we don't know we are made of matter. What if what we call matter is in fact anti-matter ? Or to put it differently, if the universe was made of "antimatter" wouldn't we think we were made of matter and the definition of antimatter (positron etc.) would be the opposite of what's now? Isn't it just a matter (no pun intended) of definition ?

So, if I maintain a set of say 20-ish critical accessiblity patches in everything from GTK+ to FireFox, in a git repo, would you pull them when you build Gentoo? An OS compiled from source should make this simpler, though the testing goes out the window.

This is also potentially a huge benefit. I really enjoy working to make GNU/Linux more accessible. I'd do it full time if I could, but I cant afford to. I don't have the time, and companies wont pay me to do it.

People with disabilities, as you suggest, often have no job and little money. They often have lot's of free time that could be spend improving FOSS accessibility. A primary vision of the Accessible Computing Foundation is creating a world where people with disabilities help themselves by creating all of he accessible software they need. There are far more than enough brilliant blind people around the world than would be needed to make Linux virtually 100% accessible to the blind. They just need to come together, learn to code, and make it happen. One of the primary messages for young blind kids is that this is even possible. We seem to live in a world where people with disabilities are encouraged to settle for less than what they can achieve. How cool would it be to organize this unemployed force to make the changes they need? How cool would it be to get young blind kids across the country learning to write code?

Kudos to RMS for believing accessibility is a human right, and taking action personally to promote accessibility in Linux. Fixing accessibility in Linux is a mess, but if we can get enough people involved, it's doable. This is the mission of multiple efforts, and the one I'm involved in is the ACF (Accessible Computing Foundation). The free software movement, and the goal of people with disabilities taking control of their computing environments are well aligned. GNU/Linux provides a platform where at least in theory any and all accessibility issues can be corrected, unlike Windows and Mac OS X.

Unfortunately there are considerable obstacles to "fixing" accessibility in Linux. I believe they can be overcome if enough people come together to make it happen, but there are huge challenges. There are also people who devote a lot of their lives to improving the situation, often for free or very low financial incentive. I spearheaded the 3.0 release of Vinux, which is Linux for the Vision Impaired. I fixed a dozen or so accessibility bugs, but the right fix in many cases would involve major changes to GNU/Linux. I'll list a few.

The accessibility API in GNU/Linux, atk/at-spi, should have shared more functionality with Windows. For typical corporate and FOSS anti-Windows reasons, the accessibility stack was built intentionally in a Windows incompatible way. The result is that accessibility in Firefox and many other major applications never works as well in Linux as it does in Windows. It simply is not reasonable to make every software vendor do all their accessibility coding N times for N operating systems. There is even an effort called Iaccessible2, which is basically a FOSS accessibility stack for Windows, which the creators seemed to hope could also work for Linux. The code was even donated to the Linux Foundation. However, there was never any money or motivation in FOSS land to actually port the software to Linux, SFAIK. Building a single accessibility API that works in Windows, GNU/Linux, Android, and Mac OS X would go a long way towards fixing accessibility in all of those places, but especially in GNU/Linux, since it is usually the OS vendors put the least effort into. As it stands, few GNU/Linux distros are able to keep FireFox and LibreOffice accessibility working.

Then there's the problem of Linux being a multi-headed Hydra monster with no one in charge. At Microsoft, Bill Gates took a personal interest in accessibility, and that's all it took for the entire company to take accessibility seriously. In GNU/Linux land, RMS also takes a strong personal interest in accessibility, but it's not like most of the devs work for the guy. RMS can make his case, but when your boss is asking for prettier GTK+ widgets in Gnome 3 and you're late delivering, accessibility fixes fall by the wayside. When we are lucky enough for a patch to be developed, many times the GNU/Linux authors refuse to include them, because the "fix" is not perfect. For example, I added accessible descriptions to pixmaps in GTK+, which enabled blind users to hear 'star' for a star icon in a table containing pixmaps. The devs could not decide if pixmap was the right place for this accessible description, enabling them to justify doing nothing, and the continued lack of support for accessible icons was the result. It saved them a few hours of work in testing, which was their real priority. Multiply this asinine situation 100X, and you begin to understand why making Linux accessible is hard. GNU/Linux land seems to take pride in making it hard to fix accessibility, because we make it almost impossible to override any given stupid author's decision not to support accessibility. I should be able to patch GTK+, and have that patch automatically distributed to every user of every distro who believes my accessibility patches are something they want. Instead, we've built a system where patches have to be accepted by the authors, and then distributed slowly over years to the stable distros. Stupid, stupid, stupid...

