[Kde-accessibility] Re: [kde-promo] Fwd: Free Standards GroupAccessibility Workgroup

Gunnar Schmi Dt gunnar at schmi-dt.de
Thu Oct 9 11:55:28 CEST 2003


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Hello,

On Wednesday 08 October 2003 23:32, Andreas Pour wrote:
> > [discussion about a statement to the new Accessibility FSG workgroup]
>
> Hmm, if you want to be PC though I think "disabled" ("disabilities") is
> every bit as bad if not worse (and there are also of course critiques of
> "differently abled", "specially abled", "challenged" and, yikes,
> "crippled").  See e.g.
> http://www.wholefamily.com/aboutteensnow/school/handicapped/q_and_a/article
>.html (question 2).
>
> The article above has a useful suggestion which is to address the issue
> directly rather than use (possibly derogatory) generalizations:
>
> "Despite the many ongoing efforts to help persons who cannot see or who
> have trouble operating a standard keyboard or mouse use Linux systems,
> Linux GUIs are still generally inaccessible to these users."
>
> Or something like that . . . .  The crux is to describe specifically what
> the problems are rather than to label people . . . .

So our current statement is

<statement>
Despite the many ongoing efforts to help persons who cannot see or who have 
trouble operating a standard keyboard or mouse use Linux systems, Linux GUIs 
are still generally inaccessible to these users.

We, people involved in the KDE project, do not want to support this social
exclusion but rather see the support for handicapped persons as an important
feature for every software. The KDE accessibility team knows about the
problem and they are working on improving the accessibility of KDE.

In order to get a completely accessible system, applications that use other 
toolkits need to be accessible as well. In this sense KDE based assistive 
technologies need to interoperate well with applications using other toolkits
and vice versa. We appreciate the foundation of the Free Standards Group as a 
forum to discuss possible standards for this with other projects involved in 
accessibility.
</statement>

What I am not very happy with are the words "We, people involved in the KDE 
project,". These words do only make sense if we write a list of names below 
that statement. Do we want this list of names (or is it possible to write 
e.g., "We, the people involved in the KDE project")?

Gunnar Schmi Dt
- -- 
Co-maintainer of the KDE Accessibility Project
Maintainer of the kdeaccessibility package
http://accessibility.kde.org/
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