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This article isn't anything more than a rant. The author filed a bug in the QT issue tracker [1] that some proprietary screen reader (JAWS, that his customers u

This article isn't anything more than a rant. The author filed a bug in the QT issue tracker [1] that some proprietary screen reader (JAWS, that his customers use) does not work well with QT on Windows. No (technical) details provided whatsoever. I don't believe anyone in the QT team is /against/ stronger support for accessibility. IMO it is understandable that fixing some piece of proprietary software is not a top priority. I believe it's more appropriate for the author to rant against JAWS for not caring about QT, than the other way around. > Free Software is NOT about Accessibility or equality The author is correct here. Free software is not about a specific feature, it's about protecting user's freedom. I believe the author would be warmly welcomed to discuss issues and submit patches - even fixing issues with proprietary software. He shouldn't blame a community of volunteers for not fixing his personal problems for free. [1] - https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-53024 https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-53024

jrochkind1 9y ago
JAWS is a very popular screen-reader, not just "some proprietary screen-reader". Probably the most popular screen-reader, although it no longer has the market dominance it used to.
Brakenshire 9y ago
> IMO it is understandable that fixing some piece of proprietary software is not a top priority. I believe it's more appropriate for the author to rant against JAWS for not caring about QT, than the other way around. Worth pointing out, JAWS is proprietary, but it is also very widely used. I'd imagine its user-base is many, many times that of NVDA (which is the open source equivalent).
- bjpbakker 9y ago
  Yeah sorry about that. Maybe "some" seems a bit too careless. Not intended that way. Substituting it for "the most popular proprietary screen-reader software" still doesn't change anything on my opinion though :)
  - rbehrends 9y ago
    It is not a realistic option for an author of accessible software to ignore JAWS. Obviously, open source software has no obligation to support accessibility, but that means that it'll be used less (this does not just affect visually impaired people, but also organizations and companies that have a need or obligation to keep their systems accessible; ADA compliance, for starters). So, yes, open source programmers are perfectly within their rights to ignore that audience, and that audience is perfectly within its rights to not use open source software that doesn't meet their accessibility needs and to warn others and advocate against the use of such software.
    - Sean1708 9y ago
      If the linked bug[0] is to be believed it sounds like JAWS are ignoring QT, rather than the other way around. [0]: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-53024 https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-53024
      - falcolas 9y ago
        A distinction without a difference, if you're trying to write accessible software. QT promised something it couldn't deliver. Marketing at its finest. /s
      - SyneRyder 9y ago
        I'm not sure about that - it also mentions that Qt is incompatible with Microsoft Narrator. If it doesn't work with the screen reader that comes bundled with the operating system, it suggests Qt is doing something wrong.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
MBCook 9y ago
I think his point is that you can't claim 'user freedom' and 'software for the people' if you ignore a chunk of the populace. > Free software is not about a specific feature, it's about protecting user's freedom. "Free software protects people's freedom (except the disabled, they're stuck with proprietary stuff, too bad)." That's not exactly a rousing motto. If anything the disabled are who should be helped most given how rediculously expensive accessibility software tends to be. It seems hypocritical compared to the usual messaging coming from the free software movement. > He shouldn't blame a community of volunteers for not fixing his personal problems for free. If free software wants to replace proprietary software this attitude doesn't work well. These aren't his personal complaints, they're problems for anyone with serious vision problems.
- falcolas 9y ago
  > That's not exactly a rousing motto. Especially since age causes everyone to be disabled somehow, and you're one accident away from being disabled in the prime of your life. Consider it a form of insurance, if you must. You put forth a bit of effort into accessibility (in its many forms) now so you can keep using things later.
falcolas 9y ago
QT promised something it couldn't (wouldn't?) deliver upon. Given that the author explicitly wrote them with questions about it and was effectively lied to, his ire is both understandable and justified IMO. What more should we expect of him?
- dvdgsng 9y ago
  Did they promise JAWS support?
  - SyneRyder 9y ago
    The article claims they did, but the author uses a paraphrase instead of a direct quote. From the article: "No problem. Qt works on Linux, Mac and Windows, and if you find any problems, just report them to us and we are going to fix them." However without a direct quote, it's hard to tell if that's an accurate representation or not.
  - falcolas 9y ago
    They don't mention any screen readers; their documentation only calls out backend accessibility specs without any mention of popular specs (UIA) they don't support.
toyg 9y ago
I agree, especially if you look at the comment on the bug: > "The JAWS people didn't answer emails when we reached out to them (admittedly quite a while ago), so we've been focusing on NVDA support. Patches to improve the situation with JAWS are welcome. Note that we may eventually implement UIA as opposed to IAccessible2, but that work is currently going slow." That, to me, is a perfectly reasonable and polite response. "JAWS didn't care about us so we've worked with others. If you can help, you're more than welcome. Things might get better at some point anyway but it will take a while."
jnbiche 9y ago
> He shouldn't blame a community of volunteers for not fixing his personal problems for free. Please allow me to highlight this statement. I encountered it so frequently when I created and maintained several popular open source projects. I honestly think a lot of people assume that if you're working on a project, you must be getting paid for it. Then again, many of them were totally unfazed when I pointed out that I did all the work unpaid, and that it was a hobby project.
- bluGill 9y ago
  I do get paid for the project I maintain, but ONLY when I am doing something that benefits my employer. I became maintainer because my employer needed a feature that wasn't there so they paid me to write it. That makes me someone who cares enough to be maintainer (the previous maintainer didn't want to be maintainer anymore). If you submit a good patch I will accept it. Submit several good patches and I'll make you co-maintainer (so far that hasn't happened). If you ask an easy support question I'll answer. If you want a new feature or have a hard support question - my employee doesn't pay me for that and I have kids to play with on my own time. Red Hat, Ubuntu and the like employee some people who will sometimes implement a new feature for you - but those companies want you to buy a support contact for features. There are a number of foundations that pay people to work on free software (FreeBSD, KDE, Mozilla, many more) and so they will be more responsive to requests - but foundations are always lacking in money so they cannot do every feature they want. There are a few "college students" (possibly retired) who work on things for fun. If they take an interest in your request they will do it. However they also have other things do to as well. I believe the majority of people working on open source projects are like me: they work on things someone pays them for but do not have the time to do anything for someone else. Note, industry coding is like this as well. They have money, but never enough to do all ideas. (and even if they did man-month issues mean they often can't do it anyway)
  - jnbiche 9y ago
    > I believe the majority of people working on open source projects are like me: they work on things someone pays them for but do not have the time to do anything for someone else. To be fair, I've also occasionally had people pay me to add features to my project. However, most of the work I've done has been volunteer, at no charge. Also, I'm not sure I agree that the majority of people working on open source projects are like you. Perhaps the more popular projects have one or two individuals working like you, but even then, there are a lot of commits coming in from volunteers. At least, that's my impression from the frontend community (JavaScript) and functional programming communities (Scala, Haskell, etc.).
DavidWoof 9y ago
> He shouldn't blame a community of volunteers for not fixing his personal problems for free. It seems to me that you're just repeating the author's point, but with a different tone. Issues of "blame" aside (what does that even mean?), his point is that open source software tends not to meet the needs of the accessibility community. One possible cause of this is that the devs who support open source software tend not to be disabled and tend not to have experience or even access to things like screen readers. I honestly don't know enough about the issue to know how true this might be, but just dismissing it as a rant, even if the word "rant" is correct in this case, doesn't address the underlying issues. BTW, a quick google search suggests that JAWS is far and away the most popular screen reader for windows. If it's not a priority, then accessibility for windows isn't a priority either, which is exactly the author's point.
stillhere 9y ago
JAWS is what a large number of blind and low vision people use. Just because you're not familiar with it doesn't mean it is "some proprietary" thing that should be ignored.
obiwahn 9y ago
The bug report is just prosa. No simple test case is attached to reproduce his problem. I think he did not even start a debugger. So what does the guy expect. Maybe it is just some broken string conversion. But without a bit investigation on his side he will never find out. Only well paid support will waste time with that kind of horrible report.