Another major GNU/Linux accessibility problem is the lack of stability and portability between distros. If I write an important Linux accessibility app, like voxin for example, it would be great to compile it once, share it with every person who needs it, and have a way for those people to use that compiled binary as long as they like. This is mostly the case in Windows, and not at all the case in Linux. Voxin, a text-to-speech wrapper for the IBM engine prefered by many vision impaired people, has to be ported to each release of Ubuntu, causing the author considerable effort just to maintain his package for one distro, even though there is no new functionality ever. Pretty much unless you are an ace coder yourself, you wont be able to get voxin working on your prefered distro, and your blind users may avoiding your distro for just that reason. Even if you do go to this effort, that effort will be good for only one version of your distro, and you will have to repeat it forever. As a result, only the espeak TTS package is natively supported in even the most accessible GNU/Linux distros.

GNU/Linux is basically designed to break, and the first thing that breaks is typically accessibility. One problem is that while we can share source code between distros and releases, we cannot share testing, and often we can't even share packaging. If Debian goes the extra mile and insures that the accessibility stack works from boot for each release, that effort does not help RedHat, who must also put in the huge additional testing effort. The result is that only the biggest and most popular distros and applications typically have a working accessibility stack at all. When I looked at what it would take to make Trisquel Linux accessible, I had to let the devs know that they simply didn't have the resources to get there. This was back in 2010, so things may have changed, but this remains the case for most distros.

All of these issues can in theory be fixed. We should stop purposely making GNU/Linux incompatible with any other OS, and instead work for cross-platform accessibility solutions. We should share well tested compiled binaries (which can be verified as matching the source) between distros for critical portions of the accessibility stack, such as TTS, so that it just works. We should make it easy to patch an author's broken accessibility code, compile and test patched binaries, and share them with people on many distros, without making the patch author jump through insane hoops like we do now to get fixes included.

The same problems holding back accessibility in GNU/Linux are also stifling innovation. The fact that we let petty gate-keepers decide what packages can be shared easily is a crime. It is insanely hard to get a new accessibility package in to RedHat, Debian, etc. Accessibility just isn't cool enough. Most good ideas aren't cool enough. That's why so few people develop "apps" for GNU/Linux anymore. The fact that we refuse to share critical testing of binaries between distros, and make GNU/Linux APIs incompatible with the rest of the world on purpose... it all has to change. Otherwise, GNU/Linux will continue it's decline.

the only one disconnected from the facts is you, as you a) lied about the numbers and 2) never provided any sources for your so called 50%. Until then you're just a shill without citations for his claims.

if that interpretation makes you feel better, so be it.

you're just an idiot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... 60%. and no, putin is a dictator, but taking crimea back was the right thing to do. now go back to langley please.

it was russian before ussr even existed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... nice try. the choices seem pretty valid. the second one was "remain part of ukraine"

are you dumb or pretend to? where was the racism in my post? That piece of land legally belonged to Russia and was inhabited by Russian majority. A referendum took place (the right of self determination - remember that chump?) and they voted for independence.

I guess you are throwing the right of self determination out of the window dude. What sort of international law are you talking about? It's funny because in Kosovo, there was no referendum at all, it became independent just by bombing. The alaska thing is straw man, it was sold to the US.

There is no point in fighting for land that doesn't belong to you. Crimea was and is Russian (60% of the population is Russian and most of the rest are russian-friendly), nikita chruschtschow transferred it to ukraine in 1954 in a time that it didn't really matter because it was simply USSR land.

There is no point in fighting for land that doesn't belong to you. Crimea was and is Russian (60% of the population is Russian and most of the rest are russian-friendly), nikita chruschtschow transferred it to ukraine in 1954 in a time that it didn't really matter because it was simply USSR land.

Scientists need to clean house before complaining about politics?!?

Try googling John Ioannidis and Koch brothers. They do not show up in posts were the Koch brothers give him millions of dollars, but the two show up a ton on conservative blogs. He's clearly going for the money. There's money to fund anti-science, unfortunately. f-ing ignorant billionaires who inherited it all (do you ever wonder why two brothers are so influential?) are the ones who really need to take a better in the mirror.

That said, it's absolutely true that most published research is BS. The same is true of *all* publications. That's the nature of the beast. There is still 100X more truth in average scientific studies than in politics.

We have come full circle. The rationale for 'putting x in the pc' so that i wouldn't need to write code for y platform...just a pc nowadays pcs have so much functionaly built-in they weigh a ton. I don't want all that shit, just show me a 320x240 screen with asci chars. Keep the UI and mice and soundcards and network cards for the simpletons. TLDR; I long for the days when all my computer could do was display characters on a black and white screen. All I ever wanted was to show off my idiocy on slashdot.

scientifically untrue. if the world economy grows each year by 3% (let's say 3.000.000.000 dollars) we can have people who can get richer each year by let's say 10% where that 10% can be let's say 1.000.000 dollars. We can have 3.000 such people in order to reach to the point where your assumption would have to be true.