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

[Bill Haneman]

Hi All:

If we become too obscure or too specific we fail to communicate what
we're doing.  Listing only blind users or those who can't use a keyboard
fails to include a wide range of abilities and disabilities (and yes,
that word is still valid in English ;-).

I think it is reasonable to retain the phrase "users with disabilities"
in our announcement since that term is still in common and accepted
usage within the accessibility community.  It is not the preferred
phrase in all situations, and the critiques are valid, but it is more
encompassing than the more specific wording.

Therefore I think the above phrase should be retained _along with_
specific mention of "blind users and users who cannot readily use a
keyboard or mouse".

On Thu, 2003-10-09 at 09:55, Gunnar Schmi Dt wrote:
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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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