From: alex wallis <alexwallis646_at_googlemail.com>
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2009 19:46:19 +0100

snip
> One clear demonstration of the difficulties faced is in the blind
> community. I don't mean to single any specific group out, but it's an easy
> to reference one here because it's happened on these lists. There have
> been complaints about the blind accessibility of Rockbox utility for a
> considerable period of time, and over that whole time the developers
> primarily working on it have made it clear that being sighted they're
> unable to effectively improve things without very detailed feedback rather
> than simple "it doesn't work" style reports. It wasn't until very recently
> that a single user (of our many blind users) came forward and tried to
> offer some of that more detailed feedback.
This is true, I can understand where you as sighted developers are coming
from. As I have been involved in a project quite extensively of late to make
the VR world second life accessible to the blind.
The guy working on the project is sighted, so I have had to help him with
understanding what does and doesn't work from the ground up, and as a team
we have made considerable progress, he understands how visually impaired
people usually do things, and has managed to implement a primitive method of
navigation and is working on how we can interact with the objects in the
world.
I am simply trying to show that I know its not a simple case of complaining
it doesn't work as you need as specific information as possible.
I believe unfortunately we are still stuck at the current stage of bugs in
qt causing most accessibility problems so guess we must hope the qt devs
decide to fix them at some point in the future, and if any more patches are
created to try to address issues I am happy to test them.

> I'm not sure how much a user-oriented conference can improve the project.
> Unless the users are going to get together and try to methodically test
> for bugs and through discussion write improved bug reports, or attempt a
> similar thing with documentation, there's just not that much that can be
> gained from a face to face gathering of users.
>
> I think the primary benefit would be for the users themselves. They'd
> hopefully get to meet some Rockbox developers and maybe learn some things
> about what goes into Rockbox. See how other people use their players, and
> be exposed to the variance in hardware and features they may not have been
> fully aware of.
I like the idea of a user devcon for this reason.
Speaking for myself, I would really like to have a look at some of the other
targets rockbox runs on, as although I know none of the targets it runs on
are still in production, some are easier to find than others. When my last
h140 broke it was quite time consuming and very expensive finding a working
one.
The reason I wouldn't contemplate any of the other targets that rockbox runs
on was because I had no idea how different I would find them from the h140,
so my thinking was I would like to stick to what I know is reliable and
works as far as accessibility goes.
If I could have a look at other targets rockbox runs on, it would put me in
a much better position for when my new 140 packs in, though long may that
day be from coming.

So I would be very interested in attending such an event, though after
September it will be a bit harder for me to attend anything, so my vote if
we start thinking about locations and dates would be before september.

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Received on 2009-06-27