[turbinerneiter]

I wish that FOSS could serve this, but as you said, it took Google, a billion dollar company, a long time to get it right.

/e/OS has about 40 team members mentioned on their website, including regular contributors - so its not 40 full-time employees.

I think the best chance to get something going in this field is to try to get public funding for a research project around something like universal accessibility or some such.

[mlang23]

If FOSS can not cater to people with special needs per definition, as you seem to imply, I will have to stop advocating it altogether. If advocating for FOSS means supporting a movement that is not willing to bridge the gap and fight against digital divide, we need to stop doing so. Technology is the best chance for people with disabilities to catch up in our society. If we take that aware from them, we are not doing any good.

[aiilns]

Your comment shows a fundamental misunderstanding of F/LOSS. It's a movement for software's freedom and consequently users' freedom.

Programmers from all over the world work on their free time on projects, some foundations exist supported by individual donations and companies' funding. Some companies release their code as F/LOSS.

There is no single entity that dictates what software is built and moreover people working on F/LOSS are (I would say) on average more aware/sensitive of their work's impact. I know for example that GNOME people are actively trying to better accessibility and would welcome the help (your time and skill or donations, or both).

https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility

[mlang23]

On the one hand, you are right. GNOME has been doing good work in the past. The move from CORBA to D-Bus didn't help to stabilize the AT-SPI, leaving us with a halfway broken system for years. But please dont get me going on donating to GNOME. I once donated 500 EUR to GNOME, back in the days when they had their friends of GNOME initiative. I was trying to earmark my donation so that it goes directly to Accessibility development. I neither got a thank you, nor did my donation ever get listed on their friends page. All I got out from this was the feeling that my money was effectively lost somewhere in the system.

Also, I am contributing to F/LOSS code since about 20 years. You might think I am "fundamentally misunderstanding" things. I believe I just have a different opinion on things then you. Lets leave it at that.

[simonh]

That's open source, not FLOSS. Open Source is a pragmatic movement that simply believes in open collaboration. FLOSS is a much more activist movement, many of who's proponents believe that proprietary software is inherently wrong and an abuse of users. That's not really a tenable position to take when the FLOSS ecosystem so regularly fails users with assisted needs.

[nelaboras]

Don't judge a loose movement as a whole against the standards of some members. And it is perfectly fine to advocate for an ambitious position even if it is not yet achieved.

You can be the owner of a publishing house and advocate free speech and still you might not have the resources to publish every worthy book.

If there are more contributors then the accessibility will improve, but unlike a commercial project you can't just oblige/order someone to do it. You have to motivate people - with the right skill set - to donate their private time to this cause over all the other causes (or non-programming activities they could support).

So great to be idealistic but you have to accept your own limitations. Maybe getting something to work for most people is simply a more achievable mid-term goal than addressing each special case, no matter how important.

[simonh]

>Don't judge a loose movement as a whole against the standards of some members. And it is perfectly fine to advocate for an ambitious position even if it is not yet achieved.

Not just some members, but the founder members and in fact the organisation that they set up to promote free software, the FSF, which campaigns on the basis that non-free software is "An exercise of unjust power".

As for not yet achieved, the free software movement was founded in 1984. Richard Stallman was celebrating the achievements of 15 years of free software back in 1999.

I'm sorry, but your conflation of Open Source with Free Software would appall Stallman and the FSF who go to great lengths to emphasise that FLOSS is quite separate and has had a very specific meaning right from the start.

[valvar]

FOSS is not a company with a big budget and a CEO. It's a philosophy and a community built around the radical idea that user freedoms matter. If you want something particular to exist, then perhaps you should start building it or donating to those who are. No matter how nice or important it is, someone needs to build it and development requires more than just wishing — it requires money and time.

[simonh]

It's this user blaming by the FLOSS community that really sticks in my craw. On the one had proprietary software is immoral, on the other FLOSS software not living up to the needs of users is, er, the user's fault for not being programmers or personally sponsoring their own development effort.

[mlang23]

+1

Thanks for this comment. I hear this a lot from people who actually know about F/LOSS but were not able (or interested) to switch from proprietary solutions because their needs are simply not handled in an appropriate way by F/LOSS.

In the past, when I was still more enthusiastic about free software, I heard their words but they somehow didn't really sink in. These days when all I hear if funding and the lack thereof, I start to get what they were saying, and I am actually pretty concerned about this. The worst outcome we could have is that free software advocacy actually works and these inaccessible solutions dominate the market. This would mean that free software actively pushs disabled people out of our society. Thinking about this, I stand to my massively downvoted comment. This would be a horrible outcome. So as long as there is no solution to the "why should I think about these fucks" or "nobody is paying me to care for disabled people" it would be a bad thing to further advocate free software.

[simonh]

Quite, it's not that I'm against open source for FLOSS, there are a lot of hard working selfless people doing great work. It's the self righteous lecturing side of it that does so much damage to the movement and disrespects people.

[lucideer]

> supporting a movement that is not willing to ...

Where did you get the impression that anyone is "unwilling"???

Do you have an example of this, or is it, as other comments point out, just a resourcing issue?

[deathgrips]

By supporting it, do you mean that you donate? Or do you mean that you just talk about it? It takes a lot of money to develop hard features like this.

[dannyr]

If a lot of people like you stop supporting it because it lacks accessibility, it might not become big enough to have the resources to implement accessibility.

Chicken and egg thing.

[mlang23]

We need to stop treating accessibility as an afterthought. Adding accessibility in a late stage of product development leads to suboptimal results, both in term of developer time needed and user experience. This is exactly why Google took so long to do proper Android accessibility.

[turbinerneiter]

I never said any of these things.

Why do you act like I want to take technology away from anyone?

Go ask Microsoft, Google and Apple how much money they spend on accessibility and then compare that to the income of /e/OS.

How would you fix that resource problem if not by trying to get better funding?

[volgar1x]

This is more a problem of man-time/funding than willingness.

[mlang23]

Sure. All the free software we use today has been written on some sort of secret contract, everyone has been paid for their work. Unfortunately, tehre is no money to fund accessibility. So we cant do anything about it. But we still advocate free software since it is morally sooo much superior to all these evil commercial software companies. If the solutions we advocate inherently prevent people with disabilities from joining in mondane tasks in our society, that is really a bummer for these people.

Please explain. Why was Steve Jobs able to explain to Apple that in the case of Accessibility, ROI has to be ignored, because it is a social responsibility to build a platform that works for everyone. Why, to the contrary, is the free software movement trying to argue that this is absolutely impossible because of lack of funding?