The backlash against Aral (at least the part that focuses on this particular interaction around accessibility) seems to come from people that subscribe to an optimistic, forward looking, but also “best effort” approach. Any small or big accessibility improvements for next releases should be encouraged, but it is counterproductive to dwell on the past, even if that past was a decade of broken accessibility.
Aral would like serious accessibility issues to be a release blocker, and for corporate distro sponsors and decision makers to be responsible for ensuring they get fixed. Fixes shouldn’t depend on patches of volunteers (“patches welcome”). He wants essential accessibility features to be put on the same level as essential features for abled users. To this end, calling out the broken past decade underscores the weight of the issue today, and the historical failure in prioritization. All this is pretty reasonable.
Against Aral, it’s a stretch to interpret two-word “patches welcome 👍” response as “I’m ableist and I don’t think Fedora should make this a showstopper, go fix it yourself if you like”, so his strong reaction condemning that specific writer (at the least) was probably mostly unwarranted. It could instead have been a smoother segue into the “showstopper” discussion.
But that discussion, as happens in the thread afterwards, is worth having, also for an innovation-first distro like Fedora. It does make me reflect on how I’m dealing with accessibility in products I’m working on.
I couldn’t help but read up on this drama.
The backlash against Aral (at least the part that focuses on this particular interaction around accessibility) seems to come from people that subscribe to an optimistic, forward looking, but also “best effort” approach. Any small or big accessibility improvements for next releases should be encouraged, but it is counterproductive to dwell on the past, even if that past was a decade of broken accessibility.
Aral would like serious accessibility issues to be a release blocker, and for corporate distro sponsors and decision makers to be responsible for ensuring they get fixed. Fixes shouldn’t depend on patches of volunteers (“patches welcome”). He wants essential accessibility features to be put on the same level as essential features for abled users. To this end, calling out the broken past decade underscores the weight of the issue today, and the historical failure in prioritization. All this is pretty reasonable.
Against Aral, it’s a stretch to interpret two-word “patches welcome 👍” response as “I’m ableist and I don’t think Fedora should make this a showstopper, go fix it yourself if you like”, so his strong reaction condemning that specific writer (at the least) was probably mostly unwarranted. It could instead have been a smoother segue into the “showstopper” discussion.
But that discussion, as happens in the thread afterwards, is worth having, also for an innovation-first distro like Fedora. It does make me reflect on how I’m dealing with accessibility in products I’m working on.