jrochkind1 9y ago

JAWS is a very popular screen-reader, not just "some proprietary screen-reader". Probably the most popular screen-reader, although it no longer has the market dominance it used to.

Brakenshire 9y ago

> IMO it is understandable that fixing some piece of proprietary software is not a top priority. I believe it's more appropriate for the author to rant against JAWS for not caring about QT, than the other way around. Worth pointing out, JAWS is proprietary, but it is also very widely used. I'd imagine its user-base is many, many times that of NVDA (which is the open source equivalent).

bjpbakker 9y ago
Yeah sorry about that. Maybe "some" seems a bit too careless. Not intended that way. Substituting it for "the most popular proprietary screen-reader software" still doesn't change anything on my opinion though :)
- rbehrends 9y ago
  It is not a realistic option for an author of accessible software to ignore JAWS. Obviously, open source software has no obligation to support accessibility, but that means that it'll be used less (this does not just affect visually impaired people, but also organizations and companies that have a need or obligation to keep their systems accessible; ADA compliance, for starters). So, yes, open source programmers are perfectly within their rights to ignore that audience, and that audience is perfectly within its rights to not use open source software that doesn't meet their accessibility needs and to warn others and advocate against the use of such software.
  - Sean1708 9y ago
    If the linked bug[0] is to be believed it sounds like JAWS are ignoring QT, rather than the other way around. [0]: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-53024 https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-53024
    - falcolas 9y ago
      A distinction without a difference, if you're trying to write accessible software. QT promised something it couldn't deliver. Marketing at its finest. /s
    - SyneRyder 9y ago
      I'm not sure about that - it also mentions that Qt is incompatible with Microsoft Narrator. If it doesn't work with the screen reader that comes bundled with the operating system, it suggests Qt is doing something wrong.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]

