list for suse-blinux, but i would like to give some accessibility hints in general

I know that "marco skambraks" was responsible for most of the accessibility issues until 11.1 AFAIK, Marco is now working full-time for the mono-a11y project does opensuse have an "opensuse accessibility manager"?

No, there's no such "manager". If you like to contribute in this area, you're more than welcome!

here are my notes/hints: Major accessibilityfeatures in opensuse 11.1: Grub-menu with speech-support (only available in opensuse) Perfect Brailledisplay detection (serial/usb). Detecting serial brailledisplays works only under opensuse distro. Featureritch and userfriendly Consolescreenreader sbl (suse-blinux). Unfortunately many other distros are using brltty as default textmode screenreader. But I know that many users of other distros are using sbl as well. Usualy they have to build sbl from source. Major features in suse-blinux sbl (missing in brltty) are: 1. attribute cursor tracking (yast, mc ...). 2. Customizable braille / keyboard keymaps 3. Application based userprofiles 4. suseblinux works with braille and speech, with braille, without braille speech-only) and braille-only.

Orca (gnome screenreader): In opensuse 11.1 orca has excelent braillesupport through sbl/brld (brld = brailledaemon).

Most gtk Apps are accessible except firefox shipped with opensuse. See bug #508611 under http://bugzilla.novell.com

Unfortunately many things are broken now under opensuse 11.2 milestone 3.

Could you file bugreports using bugzilla.novell.com, please? With integration of new software, it's too be expected that some stuff breaks.

Unfortunately it looks like that suse/novell does not longer improove the accessibility of opensuse.

The approaches in opensuse 11.1 were almost perfect. The exciting new features like the braillesupport in (textmode/gnome) and the talking grub menu should be improoved to get a well working accessibility infrastructure in the future.

Currently the following things are broken in opensuse 11.2: 1. orca braillesupport (brld/sbl). 2. firefox 3. unstable talking grub menu 4. Traditional gnome mainmenu should be activated by default (if a11y is enabled). 5. Orca should respect language setting in groubmenu (gnome live cd).

My Questions: 1. who has the responsibility for accessibility support in opensuse. 2. does opensuse still invest into a wellworking accessibility (a11y) infrastructure like other distros?

Coolo, Michl, what is your view on this? The question is also two-fold: Do you want Novell to invest - or are openSUSE community contributors interested in working on this? In the later case, I'm sure others will support them to do this.

3. Is it possible to simplify bugzilla for opensuse? currently it's hard to file bugs because there is no category for accessibility.

It's easy to add new categories but we would need somebody that screens the bugs as well, so currently the bugs are reported against the components the software is in e.g. against firefox.

Suse-linux 7.0 was the first out of the box accessible distro. Opensuse 11.1 was another milestone for a11y. It would be nice to see that novell / suSE invest in accessibility in future distros.

Thanks for the feedback, Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, Director openSUSE, aj@{novell.com,opensuse.org} SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126