[Access-activists] Re: [Accessibility] Call to Arms

[Richard Stallman]

    do have a chicken or egg problem. The free software foundation
    philosophy precludes enhancing nonfree software. I get that and I
    can make my peace with it. The cost is that you lose volunteers
    from the disabled community.

We might lose them, but it does not matter, because they would not
have done us any good.

To have lots of volunteers is not our goal.
Our goal is to enhance what can be done in the Free World.
We seek volunteers in order to achieve that.

If we could get "more volunteers" by inviting them to work on
something that can't be used in the Free World, software that we could
not even recommend, it would be self-defeating.

                                 If they can't enhance or expand on
    NaturallySpeaking capabilities, then they can't participate until
    you produce a large vocabulary continuous speech recognition
    system.

We would like them to participate _usefully_.  Based on the
information you have provided, the only way to participate usefully in
the speech input area in the medium term is by helping replace
NaturallySpeaking.

To recruit people for anything else would be make-work.