MBCook 9y ago

I think his point is that you can't claim 'user freedom' and 'software for the people' if you ignore a chunk of the populace. > Free software is not about a specific feature, it's about protecting user's freedom. "Free software protects people's freedom (except the disabled, they're stuck with proprietary stuff, too bad)." That's not exactly a rousing motto. If anything the disabled are who should be helped most given how rediculously expensive accessibility software tends to be. It seems hypocritical compared to the usual messaging coming from the free software movement. > He shouldn't blame a community of volunteers for not fixing his personal problems for free. If free software wants to replace proprietary software this attitude doesn't work well. These aren't his personal complaints, they're problems for anyone with serious vision problems.

falcolas 9y ago
> That's not exactly a rousing motto. Especially since age causes everyone to be disabled somehow, and you're one accident away from being disabled in the prime of your life. Consider it a form of insurance, if you must. You put forth a bit of effort into accessibility (in its many forms) now so you can keep using things later.

falcolas 9y ago

QT promised something it couldn't (wouldn't?) deliver upon. Given that the author explicitly wrote them with questions about it and was effectively lied to, his ire is both understandable and justified IMO. What more should we expect of him?

dvdgsng 9y ago
Did they promise JAWS support?
- SyneRyder 9y ago
  The article claims they did, but the author uses a paraphrase instead of a direct quote. From the article: "No problem. Qt works on Linux, Mac and Windows, and if you find any problems, just report them to us and we are going to fix them." However without a direct quote, it's hard to tell if that's an accurate representation or not.
- falcolas 9y ago
  They don't mention any screen readers; their documentation only calls out backend accessibility specs without any mention of popular specs (UIA) they don't support.

toyg 9y ago

I agree, especially if you look at the comment on the bug: > "The JAWS people didn't answer emails when we reached out to them (admittedly quite a while ago), so we've been focusing on NVDA support. Patches to improve the situation with JAWS are welcome. Note that we may eventually implement UIA as opposed to IAccessible2, but that work is currently going slow." That, to me, is a perfectly reasonable and polite response. "JAWS didn't care about us so we've worked with others. If you can help, you're more than welcome. Things might get better at some point anyway but it will take a while."

jnbiche 9y ago

> He shouldn't blame a community of volunteers for not fixing his personal problems for free. Please allow me to highlight this statement. I encountered it so frequently when I created and maintained several popular open source projects. I honestly think a lot of people assume that if you're working on a project, you must be getting paid for it. Then again, many of them were totally unfazed when I pointed out that I did all the work unpaid, and that it was a hobby project.

bluGill 9y ago
I do get paid for the project I maintain, but ONLY when I am doing something that benefits my employer. I became maintainer because my employer needed a feature that wasn't there so they paid me to write it. That makes me someone who cares enough to be maintainer (the previous maintainer didn't want to be maintainer anymore). If you submit a good patch I will accept it. Submit several good patches and I'll make you co-maintainer (so far that hasn't happened). If you ask an easy support question I'll answer. If you want a new feature or have a hard support question - my employee doesn't pay me for that and I have kids to play with on my own time. Red Hat, Ubuntu and the like employee some people who will sometimes implement a new feature for you - but those companies want you to buy a support contact for features. There are a number of foundations that pay people to work on free software (FreeBSD, KDE, Mozilla, many more) and so they will be more responsive to requests - but foundations are always lacking in money so they cannot do every feature they want. There are a few "college students" (possibly retired) who work on things for fun. If they take an interest in your request they will do it. However they also have other things do to as well. I believe the majority of people working on open source projects are like me: they work on things someone pays them for but do not have the time to do anything for someone else. Note, industry coding is like this as well. They have money, but never enough to do all ideas. (and even if they did man-month issues mean they often can't do it anyway)
- jnbiche 9y ago
  > I believe the majority of people working on open source projects are like me: they work on things someone pays them for but do not have the time to do anything for someone else. To be fair, I've also occasionally had people pay me to add features to my project. However, most of the work I've done has been volunteer, at no charge. Also, I'm not sure I agree that the majority of people working on open source projects are like you. Perhaps the more popular projects have one or two individuals working like you, but even then, there are a lot of commits coming in from volunteers. At least, that's my impression from the frontend community (JavaScript) and functional programming communities (Scala, Haskell, etc.).

DavidWoof 9y ago

> He shouldn't blame a community of volunteers for not fixing his personal problems for free. It seems to me that you're just repeating the author's point, but with a different tone. Issues of "blame" aside (what does that even mean?), his point is that open source software tends not to meet the needs of the accessibility community. One possible cause of this is that the devs who support open source software tend not to be disabled and tend not to have experience or even access to things like screen readers. I honestly don't know enough about the issue to know how true this might be, but just dismissing it as a rant, even if the word "rant" is correct in this case, doesn't address the underlying issues. BTW, a quick google search suggests that JAWS is far and away the most popular screen reader for windows. If it's not a priority, then accessibility for windows isn't a priority either, which is exactly the author's point.

stillhere 9y ago

JAWS is what a large number of blind and low vision people use. Just because you're not familiar with it doesn't mean it is "some proprietary" thing that should be ignored.

obiwahn 9y ago

The bug report is just prosa. No simple test case is attached to reproduce his problem. I think he did not even start a debugger. So what does the guy expect. Maybe it is just some broken string conversion. But without a bit investigation on his side he will never find out. Only well paid support will waste time with that kind of horrible report.