> > To be fair, I don't have any problem with this kind of advocacy, I > > just don't see anything coming of posting on fedora-list about it. > > > > -- > > Chris > > > > Mr. Fioretti should take his advocacy to the Gnome, KDE, and UI developers. > > Red Hat and Novell already have to comply with the Americans with > Disabilities Act. > > Does anyone know if the EU has an equivalent law that applies to Mandriva? Playing Devil's advocate here, but if elements of FOSS are installed as a matter of course, within a Fedora installation, then specific problems would be discussed here, with an eye to resolution of the problems as well as improvements to be desired. Just as any other element of Fedora is treated. I don't have WiFi so I ctrl D the messages as they appear. Same with 64bit, laptops, emacs, bluetooth, and any other subject not of interest to me. Yet, suppose Stephen Hawking were to recieve a wheelchair "requiring some assembly"? I'd gasp in horror at that lack of empathy by the supplier and run for my screwdrivers. Whether it be "law" or my own sense of humanity, if there is a need within the FOSS 'community' and I have some knack towards the resolution of that need, then stepping forward to assist is the correct thing to do, according to my perspectives. I learned some about the needs through his post. Shaking the tree a bit may drop some fruit. Not shaking the tree drops no fruit. Maybe, just maybe, one of us has the skills to assist. If we wish to do so, that would be a good thing. It got me to thinking that within my own prison project, there are blind, deaf, dumb, illiterate and impaired motor skills imnates that will need some of those FOSS tools. (add to my list...) Maybe Debian does a better job at that? Maybe RedHat? I dunno... I need to learn, as does anyone else running any sort of public server or client machines in any agency with more than X number of employees that falls under compliance with the Disabilities Act and what works in order to comply. This can become a very serious issue and what works needs to be sifted out from what doesn't work within our Linux operating system. This bears some discussion, brainstorming and development. Someone could make >more< than a few bucks at this, for support, as well. No problems, only opportunities do I see here. So, where's the beef? Of course, if you are small potatoes and plan on staying small potatoes and you have all of your physical and mental facilities at this time, no need to waste your bandwidth... just ctrl D any subject line containing FOSS or set up a filter to automatically do so, if you know how. I appreciate Marco bringing this to my attention. When I have 2.7 million prospective clients, FOSS will become an issue relevant to me, DOC, the State of North Carolina, as well as Fedora, RedHat, the greater Linux and Open Source community, as well as any thinking American Citizen with his head out of his ass and in his heart, where it belongs. I'm grateful as heck that he brought this to my attention as the issue would have bitten me unawares later on, as it will some of you. Ijust wasn't thinking. Non-compliance could prove not only costly, but embarrassing. It would be better to avoid that, I beleive. Marco, it would be better to address the specific Fedora issues you have here, though. I tried the emacs speech thing and it ate the CPU as well as the KDE one. http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software is a link to planetccrma, a group dedicated to "Planet CCRMA (CCRMA is pronounced ``karma'') at Home is a collection of rpms (RPM stands for RedHat Package Manager) that you can add to a computer running RedHat 9 or Fedora Core 1, 2 or 3 to transform it into an audio workstation with a low-latency kernel, current ALSA audio drivers and a nice set of music, midi, audio and video applications." This might solve the problems of text-to-speech conversion latency and audio/visual production. As noted, they are Fedora based. They are playing catch-up to Fedora 4 and now 5. God be with them. :) Being part of Stanford U they may have some unique abilities you may need to harness. They have the sound part down pat. I hope you meet your own expectations for some measure of success in your quest. I hope others will lend you a hand. I am not a coder, just a herder of cats. <g> But I am willing to assist you as I am able to. Namaskar, Ric
